Armors and clothing

[Fizzle]

Leather Armor.

To me the leather armor looks more like football pads! (American Football)

[Graf]

According to the in-game definition it is made from brahmin hide, but in fact it's a football armor obviously. So it's not just you, who think so.

[Lizard]

Made a ponytail with some hairvolume and two strands in the face, but still suck at texturing. Would be very grateful for a good texture.



http://www.megaupload.com/?d=2W8DTIWU

[White tiger]

will try tomorrow to make the texture

polygon index error =(   can once again export to more formats?

[Luther Blissett]

I've made fairly good success with rigging and implementing armours. I tested White Tiger's A guy with a rocket launcher.


100% zoom, a few different angles. Loses quite a bit of detail at normal zoom - I think some of this will be helped greatly with Johnnybravo's work on the shaders & shadows etc, though it might also need a bit of "painted on" shadow and highlight detail on the texture too. Overall looks very good though.


The rigging was actually fairly straightforward once I'd examined some of the existing models that Karpov had done and deciphered a little more of the fo3d - this worked on 1st attempt. The "robe" part needs a bit more work, but essentially it's fully working and usable - walking, running, shooting, punching etc.


The slight problem with it at the moment, is the "robe" part - I disabled the subsets to make part of the legs disappear (so they weren't poking through when walking), but it doesn't all move and respond correctly.


Same again here - I think disabling the knee and thigh is correct, as otherwise they stick through when the leg moves, but I think I need to look at the weighting on the vertices between the legs, so the material moves correctly. I'll examine the female holy robe model to check how that's been put together.

Anyway, I'm fairly pleased that it seems to have worked as I'd hoped. I'll tweak and learn a bit more - double check some things with the file formats etc, and if all goes well, start rigging and uploading some files to be checked, and also try to put together a quick tutorial on what I've been doing so far.

It may be worth at this point investigating whether materials settings will respond to the shaders correctly (i.e. to set some areas as a shiny material, some as a matt material) - as I feel it may be easier to do the materials first, then rig the finished model, rather than the other way around.

Though the robe one is a little more complex, I think anything which doesn't have "joined between the legs" should be fairly straightforward - so I'm fairly confident that with a little more testing, I can un-3d-noob myself a bit further, and start throwing some of the complete models into the game

[White tiger]

Wow, cool! 

[Lizard]

Sick! 

That's awesome, Luther!

[Johnnybravo]

You'd do better to take screens with antialiasing, because this is aliased to extreme :d

[barter1113]

How to enabled AA?

Can you do more screens of edited models, Luther?

[Luther Blissett]

You'd do better to take screens with antialiasing, because this is aliased to extreme :d

Tried this, but didn't seem to make much difference to me except at maximum zoom. Game won't start for me with anything other than 1 or 2, so I imagine the difference is subtle at that level. Someone with a better graphics card can take better screens once I've managed to get things working a little better, uploaded files etc

How to enabled AA?

~/Client/FOnline.cfg >
# Smoothing 3D (Anti-Aliasing).
# -1 - Autodetection
# 0 - off
# 1 .. 16 - the value of smoothing
MultiSampling=0 < change this to something else

Can you do more screens of edited models, Luther?

Yes, but I think it'd be more useful for me to :
i) Try to solve the couple of problems I have with the rigging
ii) Upload the rigged files
iii) Paste all the lines for implementing stuff, and explain how they work
iv) Let everyone else test it, then someone with a better graphics card can do screenies

In the meantime, if anyone wants to have a look themselves, I've included all files and instructions here :
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=KC1RDH7C
Note again, these files will become obsolete once I solve the current problems with my rigging.

Quite busy with work at the moment, but I'll see what I can get done over the next few weeks. I'll keep people updated with any progress, then once I work out what I'm doing, I'll put a quick tutorial together to show exactly what I've done so far. I'm trying to make sure it can all be done with free software, so anyone will be able to download necessary programs and help.

[edit]

Tested Bones' ranger patrol armour :


Seems to mostly work, apart from a few clashes in a couple of animations. The colour and brightness will probably need tweaking on the texture, as it's a little dark and flat looking. Should probably be a similar shade of brown as the legs on the sprites nearby, but nothing to worry about at this point anyway.



One bit I'm having trouble with is the shoulder sections. If they're connected too strongly to the arms, they bend round too much - i.e. it loses its "big shoulder pad" appearance. If they're just connected to the spine (as in image above), they stay as "big shoulder pads", but in a couple of animations, the body cuts through them (i.e arms are sticking through the armour).

