rincewind!

[justin]

hello again.

i became rather keen to see what i was capable of modelling after finishing the discworld. i stuck at it for over 4 hours... alot of it though was testing features of blender. alot of what you see below is very rough. nothing final. as for the colours and texture, this is only for visualising. i'm in the middle of unwrapping the uv and baking vertex paint on the texture. i have a tablet i want to try paint the texture with. anyway, heres rincewind...! i read in the other threads cameos were on the table. so i figured why not rincewind?









please leave some constructive feedback. next il be riggin the model.

thanks for your time.


best regards,


justin

[justin]

alright...

rigging in blender was almost too easy. what a great program (and it's free!) i did a very basic quick rig to see how it worked and the result was almost perfect!



i just need to fix a few loops around the elbow, hand and foot.

now i just need to write an exporter for blender into my own model format for my engine.

thanks for reading!

[justin]

one last post for the nigh...morning!

got some good progress here. i wasnt happy with the mitt style hands, so i spent over an hour redoing them into individual fingers. much better overall result. i fiddled with the silhouette so it looked neater and modified the arm and shoulder loops for better folding with the rig. heres a few screenshots of the progress;









... thats enough from me for now. very tired and dont think i'll get another chance to do much else until tomorrow night. and then the following morning. i'll just be tweaking the model and rig. still have to do the uv unwrap (such a task!) and export the texture. maybe we can get someone on board thats good at texturing?

[justin]

i couldnt leave well enough alone. i gave rincewind a mouth (moving lips) to talk! i was originally going to use a texture over the mouth to do the lip syncing. now i can just use one of a few random lip/jaw skeletal animations for talking. alot more ambitious than i originally planned...



in between adding the mouth and tweaking the model for uv unwrapping, i have started writing a python script for blender to export the model data (including the bind pose skeleton and animations.) progress is good...

[justin]

i spent the morning trying to write a python script for blender to export the model data, but kept hitting walls. a work around i am familiar with is exporting the models from blender into milkshape and using a dll i wrote to export from milkshape to my engine's model format. so far so good... blender exports all the bone and animation data perfectly into milkshape. i start work shortly and will have to leave it there for a few days. looking forward to a reply! noone visits this forum obviously. i've self appointed a few roles. ha! hope noone minds.

[justin]

i had two hours to spare today so i wrote three export tools for milkshape. they are;

discworld mesh exporter (my custom .mdl format)
discworld skeleton exporter (my custom .skl format)
discworld animation exporter (my custom .anm format)

i am really happy with the progress here. i keep fiddling with the rincewind model. i think i'll just leave it alone and shift focus onto the game engine.

a scene will be referred to as a "set" in the engine. i am visualising pre-rendered backgrounds (or hand drawn, which ever) with a walk plane for the models to move around on and collide with. a character is referred to as an "actor" in the engine. an actor has a "costume" which is basically the mesh, texture, skeleton and animations. an actor has "chores" which can vary from carrying out movements and animations which is controlled from lua scripts (which i will write a friendly tool for any contributing members of the project to use.)

i guess the most promising thing now is to see something in motion. i'll put together something in the coming week as time prevails and upload it.

woo!

[captaind]

Looking good Justin!