New NPC models

[GeorgeS]

WC - I'm very experienced in 3D model creation, and can create anything static for eqemu. If you would like, I can give some custom ones (using my textures) I sure would love to help out


Animated modeling (I use truespace 6.6) and am very good using that tool. I can texture pretty well and even make monsters. I even made a very eq similar froglok last month! If you can animate them, I can make some and submit them.

Just let me know. I will upload some examples for everyone to check out


George

[Innerfire963]

I wanna see!

[Windcatcher]

Any help is appreciated. I'm a coder, not a modeler, but with some examples I can see what I can do, or at least determine what the issues are. I have enough of the WLD format licked that I think it will be more of an issue of parsing the source material than storing it as WLD. Ultimately, though, it comes down to how well the source material matches what WLD files require. I definitely think converting animated models to WLD is doable, as long as we have good source material.

[GeorgeS]

ok then, what I will do is begin by creating eq static models (I am excellent in low poly models).

Now just a few questions -

What format would these need to be in (3DS, X, etc..) and is mesh hierarchy fine or export as single mesh?

Triangulated or not?


Next, if my models are acceptable, then I can start making static monster mesh's (I usually keep those to under 3000 tris). These would take a bit longer to make ~1 textured mob per week and 1 untextured per day.

I also find eq mob textures come in many separate textures in files. So in essence, 1 mob would have about 12 textures. The advantage of this is to re-use textures for similar themed mobs. I texture this way as well.

I will give it a go. Let you know of the progess as it happens...always glad to help!

Later
George

some links to my low poly work
ultimaIV rewrite
http://www.wizardportal.com/optimaiv/

tutorials for low poly http://www.wizardportal.com/optimaiv...tutorials.html

main page for 3D objects - see left panel
http://www.wizardportal.com/optimaiv/orion2/orion.html

some guns
http://www.wizardportal.com/optimaiv/orion2/guns1.html

[Windcatcher]

Bleh. I should have mentioned that about the texturing. There should be a separate texture for each body part (that is, skeleton bone), but only one mesh for the entire model (or at most, one mesh for the head and one mesh for the rest of the body). Separate meshes isn't important unless you want to have alternates -- for example, *all* player models all have four alternate heads: bare, wearing leather, wearing chain, and wearing plate. A few also have alternate body meshes, such as armored or robed high elves. By contrast, monster models have alternate mesh heads for different types (e.g. cyclops or hill giant) but always only one body mesh.

A textured model per week is fantastic. I wouldn't even be able to keep up. I already have a .3DS file parser, but as far as I know it doesn't support bones. Maybe the thing to do is export the same model in a bunch of different formats and I can see what I can read. I have a parser for Quake III and I might have one for half-life (not sure, though). I can always scour the net for readers for different formats and convert to Delphi if I have to.

Another thng I forgot: there are some "special" bones in WLD models that don't have any polys. These are for item attachments such as weapons and shields. There should be one for each hand and a shield bone on the left arm. There should also be one for the helmet and one for what they call the guild (sits above the head). Old-world player models have helmets in the head mesh and have non-zero alpha values assigned to the helmet polys so the client can assign tints to them, so the helmet bone is unused for them, but it's used for helmet items that have their own meshes. We can tweak the lengths and orientations of these bones at a later time, but they should exist. Basically the held object bones point along the direction of a prospective held weapon, the shield bone points out through the shield, and the helmet and guild bones point straight up.

Edit: actually I think there are two bones per hand: one for a weapon and one that points to the side somehow for held books and such. I'm not 100% sure about this, but it should be easy do deal with these polygon-less bones anyway since they shouldn't ever move with any animations.

[KhaN]

Back from holidays, so.

If we can acquire some free models that meet these requirements

Post a schema of those requirement, ala davinci draw with named bones, bounding box, entities ....

Also, as OZ already import Ogre Meshes, it would be maybe easier to export NPC as ogre format, i already have bunnies, horses and such ready and animated, but nothing humanoid ready yet, and also, i think my bone format wont match what you need (i mainly bone ala Muybridge's way).

Thanks