OpenArena Message Boards

Hey all. For some reason lost to me I started drawing Open Arena characters, which you can see on the page linked right below. Now thinking about doing some models, but I'm no 3D modeller (currently locked in mortal combat with Blender). Also wrote a background story of my own, but I'm also no writer.

Open Arena page (http://androidarts.com/ThongArena/ThongArena.htm) (mildly NSFW but so is OA I guess).

An image from the page to spice up the post. Characters should be around 500-1k ... vertices? What about weapons? Same model is used as handheld and map item?

(http://androidarts.com/ThongArena/wpn.jpg)

Those weapon sketches are very inspiring.  Weapon designs are among some of my biggest creative blocks, I still haven't made the new non-spinning machinegun for OA3 yet. or a rocket launcher.  What was sort of modeled so far is a plasma gun, lightning gun (spinning 3 prongs), railgun (not ingame or textured), gauntlet (also not ingame nor textured) and chaingun (barely textured and only lowest lod level so far)


Also I like how you tried to make a sensible story of the nonsense that is OA's art inconsistency!  I had a hard time trying to think about it as well with theories about thematic consistency, though the general consensus from the players were more of a 'i don't care, a game is a game' thing.



I'm trying to keep it 2000 triangles at most per character, i'm often over this limit by a few hundred though.   Performance reasons make me favor one texture only and no alpha channels however.  The renderer still can't handle more than 1000 vertices per surface well however, even if that limit can be changed to higher, it'll slow down  even if there's no models pushing that limit, and one time when I did it it had sprung a memory leak and crashed.



Also here's a small sketch showing the style shift for sorceress. I should mention I am a terrible 2d artist, so my drawings are full of unrerined proportions "hope it gets the point across" concept level at best. I like to spend more art time in blender than mypaint.    Zoom the thumbnail out and the left one should be more discernable at a distance than the right

I very rarely use the "a" word, but that web page was awesome.

Really enjoyed it, thanks.

That artwork seriously kicks ass.

Thanks. I've updated the page a little. Might be coloring some figures up.

fromhell> Sometimes concept art can be quite arbitrary so it's just a lot of work trying to match it in 3D. I guess if one's comfortable designing in 3D it's better to make the arbitrary choices and general design choices directly there. Some 3D modellers really need othros and ref whilst other can improvice directly. I'm starting to play around with Blenders dynamic scultping thing and it seems nice for "sketching".

Had a little fun with your Sorceress (did arbitrary stuff, no deep thoughts behind). I think, while the cone hat has a simple silhouette, the bent version might fill out a square hitbox better...?

(http://androidarts.com/ThongArena/FromHellWitch.jpg)

Okay that is awesome. gives me ideas on how to detail the skin and maybe fold the hat.  The reason why I haven't done it already is for uvmapping/texturing purposes since I paint in 3D


Also these (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=4924.0) topics (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=4409.0) may (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=4369.0) be of interest, it's where I try to go at it developing concepts and models at a snail's pace. I also need to update this list (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=4904.0) which regards the OA->OA3 redesigns

Iterated those weapon doodles*.

(http://androidarts.com/ThongArena/wpn2.jpg)

* Only the ones in top post, I forgot to scroll down.

The pink haired grunt is interesting.  I could attempt to model that

It's pretty rough. I could make a quick ortho perhaps. The idea was to put some more flamboyant designs on that sheet eventually (upper class silliness). Pink haired girl might be an aristocrat. Might redesign the grunts to give them some gold embellishments, maybe a silly Queen's Guard hat.

Edit: Just searched in the App Store on my mac and found Open Arena, Nexuiz and some other fps game being sold by some chap.

Edit: Thoughts on title screen, medal and bot level icons.

(http://androidarts.com/ThongArena/misc.jpg)

Edit: Painted texture style, more flat (in general direction of TF2/Overwatch). Might work better with the less gritty animé characters?
(http://androidarts.com/ThongArena/blocks17i%20x3.jpg)

(http://androidarts.com/ThongArena/Dungeon%20set.jpg)

warming up by taking on "moebari maniac" first since the concept is simple enough.


spoiler: it's sorceress's mesh as a base and it's around 1750 triangles, more could be used for making a sword maybe. and maybe using the huntress rig for that since she already has a katana

i don't like how the legs turned out though

Looking pretty good! I'm unsure how to get around the hip-ribs cut-off in the model. Probably no good way to hide the clipping for bare midriff characters without making the waist round rather than oval. 

yeah this was my problem with angelyss since I had to do her on lower.md3 entirely.  OA3 has a strict lower/upper requirement, angelyss would probably need a sling change to work (hip-tied instead of down to crotch) and maybe some belt or some clever shading/normal/splitedge trickery to make the seam not as bad.  I didn't do any caps between the two in this one yet. I'll have to paint a quick texture and get her in game to see how she really looks

On Sorceress, the torso/lower break happens at the belt which is a bit above the navel and below the back's dorsi muscle.  The belt is kind of high up.

On Succubus (the topless blue/purple demon) the break happens around her ribcage and down the dorsi.  She has armor on her back which also helps the seam a bit.  She has no belt, and I rely on muscle shading/split edges around her abs to make it look consistent with the seam.
 

