Skree000

Fell asleep laying half on the couch tonight, woke up at 3am with a cramped neck and back LOL decided to finish the Halo 1 Pelican.... Going to check out the Halo2 pelican and see if its much different, hopefully higher detail, this baby is uber low poly and the textures are (as you can see here) only 512x512s. http://www.kolcrosbie.com/Pelican_Halo1.jpg Apparently the halo 1 assets didnt even use normal maps, so i had to generate some along with spec maps... kind of crappy placeholders atm. Can you picture this crashed in the DC wasteland with dead space marines lying all around? :)

Oh yeah sure dude np. Sorry been really busy at work doing some Wikis on unwrapping lol. For now my schedules been pretty tight so if you want please by all means Go for it. Tonight after work when I get home ill send to you the Hipoly, lowpoly and the normal map (and AO map) generated so far. Id throw it to you sooner but im at work right now ><

tiny update, got both Bumblebee escape pod and Pelican drop-ship extracted. Just doing some final tweaks on them, the textures dont look right! bah!! *shakefist* will have to do some retex on them to make them all burnt up and wrecked for the crashsite hehe

If the shell casing Particle Effect is like most others, it should have a Decay rate setting... might also be called Lifespan, Life, Duration.. Lifetime... basically dictating how long the particle/meshes will last after being spawned. Ive never checked in the GECK regarding particles/emitters/FX so for now you're on your own lol. Ill need to look into it sooner or later though for my own mod so ill keep you posted as i learn more

Ok heres some visuals showing the normals map from the Hi poly working on the low. Left to right is: Hi poly, low poly, low poly w/ normals from Hi poly Second row is the same renders except with the Wireframe showing. Its more subtle in the last frame the difference between low poly and low poly w/ normals but thats because the wireframe makes it hard to see the subtleties http://www.kolcrosbie.com/Normals%20vs%20regular.jpg http://www.kolcrosbie.com/Normals%20vs%20regular2.jpg The denser your pack job on your unwrap the higher resolution youll be able to get out of your textures. Problems only arise with dense packs when you have a low res texture. Ie. if you had a 32x32 pixel texture on this, youd have a horrible mess, not enough spacing, but youd never put a texture that small on an asset like this anyways, but you get the idea. Make the most of your UV space! heres the unwrap: http://www.kolcrosbie.com/Wireframe2.jpg

First of all, the high poly on the left I made AFTER the low poly on the right. I generated it myself using sub-d modelling techniques. secondly, The eyes on the low poly are actually boosted from his original on page 1. The original was more boxy in that area. 5.5k tris for a HELMET alone is still pretty high even for a high end game. We have to realise the rest of the body armor isnt included in that poly count. Comparatively: Gears of War characters at LOD 0 clocked in at 10k polys minimum. This helm is just a sliver under 3k polys. And the entire remaining suit still hasnt been included yet. Could it run well with alot more polys and tris? definately. Would it cause noticeable graphical slowdown for most people when multiple copies of this mesh are on screen? Depends on how high poly your objects are, but yes usually. In all honesty, the bethesda meshes are not very well optimized with ridiculously high poly counts totally wasting our GPU performance. The first time i ripped some out and had a look it was really dissapointing. Sure they look nice in game, but the game could run so much faster with very little noticeable difference. And before you go saying 'their power armor looks good' Im talking about their regular clothing meshes and character meshes especially. Theres so many redundant quads and polys its no wonder the game cripples all but newer pc's. The whole science of polygonal optimization basically revolves around the idea that small surface details, intrusions/cavities and complex sculptural topology can be faked with normal maps, and dont really need extraneous geometry to express it. Additionally we also add extra polys when needed to facilitate mobility and range of motion for animations. Most co-planar geometry can be totally removed unless it retains an exterior silhouette or serves some greater function. IE. a torso doesnt need to contain dozens of rows of polygons just to bend or contort. only 5-6 rows IF that. Is the helmet perfect? no. Did i make it worse? *shrugs* you tell me

Im fairly certain this number lies in the shell casing ejection particle emitter settings. This would probably be an FX or Special Effect, Firing Effect type thing. (not animation). Once you find it its just a matter of cranking up the number of meshes generated. I would save that out as an alternate firing effect, so you dont overwrite anything (unless you want to)

http://www.kolcrosbie.com/PowerArmorHelmet.jpg Stuff like screws and rivets are going to be done in texture since it takes alot less time than to model them in for a high poly capture... Flickone have you decided how the armor is going to be bolted together/rivetted? Do you want seams down the middle like the vanilla Power armor? o.O?

