Organic Modeling Redux Rehashed Rinsed and Repeated

Back to remodeling my remodeled models ... models.
And LODing, lots of LODing.
And we're not going to be rejiggering the pokery again, this is the final cut of character models.

This was what changed the last big alteration, as posted in this old blog.



But frankly there were still plenty of issues, especially with dodgy deformation around the arms, so after fluffy bunny slipper catgirl got scratch built, then tweaked for better joints, everyone else has needed a bit of a rebuild from scratch too.

Obviously the best way to do this is to have a set of standard "base" characters to act as a blueprint, one for male and one for female. With deformation going to be as good as I could get, it was time to plough on with rebuilding my base soldier model. Still sticking to the principals of keep things fairly simple, most characters are sharing the same pants and footware textures. I beefed up the body armour considerably, and so it no longer looks like a leather jerkin from Henry V. So, once more into the breach, dear friends ...

Old versus new version as seen in Blender.


Actually, I trimmed a few polys off the head, it was much too detailed under the cap, and as the cap isn't coming off there was no point in having a full head of hair underneath it. So LOD_0 weighs in at 4958 tris.

I ended up 7 LODs in total, cutting down polys and texture numbers as they go - the last one blank to make sure that the model will disappear totally at 8 pixels. I've found that without having an empty level of detail the last LOD will always display. It hadn't previously occured to me that textures should be LODed out too, but I saw someone ... somewhere ... in the forums mention that the last LOD should only have one texture to reduce draw passes.

LOD_0 - 4958 tris - 8 textures - detail 400
LOD_1 - 3732 tris - 8 textures - detail 300
LOD_2 - 1849 tris - 5 textures - detail 200
LOD_3 - 764 tris - 3 textures - detail 80
LOD_4 - 120 tris - 2 textures - detail 40
LOD_5 - 108 tris - 1 textures - detail 8
LOD_6 - 0 tris - 0 textures - detail 2

Now the reason why 4 and 5 are so similar is that skin reflects, and I found it a bit of a jump when the pale skin colour popped into view, so I made an extra LOD which was basically the same blocky, stick figure as 5, but carried the skin texture for the face, thus easing the popping of the contrasting tone of the two remaining textures.

Bent over Gimp and feverishly scrawling on my tablet, I'd also redrew the textures up to scratch a little more.

And what it looks like skinned in comparison to the old model.


Righty-ho, now I need to knock up a security guard, and then probably work on bad guys of a scary disposition.

Merry Ruddy Crimbo

Organic Modeling Redux, WM(in)Ds, Melee, Dewicious Spam

The problem with an organic approach, particularly to modeling, is that it's rather synonymous with not knowing what you were doing, but you still needed to get something out.

So, I've remodeled and animated my player models "correctly", dropped my previous "hax" after finally working out how blended files are supposed to work, sorted out the various blend animations, and done a fair bit of "rejigging" to remove various issues of bad deformation.

In short, stuff I'd done previously ... and then redone previously. And this time it's done properly ... after a whole load more reading up and experimentation to find out what the hell "properly" actually was. This ... is the organic approach to modeling. The modeling done by someone who doesn't do modeling. It deals with small pushes forwards culminating in a far off strategic victory, and thus - global domination. After all what is the point of being a tinpot dictator, if you can't be tinpot. Surely one for Philosiraptor.

Whilst this all takes a great deal of elbow grease, the results aren't particularly good in a screenshot, so you'll just have to take my word for it when I say I've been doing all of this ... and not just playing annoying PuzzleBobble Soccer flash games - which I'm now firmly on the All Time High Score list for.

But the Interwebz demands pics, or something didn't happen, so here is not so much W-M-Ds as W-Min-Ds.


Cricket bat with a split in it held together with electrical tape.

Melee ... does the engine come with melee ...

Of course it does, it comes with everything ... everything which you can make - so I did.

Classic (and I use the term in the widest possible sense) FPS melee. Animation plays (via the recoil state no less - makes sure it doesn't get blended with other blends), delayed raycast (to take into account time for the swing back) goes out 2 metres along the eye vector, damage and impulse done to anything hit exempting self and weapon.

As part of my "bring player model up to speed" efforts, I'm including player gameplay attributes - which is probably the same thing really - and that of course means weaponry. I've gone for the old school approach of allowing the player to be "tooled up to the nines" with bags of weapons ... probably 20 in all. That's 2 weapons per numerical key a la HL2. SO I wrote a little script for that, trying to do it on the cheap. It worked fine, though someone pointed out that it's not networked - and whilst MP isn't really my thing, I did want to make nice script, so redid it so it'll work in multiplayer.

Also thoughts of finalizing my AI, something which I'll do once I've completed my player gameplay attributes.

In other news ... it's cold, someone ordered Winter ... it wasn't me. Also Chinese Haxxorz? On my Box? Apparently so, though the old Mark.1eyeBall nailed the suspicious files before AV or Defender got their act together. Eventually security agreed with me that something was wrong regardless of initially saying everything was fine which it clearly wasn't, until it tried to dial out to some spamsite in China.

Disaster averted ... only for some days later my file structure to corrupt. Retrieved ... I feel some nice new HDs coming on, and not the type I've spent 3 years complaining to Dell about. And if I'm going to have to install everything from scratch again - I might as well ditch Vista for W7. We shall see. Amidst all of this fervour bent over a keyboard, lack of benchpressing has turned shoulders to jelly and the first twinge of trapped nerve has reared it's ... I don't know, nerves don't really have heads ... but if they did it would have reared it. Hot water bottle down the jumper.

Didn't I promise you good folks Spam?