Once I find the compromise for this, I should be ready to make a quick tutorial.

[Lexx]

According to the in-game definition it is made from brahmin hide, but in fact it's a football armor obviously. So it's not just you, who think so.

In fact, it's a motorcycle football armor, not american football armor.

[Luther Blissett]

Quickly threw together a tribal model to test. When I say 'model', I of course mean "I made a cylinder on the arm and one round the waist". Not exactly high poly stuff I used the legs from White Tiger's "shaman" model. The reason I modelled the straps rather than painting them on is simply due to the skin colour thing. I suppose you could have just as easily painted straps onto each skin colour on the base layer, but I'm just testing things, so it doesn't really matter if it ends up useful or not.

Anyway, I think the implemented model of this is pretty safe i.e. it's so simple that there's no complex folding of cloth between legs or bending round shoulders - so with little opportunity for it to be "wrong", you could sort of call this finished, other than the points addressed below.



Firstly, technical thing - this (3D man wrongly seen as behind something else for a split second) sometimes happens with the 3D models for me. Is this just happening to me, or is this common for everyone else? I assume this isn't something we can fix ourselves.



Secondly, the difference in image is pretty obvious here - moreso than on many other of the models. You can see how he looks completely flat compared to the others. I'm not sure how much of this can be fixed by the texture, i.e. painted on shadow and highlight. The current texture is very flat, and it does show. Changing the texture should probably wait for shader progress, when we can hopefully find the right blend between engine and texture shadows. Hopefully JohnnyBravo's work on the shaders might go some way to solving this as, with the exception of death animations and the 'shot is fired before the animation starts', I think this is the main 'stumbling block' between really getting this 3D stuff to work.



For those who wondered, that's what tribals look like with different skin colours. Also for future reference, the models seem to be flipped on the x axis in the engine - at least the way I have been importing / exporting them anyway.

Necessary files with instructions etc for testing
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=5D8VHY4W

[edit]
Tested the duster hat. Hats / helmets seem like most of them will be very straightforward - all of the vertices attach to the "head" bone. That's difficult to get wrong


In the interests of "I wonder what will happen", I deleted the arms and legs of the skeleton here - it's literally exported as just the head and spine skeleton parts, whereas it looks like existing hats were attached to the full skeleton. Don't know if that'll actually be useful for anything though.

I haven't tested the duster coat yet, as it will need the extra "coat dynamics" skeleton stuff, which allows the coat to "fly back" when running, instead of being attached to the legs like the NCR long coat model did.

[Karpov]

"Coat dynamics" I'm starting to think this was not a good idea...

Haha, not really, but It requires animating the coat along with the character, that means, almost all of the animations 
But it's worth it.

[LagMaster]

why? can't just we make it conected with there own bones and give them inertia?
so if you run, the coat will stay behind, but when you stop, it will hit the caracter(the problem is that we must define stop points so it will not intersect the legs)

[Luther Blissett]

[...]It requires animating the coat along with the character, that means, almost all of the animations 
But it's worth it.

Yes, I noticed all the animations attached to the coat x file, and after playing around with the models so far, am beginning to understand the work necessary for this to be done. However, we can use this same "coat skeleton" for the duster and ragged coat and other similar things - I'm going to examine the weighting and try to do similar on the duster coat. If I can get that right, I'll be quite happy

It WILL be extra work to do on these files, but I think it's worth doing. If I manage to rig duster and ragged coat to the same skeleton, then any additional animations made for the NCR coat could simply be merged into the files, and as far as I can tell, would "magically" work.

I was considering doing similar with the long robe here, as a possible method of avoiding the legs poking through the robe - though for the sake of simplicity, I'm still hoping to get something working without the extra skeleton.

why? can't just we make it conected with there own bones and give them inertia?

I don't know how you'd give them inertia (I am still a 3D noob) - however the "coat dynamics" is, as you say, its own set of bones. Basically, every current animation would need merging with the skeleton on the coat model, then the animation for the coat-bones would animate at the same time.

Might make more sense with a picture :

If you see the two little lines coming from the pelvis (img#2), these are attached to the two "coat tails", so in the walk cycle, for example, the coat tails are animated to flow backwards, whilst the rest of the skeleton walks as normal. The chest and arms are rigged to the body skeleton (img#3), like all other items, but the coat isn't joined to the legs at all.