Some 3D work ( game usable )

[Dragonlord]

Thought I might once put in some stuff I made for the unlikely case somebody actually cares

. I've got a couple of models around here but I'll just post one for the beginning to see if there is any interest or not. So let's start with one of my first and especially complete models.

Quote from the Deviation Page about the Renamon Model:

Since quite some time I wanted to get a bit of free time to do some fun-projos ( fun projects ) to relax a bit from the lot of work around me and somehow finally got to it. From all possible models I managed to find a full set of ref-images for this one so it got the first work spot. I tried out in this one a bit a different way of modeling, especially trying to model a bit "quick" so I won't get stuck on details. The hands still managed to give me some headaches though. I only know the few images I have so I don't know how accurate I stayed to the "original" ( or how accurate those images are ). So took me a couple of hours to get there.

The chest has this "fur" on it. Had no idea where to start but that's why you do such things to learn on the way. Done it only with sub-surf and no helper scripts. Some normal map should make it a bit better in the end I hope. That said this is the first time I ever worked with something having fur ( dragons don't have fur so you are safe from it ).

I have also fully rigged this one. I made a little test pose to see how things work. I won't go too much into detail with this one. The rig is a typical game rig and therefore geared for as less bones as possible.

Finally the texture made it's way on the model. Made diffuse and detail normal map. The fur somehow did not fully turn out like I wanted it to be but with a better trick this would work out. The eyes are a bit problematic as this character is drawn by nature and while drawing things you can do a couple of "hacks" which do not work that well in 3D.

So with all this done I'm calling this one off as finished expect maybe a bit of clean up once upon time. This one gave me some learning in modelling with a new technique I call "Cylinder Modelling" as well as working with fur without high polygon tricks ( hence no fibre or individual hair strains ). Finally some statistics for those interested.

Statistics:
Program used: Blender3D 2.43
Vertices: 3086
Faces: 3312
Sub-Surf Level: 2
Rig Bones: 58
Textures:
- Head diffuse( 512x512 ) normal( 512x512 )
- Body diffuse( 512x512 ) normal( 512x512 )
- Legs diffuse( 512x512 ) normal( 512x512 )
- Eyes diffuse( 128x128 )
Work time: in total a couple of days ( bit more than a week I suppose ).

Here the main image and some additional views from the work process.

Images are nice but videos are better

. Playing around producing some animations. All linked videos so you can watch them ( might upload them to myvideo if people like this better than direct links ).

Walking Animation ( direct video 4.4MB )


Crouching Stance Animation ( direct video 2.1MB )


Eventually putting this into a game engine just because I can

. Nothing serious, just playing around with the model and animations. ( direct video )


So that's it for this model. I've somebody is interested I've got some others too, just say what you want to see ( if anything at all ): Imperialdramon DM, Charizard, Shield Liger.


EDIT: Posted Charizard model.

EDIT: Posted Imperialdramon DM model.

EDIT: Posted Shield Liger model.

 

[Raika]

Wooooow... That's awesome stuff!

 

[KingVamp]

That pretty good.

 

[Ducky]

thats good !!!! wish I could do that

 

[Dragonlord]

Thanks you like it. So... interested in some more? As mentioned in the first post I've got 3 other models which ( except for one ) are finished. Not sure if I should put them in the same topic. Still the one-topic-per-person rule in effect?

 

[OmerMe]

Sure, post them, that's really awesome! I'd love to see more.

 

[alidsl]

I spy with my little eye... A homebrew game

 

[Dragonlord]

Nah, it's not for a game although it the model would be all ready to be placed in one ( properly rigged and textured ).

Now what goes for additional models... a new topic or in this topic? Not sure what the mods like or dislike

 

[OmerMe]

Just post it in this topic in a new post and in the first post, it's a new topic so people will notice the update.

 

[Dragonlord]

Okay, here goes nothing. I'll continue then with the Charizard model. This one went over various other places so the text is a bit stitched together ( my apologies ). Images are clickies, videos will be added once uploaded to myvideo.

Time for another Fun-Project ( FunProjo Series ). This time I came around a guy which most probably many of you know ( and hate ). It's from a game franchise called Pokémon which is amongst game developers a little miracle in that it violates many Good Practice rules and should be a failure but yet it's loved mad like pie... that said WoW violates them too but you see the unholy results

Those knowing the FunProjo Series know that I'm always linking a Goal to a project. This time the goal has been two-fold. The first is Proper Mesh Loops / Topology. I used this to improved on my mesh topology skills. There are still some places where I could not get around triangles somehow ( and places where I wanted them ).

Eventually got around to tackle the second part of the story: the Particle Engine. I'm though not really fond of the results. I'm not sure though if this is because of limitations in Blender's support for particles or me missing the options. First the particles are too big. They have to be smaller but more of them. Second particles should be able to undergo texture transformation. What this means is that currently a particle gets a texture coordinate assigned depending on where it leaves the emitter mesh and keeps this until the end of time. What I want though is that the particle texture coordinates moves along the texture so the particle starts out bright white and becomes dark red while fading out towards the end of it's life. Currently it's a bengalian torch not much of a fire after all.