Okay your unwrap is done. Going to tweak this model cranking up its polycount to make a rough Hi-poly for normal map generation So far the model sits at 3200 polys, which is pretty heavy... (6k tris ouch) Going to see if i can get it down to atleast 3000 polys once I bake your normals for ya. Ill texture it too if you want, i have some fun ideas for this one :)

I think ill make an overlay for you.... my screenshots up a few pages were an older version I did for a game concept, but I really like your quick one it inspired me to make another attempt :) I think ill make a dirty and scratched up one that really feels like 'fallout' :)

The easiest way to lose polies is on wires and thin cylindrical extrusions. especially on the backsides All you need is a triangle-shaped tube to hold the shape, the back can be flat and the front can have a ridge to catch the light from 2 angles. Combined with a proper normal map, it will look Identical to a normal wire/tube. Additionally, the poster above speaks the truth. Most simple indentations and intrusions can be eliminated on the final model and a strong normal map used in its place. If the textures are done properly, nobody will tell the difference. Its all about the quality of the high-poly model you used to generate the normal map, and how good your Render-To-Texture capture cage is. (if doing R2T in max) Thats the other issue... all the Fallout 3 models were made in conjunction before or after a High poly version, which was used to generate their normal maps. Without a high poly version only surface normals that imitate seams, ridges and texture details can be made. True normals that emulate complex shapes and forms are most easily created with a high poly source model, but that wont be the ingame model. Oh and about texture sizes, if the texture still looks blurry with a 1024x1024 on it, something is wrong. That is more than enough texture space for any asset from a good distance away. The whole idea behind choosing texture sizes relies on an evaluation of how far the asset will be to the camera and approx. how big it will be on the players screen. At typical resolution a texture that fills the screen only needs the resolution of no more than a 1024, maybe for some people a 2048 if they have insane huge monitors. If your model looks blurry still, its a matter of making the UV unwrap more efficient. Ill see if i can crank one out for you tonight after work.

Your model is pretty good, I cut down you polycount by about 500 without losing any real visible change (those wires had too many for their size heh) The unwrap looked pretty good, doing some parts over but for the most part its good, you just need to learn to pack your UVs more efficiently, but for someone who is learning and new, this is excellent so far. Ill see if i can have this finished unwrapping tomorrow, time to get some sleep, ive been up late working on bf2142 weapons too much lately, no sleep = zzzzzzz@work lol

OK ive got your model, ill give it a go. Its 1:50am right now, but i dont work until 10am tomorrow hehe. And all i do at work anyways is unwrap stuff LOL

I UV unwrap stuff all day long at work. I wouldnt mind giving your model a shot if you want a quality professional unwrap done. You'll have to prepare yourself for critiques though, when you unwrap something, every single vertex and polygon is exposed for me to see and any errors or modelling mistakes will be revealed. If you want to receive criticisms that is (only to help improve the model overall i mean. Not to insult anyone, everyone makes things in iterations until they get critiqued to make it better)

Thats the plan, although until I either get a 360 SDK, a 360 emulator or they release halo3 on computer, dont expect the actual Halo 3 ODST armor, so far we will be limited to Halo 2 version =(

Whenever anyone releases a mod, they pretty much are distributing everything in the open for anyone to rip up and use on their own, whether they like it or not people will do it. Since I cannot lay claim to Bungies creations, everything I produce will be (my augmented versions of) their IP's. Therefore I have no right to say 'dont touch this' hehe. Since (when I finish) this mod seems to be the only one of this level of depth on the matter of Halo asset importing, I would hope people dont just tint the armor some hot pink and then try to re-release it (besides I plan on giving the option of color pallettes anyways with alternate texture loadouts), since then there would be 50 conflicting variants :) Therefore I ask that if anyone has any ideas spill em out please, so I can please everyone with 1 mod and do the hard work for you guys so you dont have to fix my failings or inadequacies! :) But who am I to make demands anyways :) PS. I know, I know, its 'lightish Red' The core idea behind this minimod is a set of random encounters. One containing a crashed bumblebee escape pod with dead USMC space marines with fully lootable (and wearable) space marine combat armor (2 variants so far), another encounter containing a crashed pelican with more soldiers, including a dead spartan. Next to the corpse will be Cortana, pleading with the chief to 'Get up chief! Chieef!' (sound bytes from the games) (to add to the humor). Added bonus, once you take off the chiefs helmet you get to see his face... I have plans for that too 8-) (either going to make a smaller master-chiefs helmet underneath (LOL) like those dolls that fit inside eachother) or going to make his base body a new race which has a totally burned-to-a-crisp facial area so he is unrecognizable, and will be found face-down, visor smashed on a nearby rock.

