3d models development

[NastyKhan]

http://screenshooter.net/0805776/nftyixx
http://screenshooter.net/0805776/bmvidev
http://screenshooter.net/0805776/aphahlc
Harry.

"Official" mutant model reskinned and remeshed.

OBJ and PNG: http://www.sendspace.com/file/f0pzy1

[Jotisz]

Something wrong the model should look different. That one was the old one.
I'm sure the current one is up somewhere but in case its missing I uploaded it to dropbox.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/47209332/Mutant.zip
Texture should look the same though on this model too. Also it looks awesome.

[NastyKhan]

I see. Thanks.

[Jotisz]

For all who wish to try animating or just want to look at it here it is now for download.
Read the readme file in the zip. (it contains a blend file 2 picture and a txt)

I wish luck to anyone who gives a try. And looking forward to see some goings with the animation. Feel free to try and tweak existing ones to test things.
In case if someone needs it I will put together a small how animating should go in blender. But the ones that are already made are useful too even if they are for different software the rigging and animating is the same.

Download link:
http://db.tt/vSFkjFsp

[Luther Blissett]

Had a bit of time to do a bit more with this "blended" texture thing. Looks like it should work. It's far from perfect at the moment, but with a little refining, we should easily be able to mass produce textures. There's no reason why a similar thing wouldn't work with other models / armours etc. Basically, I took the shading and colour info off the "projection painted" sprites I showed you previously and roughly painted the locations. Then I assessed the current engine lighting, and sort of deleted the equivalent from the textures, which leaves us with a sort of "shading map". It's in a primitive early version at the moment, but I think it's not far from being usable.



The grey one is this shading map. It's currently set to "overlay", then you just fill a colour (from a limited palette) underneath it and you have a texture. You can of course then add further detail and so on as necessary, but as long as the main areas are shaded roughly equivalent to these, it pretty much looks okay.

Currently, this overlay is a bit shitty, but I'll do a 2nd and 3rd pass at it, and we should be pretty much there. Legs and arms in particular need some more attention. A nice little advantage of this is that if the engine lighting changes in future, we only need to adjust this overlay layer and resave the texture. In the example above, I've literally flood-filled with a flat colour, but it should work equally with rips, zips, buttons and detail etc.



I churned out these in about 5 minutes. I don't have the right font for the 13, so you've got a "curly 3" instead of the "straight topped 3" you should have. You might also see on the close up that this is a "normal" texture, therefore easy to repaint. It's currently not very good, but you could easily add some detail in there, as long as the overall colour and tone is roughly similar. You can pretty easily make your other vaults by simply typing a different number in. I also tested a few different colours i.e. Peasant jacket green, Ian trousers, Cassidy trousers etc. Some of them work better than others. A few non-palette ones sort of work, but don't quite look right. The white, black and "Van Buren" notably look a bit off. The overlay setting works best with colours of similar brightness to "Vault Suit blue", but similar layers set of "multiply" or "soft light" might cover the rest of them.

Once I've fixed a few bits and named all my layers properly, I'll upload it for everyone to use /adapt / improve.

[Jotisz]

Oddly but I think these types of textures are better looking in game then the realistic more detailed once. And unlike the previous painted texture they don't look distorted.

[Mike Crosser]

Looks great in my opinion

[White tiger]

Wow! In recent years, there was so much!
Guys, it's very cool what you are doing! Lots of new meshes and animations! I look forward to, when it will be possible to
play with the 3d fallout. It's a pity I have seyas not much free time to draw certain things, too.
Good luck and an early start to the open 3d test. )

[Luther Blissett]

Oddly but I think these types of textures are better looking in game then the realistic more detailed once. And unlike the previous painted texture they don't look distorted.

I'm pretty sure the originals wouldn't have used photorealistic texturing, so it sort of makes sense that "90s style" texturing would look more correct in game. In a sense, the technique is not incredibly dissimilar to the pixel-painted sprite adjustments of the modding heroes (50,000 sprites!) from NMA.

As said, the previous painted ones were "for reference" to produce what I'm doing now - these ones should be completely undistorted and should look relatively normal for anyone wanting to edit or adjust them. My next step is to tidy up this "overlay layer" a bit and do a bit more work on the colour palette. I've also got a "pixel map" (i.e. shapes of individual pixels projected onto the model), though I'm not sure if it's really any use other than as a curiosity.