Gave this guy a little texture. The wings have a nice diffuse shading applied which is hard to see in the high polygon version. Would look better in a low-profile light scene as for example on a weak console. That said I've made better skins up to now but I'm also not very good at it

.

Two images one textured one wireframe and a rotation video.

QUOTE

Happened to revisit this model again. Tinkered with the rig and made a couple of animations for practicing purpose. This one is mostly about weight shifting, momentum and body motion. Poor Charizard though got the kick in the last one . Hacked them during some hours in an afternoon. Still room for some tweaking.

In total these are 6 videos.

Idle: Typical idling standing stance.
Walk: Walking cycle with variation for left/right ( see last video. and yeah, he's not moving, forgot to disable the modifier. last video has it ).
Hit-Recover: What pokes can do best, getting their snouts polished . Made two versions out of the same starting animation. An old trick so the player doesn't know by the start of the animation yet if he's going to come back or not.
Hit-Faint, 2: Another thing pokes can do best: fainting. A funny property of this entire poke stuff which does not really resemble Japanese cartoons. But maybe this is why it still sells like mad although rehashed 'til death. Second version is from the back a bit like the original Colosseum ( for N64 I think it had been ).
IGDE Version: Slammed all together into a game ready animator testing it out in the IGDE. Shows how the walk variations blend together. Typical animator file so a quick thing to do. The hit animations work too there but not shown here. Tested how it would work to place those inside the animator too.

And here the videos in no particular order:
Idle, Walk, Hit-Recover, Hit-Faint, IGDE Test.

For those not knowing the abbreviations, IGDE stands for "Drag[en]gine Integrated Game Development Environment" and is a game editing framework. I do all my tests in there.

NOTE: Video upload services usually don't allow to download videos in the original full version. For those interested in the original video you can find them here: Idle, Walk, Hit-Recover, Hit-Faint (v1, v2), IGDE Test.

NOTE: One might ask what the red and green shapes are in the IGDE video. I forgot to disable the debugging stuff there. These shapes are used to keep actors walking on the ground, that's all.

I've still got some testing open with that guy. I'm using him to test some engine features which I usually don't use but others might helpful so he's a sort of guinea pig for me right now

. One more down, two more left. Got still in stock an IDramon-DM and a Shield Liger.

 

[david432111]

Looks pretty good

You should seriously think about making a pokemon meets digimon kind of game using these models.

 

[Dragonlord]

Another one for the count. Posting first the Imperialdramon DM one since the other is not finished yet. Again some a quote first about what it is:

From time to time I take a break and do some modeling of cartoon or otherwise tv show characters especially if they have some relationship ( even if only remotely ) with dragons. This guy here had been on my todo list since quite some time but just recently I stumbled across usable reference images.

I tried to get this guy done quickly but various parts of his body proved to be more challenging than I first expected. In total 4 afternoons I spend on this one not counting rendering the images and rotation views.

I'm still a bit fighting with the reflective material for the metal parts as well as those stupid plastic like material. Just can't get them to look good.

Shown here is one final render. Check out also the various other renders including progress steps of this model while it came along.

I rendered also two rotation views one with basic lighting and one with a more complex lighting setup one I'm though not too fond of. I'll try to add some final touches improving the lighting showcase and fixing some minor issues with the model.

Next steps are now to do the low-poly, rig and normal-baking. Just love playing around with models like this in interactive game engines.

There are a couple of images ( numbers N refer to "renderN.png" ) in the directory so here only an overview and a final one.

And two videos. A rotation view ( direct video ) and a walk animation ( direct video ). Concerning the walk some quote:
QUOTEOnce I had the bugger done from the modeling point of view I plugged him into the game engine. Looked rather hilarious. Unfortunately I don't have an image/video of that right now since I killed the .model file on accident and it had been a quick test. Whatever something I noticed quickly has been that whoever designed this bugger didn't think much about animating him. The leg structure is messed up pretty bad. The front legs for example have only one leg joint and you need two leg joints to get anything useful done like a walk animation or whatever. So I went out of the beaten path and "modified" the model a bit. What I did is making the lower foot part movable instead of static. This adds the missing joint and now he can walk ( well, sort of... he's too clumsy for this world ). This does not really comply with the original design but what can one do with broken legs.

No IGDE Test run this time since he's not unwrapped and textured in a game ready form yet. Something for a rainy day

. One more model missing, the shield liger.

 

[Briankealing]

Nicely done.
I need to figure out how to create 3d models myself.

 

[GameSoul]

Great job on the models. Let us know when that game comes out

 

[Dragonlord]

Sorry, no game with that. Did them just for practicing and having fun with some dragons in my collection

 

[Dragonlord]

Took quite some time ( several days and some failed attempts ) at rotation-rendering this guy with all the reflective stuff but now I got the video so let's drop in another one... and a special one too. Why special? It has been the first real blender model I tried and where I aimed high. But some quotes are better to recap the story.

