A horse is a horse yadda yadda (update WIP)

LeJomphe

Heya all, I was starting to get worried the boards had gone belly up or something. Just now found the temp boards, it's good to see the place again.

This is an update on that Horse guy model I was workng on. On this first pass I'm going with the short cropped hair/normal hands/regular glasses since it's closer to the original idea for a ut2k4 model but I definitely plan to go back and redo a second version with the powdered wig, hooves and blinders. Second one will probably look like a donkey to make it political . Right now, there's reasonably good progress on the head. The general color layout and some of the shaping on the rest of the body is started but there's no real detail work on the body yet. Hope you like.

(Edit: 17/11/2004. Progress update, the model is skinned/boned/rigged, whatever the term is but expect skinning to be tweaked as soon as I get some headway on the animations. Augmented the contrasts in the face area, Still haven't forgot about the speculars, just enthusiastic about getting it fully functional and in game asap.)








(Edit : Updated the pics to some more recent ones off my website)

Matabus

I really like the painting style you've got going on with the head. You might want to sharpen a few of the edges there, however, as it would pop the muscles out a smidge more. Great silhouette and character you've got going mang. Wires?

Wells

looking really good, and glad to see you'll be doing the wig/hooves version. was rather partial to that one. any chance of you throwing up the wires again? thats got to be the best low-poly horse head i've seen.

FatAssasin

That's a great character. The head is coming along really nice. It's looks very polished, even at this unfinished stage. Can't wait to see the rest.

poopinmymouth

GAAWGEOUS. very nice man, but it needs some hard edges. its all very soft right now, which is appropriate in places, but needs more contrast in areas, horses faces are very tense in their detail. Also, you seem to have shied away from specular. its super hard to do on a horse, because its antistropic in nature, but i think it could really use some. Good work so far man!!

LeJomphe

Thanks there definitely will be speculars, just haven't had a chance to work on them yet. For those interested I just added the wires in the original post.

There's probably not much point in posting the flat untill it's farther along, unless anyone wants to see it ? It's one 1024/1024 texture with an alpha map.

It's at 2678 poly's in it's latest incarnation so there's plenty of room to work on the mesh if any surprises happen in the deformation.

adam

Ahahaha man this character kicked ass! I love the style of it - and I *love* the glasses and the way you've done them for the horse. My only crit is for his texture. It's all very soft and there isn't much contrast. Throw in some dark areas/hard edges and you'll find his surface will 'pop' more, adding depth to him.

Scott Ruggels

Really smooth texture work. nicely done.

Scott

LeJomphe

Heya, Here's the latest update on "Sir Ed",

Most of the work was done on the body textures. The facial speculars still elude me, everything I tried made it look fuzzy or washed out. I'll be getting back to that now that the body is mostly done.

At this point I'd really like to get him into unreal and see him run around a bit, I've been able to import him into the editor but not the actual game yet, and applying the animations from other digitigrade characters totally stretched him into a skinny Ally Mc Beal horse. I've never done this part before, a good tutorial would seriously help if there's any good ones out there (most searches resulted in ut2003 tuts), or even someone to ask questions. Like what orientation should the bone_weapon have and does it need an end effector ?

Anyways, enough talk, here's the pictures

(edit: 17/11/2004 picture links removed to reduce download times and keep everything in the first post)

MAUL0r

i love this model! very nicely done.

Scott Ruggels

If he's built on the "Gen Mo'Kai". skeleton, and the proportions are equal, then you can just "copy Mesh peoperties" from a current Gen Mo'Kai animation, and then switch back and "Paste mesh Properties" onto your model and this will give you the same scale as the current (somewhat short) Gen Mo'Kai. However if his proportions differe significantly, in terms of limb length, and height, then you will have problems and you may want to do custom animations. I might be able to help get him into the game, if you can tollerate a little adjustment to make him proportional and rigged to the Gen Mo'Kai Skeleton. Otherwise I'd say custom animation would be your best bet. As to importing custom animations, I haven't quite figured that out in Maya, though on Max it's apparently a tad easier.

Scott

Sean McBride

hahaha thats awesome. Can't wait till its done.

swampbug

Great cleanlyness to the model and texture. Stands out with great character too. awesomejob

TheWaq

The great model there..
=

TheWaq

The great model there..

LeJomphe

[ QUOTE ]
I might be able to help get him into the game, if you can tollerate a little adjustment to make him proportional and rigged to the Gen Mo'Kai Skeleton. Otherwise I'd say custom animation would be your best bet.