Mummzy has got a book out, first in years. Published on the cheap, you have to do your own cover - cue the BA Hons PGD in Fine Arts which I don't put behind my name because they look silly. Originally she wanted some sort of terrible Conanesque 1970s fantasy boobz-and-swords cover ... I managed to talk her out of that. Haven't plugged the old tablet in for a freehand draw in aeons - it's been all texture making recently. But good practise for my ideas of comicbook cutscenes/intros/etc.


Over9000 hours in MS Paint - honest

The publishers asked for a bleed, I gave them one, then they didn't use it, making the cover slightly off centre. [/RAEG]

Spamwich available from Amazon US or UK

[/end_of_spamwich]

Righty ... next up will be completing the player methods, sorting out some more weapons and tweaking the ones I've done. I'm up to 6 types at the moment. I'm thinking along the lines of keybinds sharing 2 types of vaguely similar weapon types:
1. Melee Weapons
2. Shotguns
3. Close Range Firearms
4. Rifles
5. AssaultRifle w/ GrenadeLauncher
6. Light MGs
7. Rocket Launchers
8. Energy, laser, sci-fi rifles
9. BFGs
10. ... er ... not sure. Grenades? Or I might put them somewhere else.

The there's a little case of remodeling all the other player/AI types, I've got one romper-suited, bunny slippered, comedy player model finalized, but the others require anywhere between redux and starting. And then bad guys of a scary nature ... and then AI sorting out, and the pathfinding tweaking. And then gameplay in the first level, and guis, and some other stuff.... and eventually a demo, just to get some performance feedback. Oh, and learn Fmod I guess. And ... you know the score...

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Also, Ball of Fruity 6 is out - I have not purchased. Not because of any Interwebz Picket Line over the PC user getting a beating, but because I've been busy (read the above bit ... it details this stuff).

Now - this got me thinking:
If one of the leading PC multiplayer experiences has ditched modding ... will other 3A franchises follow? It could be that ... at some time in the future ... the only way to mod, map-make or customize ... may be with an Indy game.

Lights, Lightmaps, Levels, Lorries, Lying Down Animations

Grasping at straws for another "L" word in the title. Licensed Fraps could have been it.

Level geometry complete-ish, lit, lightmapped, populated with stuff.

Stuff has mainly been pipes, lot of brass stuff lying around on walls and ceilings, to make the corridors look a little less bare. Various signs, some helpful with directions, some for comedy. I've also repolyed my cars and trucks, so that they look somewhat better but still stay away from overt realism. And I've got some simple flashing two-tones.


It was looking a bit clean, some damage decals took care of that

I'm a great believer in dog-legs and multiple height overlays in level design, giving the player the chance to see places that they want to go, have already been, alternative routes, and places which they can't get to but adds to the ambiance, illusion of immersion.


Multilevel Crossover Madness - with the opportunity to jump/fall through damaged railings onto other catwalks

There's two seperate routes through from the start and finish of roughly equal length, various chances to crossover and swap them by jumping, falling, not looking where you're going. Both routes are a mile long and come together for a final sequence, plenty of signposting to avoid running around endlessly in circles - because being frustratingly lost is not fun.



Lightmapping has been great, and the ability of pureLight to design everything at once in Blender and then export it in position -rather than lining it all up as I had previously in the world editor - allowed me to add more stuff, like pipes to the walls without having a nervous breakdown about placement.



Feeling decidedly unfit, I embarked on a masochistic hike over the roughest part of the Yorkshire Wolds, and only just made it back alive. I did however grab some nice reference pics of the area for future use, and the abandoned medieval village with ruined church at Warram Percy. linky


Ooooh, spooky

Having worked out how the particle editor functions for a bit of smoke and fire and with my intro levels geometry pretty set, I've turned my attention back to the gameplay, player models and AI. Crouch and prone animations have been done, and the necessary changes to the code implemented to get them to work and also to get the side/back animations for swimming. Still a few things require sorting out, rebuilding of the joints to deform better, some decent arms and hands, etc.

And needless to say the weapons also need a bit of an overhaul. Not just with a few extra polys here and there but also some scripting to get them to work via magazines rather than just an ammunition pool. Save that they're fairly done though.


Choice of comedy hairbands

And to the AI. I've got some pathfinding crammed in, and it seems to work fine, regardless of the day I spent trying to destroy it by getting the wrong end of the stick. So my AI will need a bit of an overhaul too from their ancient origins back when I made my first demo in TGE some 16 months ago. No doubt this will take a bit of brain work, and it'd be useful to have a look in the code and see what controls the stances available to the AI, so that I could script a doPose(crouch); function and the like. It'd be nice to force the AI to hit the dirt when they're getting shot at, rather than constantly crawling around in a scary way as they default to the prone stance for reasons only known to themselves.


Trapdoors never have enough amusing warning signs on them

And after all of that it's scripting actual in-game play. And sort out a gui, mission progression, bits inbetween, a savegame() function, a ton of other things, and a new demo. Don't hold your breath on the last one ...

Did I mention lightmapping? And licensing FRAPS - no more 30 second vids with a watermark then.



A quick run around in Advanced Lighting as a test. 44 seconds.
Link for HD



And an abbreviated run through in Basic Lighting - no spec, no normals, just a crappy PC. 8.28 minutes.
Link for HD

And this brings me to something else - moozik. It ain't the sort of thing I can do myself, so I've been spending lots of time listening to licenseable royalty free tracks, mostly from sites that I've seen linked in blogs here. Looped twice to fit the length of my vid is "Time" by Milkman-Dan, here used with newgrounds.com non-commercial/share/attribute license. I also noticed that he's listed on AudioJungle.net for licensing.