Some ( long ) time ago I once started a Fun-Projo besides the Renamon one where I put myself the goal to go "high detail". High detail simply means pushing detail level as far as possible using Sub-Surf and various other techniques. I used this as a learning chance and have chosen something which deemed to be of high detail. At this time I happened to come across some images of what is called a "Shield Liger". It's something from a Japanese manga called "Zoids". The main problem with this model is that I have never seen one of those toys from up close neither do you get these things in my country. So the only thing I had left had been rather small and pixelated photos foundon the internet of people owning such a toy. Photos are anything else but good reference images since they rarely are of the required format ( front, side, top, 3/4 ) and therefore I had to heavily guess my way around this model, especially what goes for all the details. This kinda killed the project in the end since I simply could not decipher the small details anymore on the images ( often only occupying a handful of pixels ) so the project got more and more stuck. I found in the mean time nice image sets of other Zoids ( especially of a dragon one ^.=.^ ) so maybe if the time is right I'm going to give them once a shot but without the high detail requirements as on this one.

So now a bit more about the results I obtained. I somehow managed to get the head and legs done but lacking the body and tail. This guy is rigged to the teeth so the hood and shield flaps can all be moved. Also made some cockpit inside which I had to imagine myself since I had no clue at all how it is supposed to look like. As the game designer I am I took the liberty to design a cockpit I would put like this in a game and that should be useful to a potential player. Chances are I'm going to put this to a test once in my game engine. After all I can't remember a Zoids game with true cockpit view and I've come across next to all of them

. The rest are various screenshot with and without posing and different angles. There are more images not collated into this one here.
The result had been this model here which is not finished but still having quite some details in it. More images can be found here.

.

The model then has been left around and didn't continue since I simply lacked the informations I needed to get it on. Some time later though I stumbled across some things and this is where the second part in the story unfolds:
QUOTEA couple of days ago I stumbled across images taken from the tv show with the inside of cockpits. Having now some more reference material with which I can actually work I reworked the cockpit area beefing things up. It's not finished yet and the render contains only simple blender color materials ( except the monitor texture ) but it's a start. I did not recreate one of the cockpits found in the images but I mixed them together and put in some of my own ideas where I think it looks cool. The first two images show two angled renders ( and yes, Blender kills me with the crappy smoothing... it's a pain U_U ).

As the game developer I am I could not resist to build the cockpit in a way it could be used in a game. After all there is a lack of mecha games with actual in-game cockpits that are not just a 2D overlay image. When it goes down to zoids in games I've seen only tactical stuff or 3rd person stuff so far. Don't know why there is no in-cockpit views to really get a feeling for a combat. After all those mechas are quite different from each other and some real combat action would definitely be interesting to fiddle around with. Put together some monitor content for testing purpose in a way it could be useful for a player. You can most probably not read the text but in the left shuttle monitor the status bars are supposed to be "energy" ( blue; no idea what this does with a Zoid but all the games I found so far had such a bar ), "durability" or "integrity" ( red: I don't like the generic term HP ) and "shield" ( green; after all this guy is called shield liger so I assume it has a sort of shield ). The last image shows a render using a camera in the proper first-person position.

Now I need to add some more detail stuff on the side and back of the cockpit to break the emptiness.

( EDIT: I know, the JPEG is a bit blocky but I didn't wanted to force people to download rather large PNGs

)

Some screenshots of the result. More can be found again here

Last but not least two videos. One is the obligate rotation view which is the only one with the reflective material turned on. Makes some difference. And the other some igde test run. Played around there with the controllers, attachements and the typical walking around. Shadows look a bit strange since the model has been scaled down 1/10 for testing purpose and this is too small for the shadow caster to handle properly. I also rag-dolled ( physics ) this guy a little bit but no video of that yet. Could be done though if people like to see this dude tumble down some stairs ( well... sort of

).

I've got some plans with this guy beyond testing but it's nothing fixed yet. It will most probably boil down to a little sample scripts to test how it would look like ( meaning in-cockpit combat action or something along this line ). Nothing serious though since foreign IPs is a story on it's own so you can only do "testing" things

. First I need to get it finished and that's a bit difficult with the lack of informations I have. Stumbled across some additional images recently which fill in the gaps. I'll work on this guy a bit more when I get the time.

 

[Psyfira]

Wow, it looks brilliant! The amount of detail you've managed to get in without the model in front of you is amazing, you've done a really good job. I have one of these toys in a different colour, kept it from when I was a kid so if you need some extra reference pics or a copy of the instruction/assembly manual (which has some really good diagrams in it) just give me a shout

 

[Dragonlord]

I found a copy of a manual of such a toy but it seems to be a more advanced version of this shield liger. It looks slightly different and the construction seems different in some parts too. Gave me though some pointers of the hidden details I did not see ( tried fixing up the leg after I learned through it that they actually have a shoulder/hip joint in the toy... I though they missed it... extra joint helps in animation

). A scan of the manual of the matching toy though would certainly help even more especially since the manual contains front/side shots of the body parts. I'd definitely not say no to such an offer

 

[Raika]

Damn, the new stuff are sweet! I really like the Zoid one, it's plain awesome!

 

[Psyfira]

I'd definitely not say no to such an offer

Here you go: http://rapidshare.com/files/306672078/Zoid...tions3.pdf.html .