block based robot - work in progress.

[zuriastrad]

g'day, i'm trying to learn to animate and one major stumbling block i've encountered with animation is that i start a skeleton with good intentions but then get sidetracked into making a fancy mesh for it. so i decided to restrict myself to an very basic mesh and then get on with making animations for it. here's what i made....

it's pretty low poly, only 234 triangles. i made it from simple blocks, then marked all the seams, uvmapped it with gaps between each square face and baked ambient occlusion into a black texture. i then loaded the resulting texture into gimp and gave it some gaussian blur, this softened the shading and let some of the black around the uvmapping bleed onto the visible squares, giving it a kind of pencil sketch type effect along the edges.

it's got a working skeleton and now i need to make some animations for it. i'll probably knock together some fairly rough ones, for two reasons. (1) i want to see it in the game as soon as possible and (2) i'm an animation noob.

if anyone wants to take a closer look, the blend file is available HERE.

[Dokujisan]

That is the best looking block robot model that I've seen for Nexuiz today.

Bravo

On a serious note....I'm getting the impression that animation of models is one of the hardest things to figure out within the realm of Nexuiz editing.

[bengreenwood]

Zuriastrad, why bother with the smaller blocks on the face? Why not just skin on a face?

[zuriastrad]

Dokujisan-
yeah, animation is pretty scary. i think this is why i normally get sidetracked into spending time on the mesh instead, my brain is trying to save me from the horrors of animation.

bengreenwood-
it was laziness on my part, by using the blocks i could let blender's texture baking do the shadows on the face instead of spending time trying to make something decent in gimp.

[Rebecca]

Dokujisan-
yeah, animation is pretty scary.

I find rigging the hardest thing. With low poly and only weights 0/1 allowed, it is hard to make the mesh deform properly at the joints. In this regard, the block robot should be easy, since it has no joints.

[zuriastrad]

rebecca- i think someone might have mentioned the all-or-nothing weight painting on irc. i'd kind of hoped they were mistaken about it because that sounds like a nightmare to work with. is that a limitation of the zym format?

[The mysterious Mr. 4m]

I like the player models as they are, but the bots should all look at least similar and this "low-bot" would be perfect.

[Rebecca]

rebecca- i think someone might have mentioned the all-or-nothing weight painting on irc. i'd kind of hoped they were mistaken about it because that sounds like a nightmare to work with. is that a limitation of the zym format?

Mmh, I think I picked that up somewhere in the forum, but I don't know for sure. I hoped someone who knows would answer to this post... I think I'll experiment a bit the next days with a test model.

[Rebecca]

I can't find the forum thread that I had in mind anymore.

So I've made a test model with six vertexes and two bones, where two of the vertexes were assigned to both of the bones with weights 0.6 and 0.4. But in the game, the vertexes were acting as if they were assigned exclusively to one of the bones. Well...

[zuriastrad]

that's a pity.