well, I did it kind of dumb :-( (and I really REALLY need to change my account name ... I haven't been called animeboy since highschool :-| )
I just declared my pieces all as the same mesh. So my head, my, boots, my arms, ect are all the same piece of geometry. The problem to doing this, is you have like ... 8 instances of your character ontop of each other and the material gets really REALLY bright, and if you have an extremly complex character you'll probably make the game go in the fritz.
The other way to do it,
Create 2 animation packages. 1 that is your model skinned to a rig, and another that's 1 triangle skinned to your rig. Just have your head declared as your head, and have the "dummy triangle" declared as the other 7 pieces.
The I really haven't had too much luck with the second method ... When I went into the game, I wouldn't be playing as my custom character. Sometimes he does shoe up, but 10% of the texture doesn't show properly ...
edit: I think the material is all on my end though. I haven't set up my UVs and texture sizes to match UT3's system.
edit2: yeah the second method works. I just squished my characters UVs and used the top half of a 2048 X 2048 texture and my material displayed correctly. The withdrawl is that you basically have 2048 X 1024 pixels of space your entire character :-(
Adam from what I have seen so far so-called cinematics characters support facial animation through facefx assets. However I don't think they are used during match and it's also good to note that even if some of them are available in the editor they are likely to never show up in realtime in the game since all the ingame cinematics have been rendered as videos anyways. Like if you open all the packages in the editor you'll find a couple cinematics characters but only the head texture and the body material for Malcolm, not his meshes.
Cool that Epic left a couple in the packages still (I suspect these are here because they define the body ragdoll/physics parameters, something that split appart charater bodyparts are linked to somehow. Just a guess.)
Did a huge amount of fixing, now have to fix my uvw's for the UT 3 engine and then fix up my model. Geodaves export tutorial is pretty damn cool.
The one thing I found is that you have to rotate each mesh part -90 degrees and then lower them about -50 ish units in the UT3 editor. I guess its something to do with max file / rig that epic gave us. So if your model runs sideways like mine did just use the above coords .
Online play works, it seems that a new map needs to be started before all can see the model.
Most of the Headgear wont look good on him because his shape is much different from the normal heads and the head is more placed to the front.
I think he needs no Headgear, his beauty needs to be shown!
The Weapon Tutorials seems quiet easy, maybe i should try it
Davidson, you left the 'blocked:true' tag in some of the head lines! I guess that was in order to have the special characters unlock along with their zombie versions but I had all the stock characters unlocked and when I installed your custom head, it wouldn't appear! Had to change the line myself :P
Good stuff here, this game needs more custom content badly. I wish Epic would remember us PC users more often , but it shows how resourceful we are when it comes to making cool stuff.
Keep up the good work guys and gals!
@ pior
The last 8 Characters in the code are only Bots, so you could play against a whole Zombie Team. The 2 namend "Zombie" are for player selection. But i dont know what you did wrong that they didt appear? :P
Ok so HERE is the .TXT I was talking about that we should try and use for EACH ASSET one of us makes.
Please fill in the requested information to the best of your ability. If we can make the UT3 pack as informative/educational as possible the better so please offer up as much info as possible in the creation notes!
Mysterial also says that Custom faction support is coming in the next patch! That will hopefully make everything about characters, like materials shader and animations, mod able.
if my link is against the rules, please remove it.
Ok i've got a little problem. everytime i'm starting the Ued i have to reimport all my textures because the shader displays it only like a 512 map but it is actually a 2048, so is there a way to just preserve the initial settings?
and all I get is this. As far as I can tell I've been following Pior's Tutorial pretty closely. It's odd to me that I can get everything to show up in the editor fine but in game. It makes me think maybe my code is wrong?
<font color="orange"> Part Text </font>
Parts=(Part=PART_Head,ObjectName="CH_Elizabeth_Female.Mesh.SK_CH_LizFace_Female_Head01",PartID="Z",FamilyID="IRNF")
<font color="orange"> Character Text </font>
Characters=(CharName="Elizabeth",Description="",CharID="Z",bLocked="false",Faction="Ironguard",PreviewImageMarkup="",
CharData=(FamilyID="IRNF",HeadID="Z",TorsoID="A",ShoPadID="B",bHasLeftShoPad=true,bHasRightShoPad=true,ArmsID="A",ThighsID="A",BootsID="A"))
Most of the time it´s a simple typo in the name of the mesh for instance.
Especially with those long ass UT3 names that happens very fast...Check the names of your pack and your meshes.
