Ok, for those of you who haven't noticed it or tried it, the new dom points are finished.
Thanks to morfar for once again helping out with some coding both in the shader and mixing with the .qc-file, the logo texture and creating the normalmap, even adding a cvar for fullbright on and off (off by default).
Here's the finished product:

look good from the screenshots

And even better in-game with the animation.

Thanks, now people just have to play the mode

Good luck lol

ai wrote:Thanks, now people just have to play the mode

Try frankishtower15 in dom: people have to fight over the tower all day .

Yea, thats fun.

These are BAMF. Great job

So, guess what. I am getting closer to finally understanding the process of creating player models. I believe it's all thanks to glennxserge (Joshua Mills, is this correct?) who not only gave me an energy boost to once again fiddle with this, but also gave me a perl script that re-defines the correct bones to the vertices. He also helped me a bit on the way, great thanks!
I understand that he is also doing some player models.

Now, I'm going to explain a little on what I did just in case people wonder or if any other artists come along. Btw, this model I used is not mine, Ivan (from these forums) created this model a long time ago, but he nor anyone else couldn't rig it. I thought it would be a shame for such a good looking model to go to waste, so I decided to finally do something about it.

I am using Maya, as mentioned somewhere in this thread , I imported the robots (Quark or Crash as he is called) skeleton/bones.
I did try to re-use the animations from the Quark but when exporting from Maya the Valve SMD exporter gave the bones different numbers so they wouldn't match up with Quarks animations. I also saw that this skeleton had way to many and unused bones, I removed a lot of them.
The skeleton had some kind of '1 frame' animation, not an animation per se, just 'keyed frames' as it's called in Maya. This made it so that the model got deformed when later brought in-game. So basically I just removed all of that.
Lastly, Ivan's model had some inverted face normals, which means you would look through the model in a reverse kind of way. So when all of this was done I had to not only export the model as an 'Valve SMD Model' but also export the skeleton as 'Valve SMD Animation'. I duplicated the animation file and renamed it to a couple of animations so that the model would actually show up in-game. Otherwise you just get a diamond thing that you get when stuff are missing.
Of course, the model isn't animated, but this shows that my approach gave success and that I soon can start creating animations as well.

That's it folks. This took half a day with trail and error, but I learned something at least.
Cheers.

Result:

WOW! Nice, those look really good for half a day! You are getting really close.

Very nice.. but that face reminds me about something. Not sure what. maybe a q4 strogg?

esteel wrote:Very nice.. but that face reminds me about something. Not sure what. maybe a q4 strogg?

Maybe it reminds you of the screenshots Ivan posted a long time ago?

Ok update to all the riggers out there. Apparently joint orientation is a VERY important thing
I totally forgot about it, shows that I don't do this much . Meh, this is gonna be troublesome.

Looking good Ai. yeah, bone orientation is definitely important. it's one of those fairly invisible things until you compile your zym and your characters weapons is flipped all over the place (>_<)

Anyway, keep it up.

glennxserge wrote:yeah, bone orientation is definitely important. it's one of those fairly invisible things until you compile your zym and your characters weapons is flipped all over the place (>_<)

Lool yeah, this is what I'm currently trying to accomplish. I think I manged to make it correct now, did it last night but I didn't try it out in-game.
I think it's weird that this is a invisible number, Maya is otherwise so friendly and can show almost anything. Looking at the Local Rotation Axies doesn't help too much but can be helpful. I am manually rotating them in correct position just to give me a hint how it looks like.

Yay, finally after 2 days of orienting the joints, re-orienting, testing, compiling and like repeating this damn process 50 times I finally got it looking damn good in an 'idle' pose. The weapon is in perfect position and now the character no longer is standing in a slanted 't' pose (but in fact have a inanimated idle-state pose).
With this done I can now jump into creating animations which I'm looking forward to.

I posted here just to vent my happiness that the agonizing process of reorienting joints is finally over.

Ok, I just released a new version of the skeleton, this time in it's natural pose, meaning he is standing up. This natural pose is good if you want to rig it, pose it and/or animate it, so instead of trying to make use of the already existing ones now you have it lots easier.

I got a PM asking for this so I thought I might as well share with everyone else.
Link: http://ai.planetnexuiz.de/Models/Misc/s ... alPose.zip

Cheers.

Ok, I'm gonna be using this post to update the link when any animations have been completed.
Here people can download and try it out for themselves in-game, and if you think there's something weird or odd with the animations don't hesitate to comment on that.