Hehe that might take a while :) for now let me get the armor working in game then we will see whats next hehe

Its on the list of things to do :) Frigates were just there so I figured why not and got them out too hehe. I think i have ADD when it comes to this lol... ooo thats pretty, lets to that.. ooo look at that

Micro-update: Fleet Admiral Hood along with 2 other Marine dress uniforms extracted tonight! so that makes 3 variations of USMC white dress uni's, each with their own hat. Obviously the rank is denoted on each with stars or ivy wreaths or whatnot just as they are ingame in those cut scenes :) Cortana extracted too... maybe she can be an NPC at the crash site where you discover the dead Master Chief LOL ... Chief! Chief! Wake up!! (can get some sound bytes from the first games and use those, since she says that alot in the series lol) Also a UNSC Frigate has been extracted and its textures located. Just needs a shader rebuild. These ships are absolutely enormous, its ridiculous lol. Wonder if I could place some in the skies above DC when they go looking for the MIA MC :)

Got all excited with the guns from BF2142, once Ive streamlined (pretty much have already) the NIF import process, ill be moving on from weapons to much harder things (armor)

what prog are you trying to use to open the pics? does your windows explorer generate thumbnails for the pics when you switch your browser to 'thumbnail view'?

Running up the walls? Interesting... how did you do that? that should be documented!

Recolors are a snap. Just a simple photoshop tint mask operation

If you are making collision for weapons, Make sure when you go to export, your collision mesh should be an Editable Mesh, not a Poly Also, make sure its Bhkrigidbody modifier is set to Convex.... OH DONT FORGET if you are having errors 'Assertation Failed' Array something something, basically it means wherever you hit 'Paste Over' (on all of those items actually) reset that blocks 'name' to zero (0) Just click the space where it has its own name, and enter Zero, it should default to the root nodes name with zero in brackets [0] if you dont do this, you will have assertation fail errors upon trying to open it up in Geck or preview window. (all nodes nitristripdata must be named 0!

ok heres the situation Models are 3d geometry to texture the 3d geometry we must 'unwrap' the shape onto a flat surface, this is the UV unwrapping process. Once you have UV unwrapped your model, its UV coordinates are contained within the 3d shape's data. (that is called 'a mesh that has already been Unwrapped, or a 'mesh with UVs) The UV unwrap is basically an organized layout of where the 3d triangles appear on 2d space. We export out this layout as a 'template' showing how the wireframe is spread out, usually we export these out to aid in the texturing process, to paint on top of them, or around them, using the wireframe exported UV template as a guide for where we need to apply our textures to which areas. Now, when you say, you have a model with a UV map included as a Jpeg, do you mean, the jpeg is a flat template render of the UV window, showing the wireframe spread out flat? or is it a Texture map with color information, or something like that. You only really need 1 UV unwrap per model unless your game engine is going to apply additional effects such as AmbientOcclusion, FinalGather, GlobalIllumination or grunge maps onto your model, then it would need a second UV unwrap on a UV2 channel Are you asking if there is an easier way to unwrap your model? If so, programs like 3dstudio max and Maya have UV windows that will let you unwrap things... Maya's sucks tbh... but there are simple applications such as Roadkill or UVLayout that are standalone and can quickly unwrap a model for you, but you will never have the kind of control you would in your unwrapping process as you would in 3dsMax, maya or Blender. Or are you asking if you can attach multiple 'texture maps' to a model? Not sure which you mean since you sound like you are a bit new at this :) (not trying to make fun, just trying to get a better idea of your question before i can answer it)