The waste is probably too thin for the legs (or vice versa; although that makes it too thin to properly aim on).

Spent a few hours to do the soldier, trying to avoid the leg issues moebari maniac had


and the texture too while i'm at it. 1902 triangles so under budget!

Looking good! I think the calves are a little thick&high. Painted directly in the 3D program?

Looking at some old screenshots (http://androidarts.com/ThongArena/pantybot.jpg) of mine, I see that the weapon will /often/ cover the waist so the split is only jarring from certain angles and when laying dead.

Edit: Paintover:
(http://androidarts.com/ThongArena/Princess.jpg)

(http://androidarts.com/ThongArena/Princess.gif)

Despite looking good; it's not very practical to choose a character coloured as a zebra (as that probably will be quite dispatching).

I don't think the stripes will create any moiré.

Here are my adventures in 3D-land. First ever organic sculpt, so I don't know what I'm doing. Might have to scaledown head a bit. Not really sure about proportions or style. Model will obviously be decimated down to 900-1600 total, but that should improved armour/clothes which I have not yet sculpted. Lost work 3 times due to crashes :-/
(http://androidarts.com/ThongArena/3D%20rough.jpg)

Sorry for the late reply. I was ill.

I tired to make many of those paintover adjustments (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tma24etce8Y) and got her ingame, realized how worse my skeleton rig is :/  That head clipping


as far as modeling in Blender goes i've never used the sculpt tool since I believe it causes memory leaks, and I use an old Blender version (2.66a) anyway. and yes I did paint the texture within Blender's viewports itself since I can't get my mind to cooperate with layers and painting on 3d just feels more natural to my workflow anyway.

Also my modeling method usually is a point extruding-and-facing marathon

Hey Arne, those are some great ideas and designs!

This just a quick and dirty block-out trying to get a feel for the forms. It will be cleaned + optimized up later. I'm having troubles trying to figure out the receiver/handle area. If you have feedback/suggestions that would be helpful, otherwise I'll improvise.  :)

(http://i.imgur.com/hDRrPzO.png)

fromhell> Great fun to see the Princess ingame. Perhaps the collar piece can be widened a bit? I don't know much about... deformation zones(?) and such for joints. Guessing it's a pain to set up right, but it might be a lot easier for more armoured, robotic or insectoid figures.

Joshua> Looks like it could work. Maybe a bit short? IIRC this was a rail gun and I wanted it to be a bit longer, more like a rifle than Q3A's chubby cylinder. I think texture "fit-ness" can make or break a model, even changing the geometry, adding or removing form. Doesn't Q3A use some kind of LoD curves for round forms? Also unsure if first person model is the same as map model. Nowadays I suppose it might as well be, out of convenience. RPi 2 users might be more performance sensitive though. Perhaps weapons can be split up just like player models so poly count can go under 1k?

Ideas, with some poly reduction:

(http://androidarts.com/ThongArena/Gun%20PO.jpg)

There's two LOD systems:

- one for the subdivided beziers/curves in maps
- one for models, which switches meshes to different, loaded-in-memory meshes and they must be made manually. i.e. head.md3 = lod 0, head_1.md3 = lod 1, head_2.md3 = lod 2
- MDR lods are internal and are also manually made, though unfortunately our MDR pipeline doesn't export LODs for MDR.


Weapon models are the same in first person and the world.  _hand.md3 is a just tag_weapon that positions the weapon on the screen and animates it, and it's coded to not display any geometry.   Unfortunately this limits the weapon animation to just a mere recoil; no reloading anims or anything. (yet?)

Remember that the vertex count limit is per surface and not per model. Splitting weapons into different meshes shouldn't be necessary, unless there's a spinning "barrel" involved.  Also there's plenty of verts in Joshua's model up there the engine can handle fine, even though there's a lot of it that could be shaved off and merged without loss.   Even the glowy tube bit of the gun could be handled on the same texture if it were uvmapped along the left side of the texture so there could be a vertical glowing rgbGen entity scroller working down it, with much less performance penalty than the Q3 railgun but just as visually effective



It should be noted that Q3A didn't have LODs for everything.  It didn't have any for their railgun. :P and while q3 ran nice on the hardware of its period (TNT/Voodoo/Rage), it's not very futureproof toward newer APIs like GLES which has very poor texture switching performance.  That's one of the prime reasons why i'm doing single texture models and avoiding reliance of flashy shaders on non-effects models.  That's not to say there won't be _normal mapping or _specular mapping texture support in the future though,  that's probably possible in the future (in a Darkplaces-style transparent way)

Try a big OA088 botmatch with model kyonshi and cg_forcemodel 1. It will be slow because I spent a lot of stages on the face, trying to fake some sort of glossy skintone effect.  Also there's at least 4 textures used per player and there's two different alpha blendings going on.  This WAS very fast on the Radeon x800 card I developed it on, but not so much on any DX10-class hardware since.  

@fromhell
Thanks for the info! Are there any triangle count budgets posted anywhere? I think it is currently around 1.3K, which will drop when the model is optimized (apply mirror modifier, remove intersecting geo, convert splines to meshes, etc).