Sorry this took so long but at long last I've got a pack of skeletons that will export properly from Maya 7.0+ to UT3. positions and rotations included.
Hey guys!
I'm very new to Polycount so this is my first post
In order to contribute to the topic I wanted to show off my Skaarj model I did back in October 2007 which was a part of my Unreal Fanart.
Hourences told me you're working on a UT3 pack or something. Here is a render of the character. Hope you like it
Now there is still one problem and I'm not sure if I should post this in the request section or not.
Since I'm very busy within the next months I won't have time to animate this guy for UT3. I already offered the model to ChaosUT but unfortunately they had to pass because everyone is full of work.
So if someone here has some time and feels like helping me out bringing the char into UT3 I'd be very grateful
I already rigged it in Maya but the skeleton doesn't seem to be UT3 compatible
Sweet stuff going on here guys, looks like some of you are in the final stretch of getting characters and whatnot in game. Does anyone know of animation files, preferably .bip, that we can use as a base for the entire UT3 animation set for uniquely propotioned rigs?
Not important as I'll probably end up building around Epic's example models, just thought it would come in handy.
I was dissappointed working on Airborn with having some sort of TF2 shading, only built upon Unreal 3s Phongshader, so i could only ramp the diffuse not really the shading and stuff, so i read the formula given in that paper ( http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2007/NPAR07_IllustrativeRenderingInTeamFortress2.pdf ) dozens of times and started rebuilding it with Unreal Nodes. If anyone knows how i could either read the upvector of a face or cut a fresnley in halfes, so i have only the sides facing upwards, that'd be really appreciated...
ok here we go
hopefully it helps
now i can start tweaking it and play with the parameters and add other fancy ass effects
I have a pretty good feeling that we're not seeing how nice it is at all with the still frame shots. Probably have to see it in action to get the full effect.
Replies
I just declared my pieces all as the same mesh. So my head, my, boots, my arms, ect are all the same piece of geometry. The problem to doing this, is you have like ... 8 instances of your character ontop of each other and the material gets really REALLY bright, and if you have an extremly complex character you'll probably make the game go in the fritz.
The other way to do it,
Create 2 animation packages. 1 that is your model skinned to a rig, and another that's 1 triangle skinned to your rig. Just have your head declared as your head, and have the "dummy triangle" declared as the other 7 pieces.
The I really haven't had too much luck with the second method ... When I went into the game, I wouldn't be playing as my custom character. Sometimes he does shoe up, but 10% of the texture doesn't show properly ...
edit: I think the material is all on my end though. I haven't set up my UVs and texture sizes to match UT3's system.
edit2: yeah the second method works. I just squished my characters UVs and used the top half of a 2048 X 2048 texture and my material displayed correctly. The withdrawl is that you basically have 2048 X 1024 pixels of space your entire character :-(
Cool that Epic left a couple in the packages still (I suspect these are here because they define the body ragdoll/physics parameters, something that split appart charater bodyparts are linked to somehow. Just a guess.)
Ingame http://rol.planetquake.gamespy.com/UT_Megs2.jpg
Did a huge amount of fixing, now have to fix my uvw's for the UT 3 engine and then fix up my model. Geodaves export tutorial is pretty damn cool.
The one thing I found is that you have to rotate each mesh part -90 degrees and then lower them about -50 ish units in the UT3 editor. I guess its something to do with max file / rig that epic gave us. So if your model runs sideways like mine did just use the above coords
Greg
Roll: -90
To be exact.
Nice work showster!
Geodave updated his tutorials on UT3, with this custom weapon tut.
http://www.ut40k.planetunreal.gamespy.com/unreal-Dateien/ut3tuts/UT3_Weapon_tutorial_1.htm
Have fun
Greg
I made a lot of changes
Mirrors:
http://download.beyondunreal.com/fileworks.php/skincity/ut3/zombie_ut3.zip
First UT3 Model at Skincity
http://skincity.beyondunreal.com
Online play works, it seems that a new map needs to be started before all can see the model.
Most of the Headgear wont look good on him because his shape is much different from the normal heads and the head is more placed to the front.
I think he needs no Headgear, his beauty needs to be shown!
The Weapon Tutorials seems quiet easy, maybe i should try it
Keep up the good work guys and gals!
The last 8 Characters in the code are only Bots, so you could play against a whole Zombie Team. The 2 namend "Zombie" are for player selection. But i dont know what you did wrong that they didt appear? :P
ut2k3/4 was mostly 3000-4000
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/UT3Mods.html
look for the max files at the bottom of the page.