Here's the file: http://ai.planetnexuiz.de/Models/Player ... 0.78.2.pk3
There's instructions on how to activate this model in the .pk3.

Animations complete:
Idle
Run
Jump (early stage)

Cheers!

EDIT:
Could you guys please download this pack and check out the run cycle? Tell me what you think about it and if you see anything wrong with it. I think I do but I this thing doesn't seem to want to go away, so if it isn't that noticeable maybe I can look past this. If it is then I just need to redo it somehow.

I see a slight pause in it. a guess would be that the cycle starts and ends in the same pose (rendering that frame twice)

tZork wrote:I see a slight pause in it. a guess would be that the cycle starts and ends in the same pose (rendering that frame twice)

Oh great, that might actually be the problem (cause they do start and and in the same position), and if it is, it would be a lot simpler to fix than I thought, thanks. I wasn't thinking about that at all.
The thing is, in Maya, the animation looks smooth without a pause so it's only visible in-game which makes it a bit weird.

Well, like i said its just a guess =). This was the bug with some anims i made for another thing a while back. (curiously it looked fine in the editor).

otherwise, it's looking good

keep up the great work ai

I posted a vid on the jumping sequence, this way more people can probably see this without having to fiddle with files and actually having the game.
This jump animation is odd, because when you laser jump for instance you first take damage (which the pain1 or pain2 will play) then right after the jump animation is played, and because of that it just looks weird.

A solution would be to not have the legs bend but then jumping wouldn't even be looking that good (almost like current animations). There is a bit of a problem already as as soon as you hit jump you jump, because of this the animation might look a bit unsynchronized, which again interferes with the freedom of how the jump animation looks like (however, this is easier to get past than the other problem).

Any comments?
Link: http://www.dailymotion.com/user/RandomP ... t_creation

its funny how when you laser really high its jumps again midair. otherwise VERY nice work

Icarus wrote:its funny how when you laser really high its jumps again midair. otherwise VERY nice work

seconded

Ok, updated the link above to now have a more fixed version of a running cycle, and feedback concerning it would be appreciated.
I'll include the link here as well: http://ai.planetnexuiz.de/Models/Player ... 0.78.2.pk3

Icarus wrote:its funny how when you laser really high its jumps again midair. otherwise VERY nice work

Yeah this is a weird coding thing. I've also discovered that if you press duck while in air (or in water for that matter) the jump animation plays right after as well. Now it boils down to if this can be changed and if someone then is willing to change this thing or if I should make a rather boring jump animation like current. I really wanted a real jump animation but with how the current system works it doesn't seem like I can (otherwise you will get these funny jump while in midair).

So before I can continue I would need an answer if it could be changed or if I should go ahead and create an animation that fits current coding. I don't mind either way, don't want to give the devs more work that necessary.

EDIT: I've talked to the devs and it seems we have agreed on a solution. There will be a new animation made which will replace jump (while in air). But in order for that to happen the existing models needs this animation as well which I will try to create. In the meantime I will just create a temp jump animation for this model and finish it once I've seen if I can create this new animation for the other models.

ah, I can feel your pain Ai. I am getting frustrated with how animations blend together. Specifically the shoot animations. If you have a machine gun and you are firing while running it just keeps looping the shoot.smd. I wish there was a way to isolate the blending of specific bones. So you could still have the legs running while the upper body was recoiling. Anyway, a lot of the animations blend in rather unnatural ways. I'm about halfway done with the animations for my character and am noticing all sorts of strange blends.

I've taken a break from the player model currently, been focusing on my personal projects for a while. I will soon pick up the player models though (I hope) but only after I've finished this then. And 'this' meaning a possible future Nex model based on NightRage's concept.

This is what I've done today, I hope to finish the model up tomorrow or something. This is the high poly version which I will use as a normal map, I have started the low poly version but I will finish it once the high poly is done.

Note: I still do not know how to set up the bones and what names they should have and such. I've taken a look at the current Nex and it seems to be more work that I anticipated.
But I hope I will learn this as well cause then it means I can create all types of models for Nexuiz.
Anyway, enough talk, I'm off to bed now.
Cheers!

Jaw dropping work man!
In case you finish this model, could you please... remodel the very old 1.0 Nexgun too?

C.Brutail wrote:In case you finish this model, could you please... remodel the very old 1.0 Nexgun too?

If I get pictures and concepts (the more the merrier) then I probably could. I did like the old one as well.