@arne
Thank you for the paint over! It is extremely helpful. I did some of your suggested poly reductions, and worked on matching the paint over proportions better. I am still trying to make sense of the underside.

(http://i.imgur.com/VAEIWSS.png)

Sorry for the late reply about this.

OpenArena version you find in the Mac App Store is unoffcial, made by third party... we don't know which differences it may have got from the official version. Sure, it can be easier to install because it would not need to "chmod" its executable like official 0.8.8 package, or to allow its execution as unsigned app (see (DO NOT LINK) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/Manual/Install#Mac)... but we cannot provide a lot of support about it (read here (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=5104.0) about a problem with it loading Blitzkrieg map, fixed by adding to it some .pk3 files taken from official package)

See also (DO NOT LINK) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/Ports_and_markets

Created a new body mesh since I didn't like how screwed up my old one was

I read yer topic and I feel like crying tears of blood  :no:

Drop the 100% compatibility, will ya? Develop, adopt - or hack it out of existing MD3s - a new standard, instead of doing horrible things to these fine boot... bodies.  ^-^

I dunno, if adapting skeletal is too much, you can make extended use of MD3s. Instead of one animation line, make it 3 or 5, and interpolate the same as animation is interpolated. It's only twice the cost of cpu lolad and some 3 times the memory/file usage!

Or treat the vert.aiming as additional animation sets, akin to strafe running.

Do *something*.  :-X
I believe the bit of additional coding can't be harder that the helluva lot of work you are going to do splitting the babes :RIP:

I'm not using MD3s.

I'm using MDR...which is literally skeleton MD3s.  no skeletal control features and has very abridged skeletal structure (for the memory!!!), also allowing for more polys and more frames.

Going MDR helps me inch more polygons out of players without sending the game into a crash or in longloadingtime territory.  Also there's already additional animations supported by detecting tag_flag on the mesh to turn them on and if defined in the animation.cfg to allow torso runs, torso jumps, torso runs on gauntlet or w/ flag, and strafe animations.  I'm already trying to unstiff the players



I had thoughts to do something to make facial expressions (like some sort of mouth openness changing 10 frames, rest of frames being 10 different expressions, and trying to make cgame appropriately picking which of those frames to use and then maybe making the TA voice taunt system play voices from the entities' local channel somehow sampling the voice playing to lip the model ala Elite Force (JK2 source should have some clues on how to do this))

Worked on the railgun a bit today. Hopefully it is at a point where it can be useful to folks. Textures are still super rough. I projected Arne's paintover to the model, touched it up a bit, and baked it out on a set of uvs designed for handpainting. The geometry could probably use some tweaking, still trying to figure out the grip/slide.

Download Railgun Blender File (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/66196469/Open%20Arena/OA%20Arne%20Railgun%20SDK.zip)

(http://i.imgur.com/yvUvNUw.png)

Quick ingame test


Left hand is clipping through, might be my fault for the bad incompatible animation rig.


Also the skin was quickly resampled to 512x512 and had a dilate+ddilate+unsharpmask darken layer followed by a dilate+unsharpmask multiply layer or something like that, to compensate the texture for overbrights.

i also did some automatic edgesplit (80 degree threshold to keep it under 1000 verts)

I can easily apply future changes by parenting to a empty which adjusts the model to this proper exporting position (as well as renaming a material's name to "models/weapons2/railgun/railgun")

I will have to admit the shape and color scheme reminds me a lot of a certain Battlezone 2 vehicle...

That gun looks seriously awesome and way much better than the current one on OA.
The character looks nice in shape, but the body feels too camouflaged while the head distracts. Unless some brightskin is included; perhaps a different colour than white and grey on the body could be used.

Nice new character. I have been wanting to make a model, but I lack a lot of knowledge of how to use blender. I made a sketch of how the character would look, but the sketch only outlines the general idea and lacks proper proportion. I have not found out how to start a new topic yet, and it would be rude of me to intrude by adding my own sketch.

1) (After logging in) Enter one of the sections of the forum (e.g. "Models", this one)
2) Click on "new topic" link: there is a line with "Mark Read  |  Notify  |  New Topic  |  Post new poll" on the right, at the beginning and at the ending of threads list.

I had fun and turned the tube into a scrolling glow texture effect on the same texture with a different shader

also, added little glow flare sprites, also on the same texture!!!  All are rgbGen entity.


and a video at a higher FOV (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnn0o7wYyRM)

Thanks for the help, Gig. For some reason I missed such an obvious thing, repeatedly.

Good!!!!

Thanks for the updates! that railgun looks pretty nice, reminded me of some nexuiz weapon :)

I just started on the MG. I still suck at hard edged modeling though :/ and i'm doing a hybrid of both the quarterangle sketch and the sorceress sketch

(http://leileilol.mancubus.net/models/oa3mg2.jpg)


i'll probably scrap it and start over lowpoly first.

I think weapons are best made using subdivision, extrusion... and before that, planning. I'm hardly the right person to give advice about 3D modelling though, haha.

Light-tube animation on railgun works pretty well!

I thought my pantyladen thread had sunk to the bottom by now.