[/ QUOTE ]

Thanks, that would definitely be appreciated. After reading your post I was able to find a collection of skeletons to study, I'm not sure if the alien one is the Gen Mo kai or not but most of the differences seem to be in the length of the legs so it might be possible to adapt the model to it, the coat tails and ears will probably need to be boned too though. (was half tempted to model in a working mouth for kicks... Maybe in version 2.0 )

Assuming a simple scenario in which the model can use the standard rig, what I'd like to know is exactly what steps are involved in getting it to work. Any questions you could answer would be a tremendous help.

Near as I can tell it goes something like :
1. export rigged unanimated mesh using actorX (any options, settings, whatever I'd need to know about ?)

2. Define a package for the mesh ? (What's the structure for this ? there seems to be the possibility of putting different versions of the model in the same package ?)

3. Import mesh into unreal editor (in the package you just created)

3. import texture into unreal editor (options : alpha is self explanatory. But what exactly are Masked, generate mip maps and detail hack ?)

4. compress texture ? (3 options here, dxt 1,3,5 what's the difference ? simply more or less compression ? Is there a standard setting for characters ?)

5. Assign texture to model.

6. copy mesh settings from Gen'Mokai

7. copy animations

8.... and that's about as far as I got. When I tried loading it just to see it even all stretched out, UT showed a blank screen so I have to assume I was doing something wrong.

There seems to be a presentation image somewhere in there for the character selection screen, not sure where that fits in. That and editing the 2 text config files which I haven't found any good documentation for yet.

killingpeople

I think the tail should be the same color as the mane. Nice clean textures. I love the concept of this model.

Scott Ruggels

What 3D software are you using?

Scott

LeJomphe

3ds max at the moment.

Scott Ruggels

Well that makes it easy if you want to get it into the game. the first thing you need to do is get the ZIP files of the skeletons used in unreal 2004, pick the Gen Mo'Kai skeleton, and move the verts on your horse to bring your character into proportion with that skeleting, then rig it to that skeleton and export it as a PSK file. (That is if you want to use the Gen Mokai default animations. I sdon't think you can put the default Human animations in a Gen Mo'kai skeleton and have it look good. the other thing is to just do the animations yourself. Can someone help, and direct him to the MAX files of the UT Characters Please?

Scott

LeJomphe

Thanks. I think I'll try to go full monty on this one and do custom animations. It'll be good practice and the coat tails don't really have an equivalent in the UT Aliens anyways.

If anyone knows where to get the UT 2004 skels that would be great though, the ones I have are for 2003 so I don't know if they're missing animations or if there are any major structural differences.

Scott Ruggels

Custom animations? cool!

As to the UT animations, they are the same between ut2003, and ut2004, with one exception in that in ut2004, there is a 1 frame driving position. where the character is "sitting" on the 000 origin, in a driving pose. other than that, they are the same.

Scott

Daz

immaculate work LeJomphe. Love the clean texture style. It's just so gooddam aesthetically pleasing.

Pezz3D

reminds me of mr pitt from seinfeld for some reason, whateva. good model and text.

LeJomphe

Thanks, finally managed to get it working with some default animations just to make sure everything's functional. There's a lot of deformation and the texture needs to be adjusted to the lighting but it's great to actually see it in game. Time to get working on the custom animations now.

Scott Ruggels

The general rule for UT, is to reduce the textures by 50 percent brightness, for the engine. Don't touch contrast though.

Scott

Moz

its because all player pawns are naturally given 40 ambient lighting so they are visible in complete darkness, which means they look like bright pieces of shit in any lighting situation.

LeJomphe

That pretty much explains why even after adjusting brightness the face still tends to look washed out.

LeJomphe

Very small update, switched the pics in the first post to the rigged pics off my site. The animated gif is the first idle animation successfully digested and imported into unreal. Updates will follow as more animations are completed.

Btw, learned a lot laying out the flat... If I ever make one this inefficient again... shoot me. Just out of curiosity, will anyone be interested in seeing a sdk when it's ready ?

Wells

i love the tea-cup pic. things are coming along nicely. good job!

LeJomphe

Finally got around to fixing the textures. Ever set something aside for a while and when you get back to it things just click ?

Before

After

Scott Ruggels

Progress?

Scott

LeJomphe

Fraid I had to start work on a few human models to flesh out my portfolio so only a few of the animations are done for now.

Progress should start again as soon as the requisite humans are out of the way .