Intro
This witch doctor-like fellow comes at ya from booger, and is his modeling debut. It kinda reminds me of some South Pacific islander dressed up in some ceremonial war-god costume. The model itself isn't that bad, but the skin suffers some unforgivable technical flaws that should never have gotten off the author's hard drive. These problems are easy to fix, however, and if the author addressed them and released an update, Voodoo would be something to be proud of for any first-time modeler.
The score averages out to 2 and an eighth, but I like the little guy so I'm gonna round up ;)
The Model
To be honest I'm happily surprised at the quality of the model. I had to look for a while before I could find something to complain about. The first thing I did (a technique I stole from some of the newer reviews ;) was to import it into 3dsmax perform an stl check, which it passed with flying colors. Then, I started dissecting the model part by part. At 458 polys, Voodoo can't get much more optimized. Since his various parts aren't connected to the body, there is no need to provide extra verts for deformation, and booger has done a good job of trimming the model down. I found only one vert, in the middle of his back, that could have been removed.
There are a couple of things I would have done differently. The feet look a little strange to me. I found that by turning an edge on each side of the foot gave a shape I found much more agreeable. But the feet are so small in-game that this isn't a major problem. Also, with such a low poly count I wish booger had given better definition to the upper jaw area of the skull. I can't really put my finger on what's wrong about it. It just doesn't feel right. Even though the mask hides the skull from the front, improving this would have helped the side and rear view of the model.
While I'm impressed with the author's efforts, it is extremely hard to justify a cartoonish model with the highest scores. The difficulty in modeling a caricature just isn't the same as that of modeling a realistic human figure. I would like to see booger attempt a more realistic model. I think he could do it. The Animations
The animations are serviceable, but seem under done. While watching them I got the feeling of a robot that was programmed to go through the motions. There just isn't any life in them. The pain animations especially suffer from this. It seems like booger animated him getting knocked back, then handled the recovery by reversing the knock-back anim. People don't recover from blows that way. They follow through with their motions. Some exaggeration of movement would have helped, as would some secondary movement.
In the run animation, the feet don't go back and forth, just up and down (although they do rock back and forth, which helps with the illusion). The only anims that truly add character to the model are the stand and taunt anims, and I wish booger had carried the feeling through the rest of the animations. The death anims are cool, but I can't figure out why his skull drops forward instead of straight down in death3. Also, I don't understand why he holds his weapon behind his head when he salutes.
All in all, a good attempt, but could have been improved.
Ugh. I dunno what booger was smoking when he did the skins, but it had to be some primo stuff. Where do I begin?
The skin size is 320x200 and has 45 percent wastage. It looks like there was no attempt to optimize the skin layout. The base skin is flat color with no shading. There is a skin with a blank mask, presumably so one could do one's own design, but there is also a blank_i.pcx, so the blank mask is available in-game. The masks themselves look like they were finger painted. Maybe booger was trying to go for some primitive-art look with the masks, but if he was, it didn't work. I think I'll stop there.
On the plus side, the shading on the CTF skins isn't that bad. Sounds
To be honest, I'm having problems with my sound card right now, so I'm going by memory here. Uh, the sounds were short and funny, and seemed to fit the model well. But only some of the sounds have been replaced. In all fairness I'm gonna refrain from scoring them, because it's been a little over a week since I heard them last. Visible Weapons Support Voodoo does have vwep support, but the weapons suffer from skin problems of their own. All the weapon models expect to have 320x200 skins, but the skins included in the .zip are the standard id weapon skins. It looks bad in hardware mode as all the skins are stretched to fit. In software mode, however, the skin mapping doesn't even come close to the relevant parts of the skin, so there's large black areas all over the weapons. I tried resizing some of the skins up to 320x200, but that looked bad. A better fix would be to go into each weapon model and change the skin sizes to match the dimensions of the actual .pcx files. Pack Inclusion If all the skin problems were fixed, I'd vote to put it in the pack. As the model currently stands, however, I'm gonna have to recommend excluding it.
I must say that this little guy was a blast to play against in Gladiator Bot.
review by Narlymon
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