[Windcatcher]

Wow, that's amazing!

I don't need mobs carrying weapons, as the rigging process will place phantom bones at the hands, the shield point on the arm, etc. The client looks for bones with special names to figure out where to place things like weapons and shields and how to orient them.

The axis center should be at feet level, though it isn't all that critical. When I rig it to the skeletons the skeleton base will be the real point of origin. Quads are okay, but bear in mind that OpenZone will convert everything to triangles when it exports. The file format requires triangles. As for export format, it has to be something that Anim8or can import. Other than that, I don't care which format you use. Likewise, size isn't all *that* important as I can rescale in Anim8or. I think my half-elf model is around 55 units tall, if you need a rough scale (OpenZone scales everything down by a factor of ten when exporting creatures, so 55 units in Anim8or will become 5.5 units in-game -- the reason for this is because of the way Anim8or handles bone thicknesses).

Textures need to be a power of 2 on each side. I'd prefer that they not get too big so as to not use too much texture memory when used in-game. I don't know if you're using a single texture for entire models or multiple textures, but I'm much more concerned about total size in bytes of all textures than the size of individual textures. I'd definitely recommend not going over 512x512 in any case as I want the client to run on older hardware. Also, textures need to be able to be loaded by Anim8or. I know it can't handle 32-bit .BMP textures, for instance, though it loads 24-bit just fine. I prefer .BMP or .TGA in any case, but I don't know if Anim8or can load .TGA (I've only tested it with .BMP files).

One thing to bear in mind is how the client handles variants. For instance, if you look at my goblin model, it has four variants, but the important thing to take note of is that they all use the exact same mesh -- only the textures differ. The client requires this if you want to have a creature race have several variants (body types). The Sony client is the same way, by the way: if you use a different mesh then it has to have an entirely different race ID (such as how Kunark goblins differ from old-world goblins).

Another thing that I should mention involves texture filenames. They should follow the same general naming convention as live textures use: for instance, a lion texture might be something like lioch0101.bmp, where the first three letters denote the model, the next two denote a body part, and the last four denote player faces (only used on special player models), texture variants, pieces of body parts, etc. My creature textures that come with OpenZone should serve as examples, and somewhere in its help file is an entry that describes what each of the numbers mean. It's not a catastrophe if you don't use this naming convention, but it means that I'll have to rename each texture and do it myself (and if you're using a single texture for the entire model that's fine, too, but you *have* to use separate textures for separate variants or it won't work).