Please fill in the requested information to the best of your ability. If we can make the UT3 pack as informative/educational as possible the better so please offer up as much info as possible in the creation notes!
Thanks!
I've uploaded a free video tutorial on getting characters ingame. You can get it from 3d-palace.com
Cheers
Greg
http://www.utforge.com/index.php?page=31
for those who didn't buy the collectors edition i guess...
damn i wish there would be more information about the material editor
This tutorials are from the Bonus DVD.
http://utforums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=598071
Mysterial also says that Custom faction support is coming in the next patch! That will hopefully make everything about characters, like materials shader and animations, mod able.
Download: ut3_goggles.rar
Ok i've got a little problem. everytime i'm starting the Ued i have to reimport all my textures because the shader displays it only like a 512 map but it is actually a 2048, so is there a way to just preserve the initial settings?
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/usermovies/147340.html
and all I get is this. As far as I can tell I've been following Pior's Tutorial pretty closely. It's odd to me that I can get everything to show up in the editor fine but in game. It makes me think maybe my code is wrong?
<font color="orange"> Part Text </font>
Parts=(Part=PART_Head,ObjectName="CH_Elizabeth_Female.Mesh.SK_CH_LizFace_Female_Head01",PartID="Z",FamilyID="IRNF")
<font color="orange"> Character Text </font>
Characters=(CharName="Elizabeth",Description="",CharID="Z",bLocked="false",Faction="Ironguard",PreviewImageMarkup="",
CharData=(FamilyID="IRNF",HeadID="Z",TorsoID="A",ShoPadID="B",bHasLeftShoPad=true,bHasRightShoPad=true,ArmsID="A",ThighsID="A",BootsID="A"))
Did you check the log file?
C:\Documents and Settings\Username\My Documents\My Games\Unreal Tournament 3\UTGame\Logs
Especially with those long ass UT3 names that happens very fast...Check the names of your pack and your meshes.
Log: FindPartSkelMesh: Failed to find/load part: CH_Elizabeth_Female.Mesh.SK_CH_LizFace_Female_Head01
I don't get it though. All my upk files are in this directory.
C:\Documents and Settings\Michael\My Documents\My Games\Unreal Tournament 3\UTGame\Published\CookedPC\CustomChars\CH_Elizabeth_Female.upk
Thinking on trying a different file to see if I can load it up fine.
*And, I got Davision's Zombie head to work so it must be something with code or maybe my mesh. At least I know it's in the right directory. >.<
grab it here if you want it.
I'm very new to Polycount so this is my first post
In order to contribute to the topic I wanted to show off my Skaarj model I did back in October 2007 which was a part of my Unreal Fanart.
Hourences told me you're working on a UT3 pack or something. Here is a render of the character. Hope you like it
Now there is still one problem and I'm not sure if I should post this in the request section or not.
Since I'm very busy within the next months I won't have time to animate this guy for UT3. I already offered the model to ChaosUT but unfortunately they had to pass because everyone is full of work.
So if someone here has some time and feels like helping me out bringing the char into UT3 I'd be very grateful
I already rigged it in Maya but the skeleton doesn't seem to be UT3 compatible
If this type of request is misplaced, I apologize
edit: had to fix the image link
I was wondering when we'd get to see some Skaarj in UT3.
that
kicks
major
ass!!
awesomeness!
considered taking part in the dominance war?
So once the next patch hits I'm sure it will be easier to get this guy animated and in engine.
Sorry. No Dominance War for me this year. I have very much work to do currently as well as time consuming studyings. Exams are coming up
Edit: Ah! Thanks for the info, Vailias!
Characters=(CharName="Elizabeth",Description="",CharID="Z",bLocked="false",Faction="Ironguard",PreviewImageMarkup="",
I would have thought you needed to close this line out with a )
Not important as I'll probably end up building around Epic's example models, just thought it would come in handy.
ok here we go
hopefully it helps
now i can start tweaking it and play with the parameters and add other fancy ass effects
edit damn stupid image rule... ok more nect post
make something unreal, we're comming
here's a full view of the shader, oobersli asked for it guess, it'l help the others too
http://polyphobia.de/public/tutorials/TF2shading/shader.jpg
plugged into
Vector Transform set to WORLD
plugged into
Component mask set to B
plugged into
Constant Clamp
gives an upward facing mask
oh and thanks for the constant clamp, removes some nodes i don't need when using this
I have a pretty good feeling that we're not seeing how nice it is at all with the still frame shots. Probably have to see it in action to get the full effect.