Suit
Rating: 9
baseq2/players/suit
Intro
"Every girl is crazy 'bout a sharp dressed man" Are those burlap fatigues starting to chafe? Is all that heavy body armor ringing up $ signs in your chiropractor eyes? Then why not go GQ for a change, and step out onto the battle field in style.
The Model
Suit has a unique look in the world of PPMs. He has a build reminiscent to characters in "Aeon Flux" and "Phantom 2040", or more recently the "Extreme Ghostbusters" and "Men in Black" cartoons, though not as dynamically animated as the 1st two. It seems to be part of a new wave, East meats West, American Anime style of art. This guy is a little heavy on the Poly Count with 822 Faces in all, but they all went to good use in the little touches, such as sunglasses, a tie, and advanced hands structure. Basically the author has made an authentic replica of a suit. Hardly any features needed to be drawn into the skin later, in order give the model a complete look. I think it might have been possible to get the model under 800 faces, in order to abide by the Q2PMP's guidelines while not loosing any detail, by cleaning up the collars, and using more tris (triangles) on the head, but maybe the author may have not been aiming for pack submission. The only design flaw I can see is that the author did not give enough faces to the shoulder/arm region for the animation he wanted to pull off, mostly in the wave animations. However in-game, and with the skins it uses, it is hardly noticeable. It would take an egghead modeler like myself, who open up the model in Q2M to pick it out. Since I feel it doesn't take away from the models final effect inside Q2, I will not deduct points. A problem that is noticeable in-game is the tendency of the tapered end of the hands that are supposed to stay hidden inside the sleeves to slightly poke out during animation sequences. The author should have set up better controls on his mesh, or fixed it later. On a personal note, I don't particularly love the design, but I think its adequate and the author succeeded in building what he planned. For being a bit unfriendly to junk - I mean lower end computer systems, I give it:
Score: Nine
The Animations
Now this is where the model got me - in a good way. The animations are absolutely flawless. For such a cartoony looking guy, Suit can really move, and all the while staying in character. There is absolutely no jerkiness in any of the scenes. You can tell the author spent a lot of time getting everything right. In the stand animation he stands straight up with his back arched, in a cocky "secret service" intimidating kind of way. He doesn't bob up and down or dance around like he's on Soul Train, but stays a cool customer, checking his 6 then returning to his 12. Notice how the author realistically distributes weight on the model. While swaying the shoulders he shifts all the models weight over the left leg, till it buckles, while letting the right foot slide freely on its forefoot. The run is fantastic, lots of exaggerated head motion that works well in-game. The attack, pains, jumps, crouch and the rest of the animations are consistent in his great attention to detail. Suit is one of the few PPMs that looks like he's actually paying attention when he fires. Raising the gun and tilting his head to aim. The crouch walk is particularly interesting. Suit rocks forward and backwards to aid in locomotion, and his feet actually leave the ground with each step, rather than slide. The wave animations are filled with attitude. His watch check (salute) says "I'm too cool for school" and his sunglasses removal, head shake (taunt) signals "I don't think so." The death animations are wonderful. Particularly the third one where he drops to his knees, his tie flies out, then his glasses smear his face. I can go on and on all day about how much I love the animations but I don't want to put you to sleep. I would suggest anyone interested in making PPMs to download this baby, even if they don't like the design, just as a reference to great animation. Its a shame that 5 stars is the limit.
Score: Ten
The Skin
Off the bat I have to take away for the skin size not being 256x256. Any skin dimensions that are not a power of two just isn't GL friendly. I always set GL_round_down to zero anyway so that the id models are not so blurry. The mapping looks fine to me. Its a bit sloppy, but it gets the job done. I've never been a fan of the whole skin wastage percentiles, that seems to be all the rage for model reviewers. Now to the content. What can I say? The author made a good skin of a cartoony guy in a suit. That is a uniform color that covers most of his body. Anything else would look silly and be dabbling into the realm of Street Pimps and Arsinio Hall. "whoop, whoop, whoop" He has given the fabrics and skin tones a touch of highlight, but not overdoing it. After all a suit doesn't show off muscle bulges, or contain large rusty plates of armor. In real life, the more markings, splotches and tears there are on your suit, the more likely it is you shouldn't be wearing one. For the non GL friendly skin and for the sloppy joe skin map I'll take of one star, but for overall in-game effect I give it a solid:
Score: Eight
Sounds
No sounds included with this model.
Visible Weapons Support
There is no current VWep support.
Pack Inclusion
I think the poly count is a bit high. But other than that its fine. I dont know if it should go in the pack or not, I just thought it deserved a review.
(editor's note, this model wont be included, given it's unknown author, non-GL friendly skins, and high poly count).
review by Bad Moon
edited and formated by sTuPiD fOoL
author name Stephen Ramsay Jones
tris.md2
Vertices 390
Mapping Vertices 686
Polygons 750
Skin size 320x240
Skin Wasted Space ?
weapon.md2
Vertices 42
Mapping Vertices 49
Polygons 72
Skin size 163x60
Skin Wasted Space ?
relevant links
Are there problems with this model information? Bad formatting? Typos? Broken links? Check out the original content, and post a description of the problem in this thread. Thanks!