There's still quite a way to go, but I think a few hours of playing with the texture will be enough to call it "done for now" and start applying / preparing similar for the other characters. We can always go back and perfect this stuff in the future, but if I can get it close enough now that it "feels right" when placed near the 2D characters, then that's probably usable for the time being. To get a perfect 1:1 with the original sprite, we'd actually have to adjust the model and idle pose a little, but I'm very hesitant to do this because it would mean adding a whole load of extra work for the tiniest bit of difference. Again, as the "shadow and form" layer is separate, it can be improved in future and simply re-applied to the textures to update them.

[Karpov]

Looks good so far Luther.If you can make a base texture, it would be very easy to recolor and use as standard skins. Are you using the "Clothing Layers"? If so, I'll add the third layer for footwear.

What's that about the idle pose? Is it the way the forearm bends? I noticed that from the rear views. Maybe I can correct it.

[Luther Blissett]

Yes - this is the plan. Currently for testing, these are all just being pasted on base layer (150), as I'm adjusting a few bits on the skin tone as well. Of course the plan is to put these on the clothing layers when they're actually used. The skin tones (man in underpants) images might need the same shading applied to them too in some places - I'll try and generate as much of this as possible from the tribal figure, then see if I can colour-pick the black man skin tone from the face and apply it. That should be enough for other people to work with at least.

For the idle pose, it's the forearm bend and the leg / knee bend mostly :



That's a like-for-like comparison between recent test and original sprite - you can see the errors a lot more clearly here.  There's a lot of small adjustments I need to make on the texture and a few major ones (groin and lower back for instance). For the idle pose itself, I've tried to show the lines of the two for comparison. I think the knee bend is the main one.

[Johnnybravo]

You don't have everything, and it shouldn't be rendered statically in texture.
To get every detail, it's still required to retouch the image and add details (like shading on spine).
Also part of the shading is error gotten from projection - for example limbs are all shadowed at edge of texture - but we got shading applied on the model.
There is no self shadowing yet, nor it appears that anyone is planning anything, which might be a little problem as well, but it's not yet strictly required.
Finally this is only part of the picture - consider sprites when the guy is lying on the ground - obviously his chest should be shaded differently then, but it wont be if you keep it just this way.
But perhaps it's just a detail that everyone will ignore due to zoom. Nobody yet knows exactly what kind of hardware is this targeted for - as some details tends to be massive with higher resolution applied. Something that will not worry anyone if people are running this game on like 1024x768/1280x960 screens.

[Luther Blissett]

Yes - they're early versions, but surely having a usable and clear base texture is good to start with? As I said before, it can (and probably should) easily be drawn over with finer detail, but we at least have the colours and layout near enough correct to start with - once tidied up a bit, it's a guideline texture based upon what's actually on the sprite. You can also see pretty clearly which parts the engine lighting etc is not hitting quite right, which I'd assume would be useful for improving such things.

Also, as I mentioned a few times previously, this "shading stuff" is kept in a separate layer in photoshop, you can simply replace it / edit it / adjust it as and when the engine shaders get changed, or the normal mapping is working and so on - then just re-export the texture and it's done.

The shading on the edge of the arms/legs is my error (guilty of the "paint what you think you see instead of what you see", it's not even like that on the projections). That's my first fix to do The shading on the model is on (I think it's yours and Baael's effects files I'm using in this repo, actually) but there's parts of it which need a little help to define some of the more subtle areas on the model. As you've rightly mentioned before, that's something which a normal map was designed for, but they don't seem to currently work. Of course, if / when they do, you just delete that part on the shading layer of the texture.

I did check a lot of the other sprites before doing this - they don't change as much as you'd expect, which surprised me, but was also part of the reason why I thought this might work initially.



First image is pretty much exactly what the engine shaders give us on an unshaded texture - as I mentioned, I've mostly deleted the "equivalent" from the projection mapped sprites, so those are supplying the majority of the shadows in all poses.

The other one is obviously the lying down ones. The pose isn't exactly the same (and oddly, the 3D model rotation is a few degrees off, but it's like that in all poses, and it probably hardcoded). The bits that look really wrong on here are the same bits that currently look really wrong on the 6 normal angles I showed previously - primarily the leg/arm stuff which you mentioned.

Resolution thing is a good point - I always use 100% or less in Fonline, and normally use 1280x960 or 1280x1024 monitors. With all of these, I'm aiming for "it looks like, and can stand next to a sprite" - so I'd go for "colour it blue like the originals" for jeans, rather than "paste a jeans texture from photographic source material" like you might with large and detailed figures. This was based on the impression that we'd be having 2D and 3D characters alongside each other, with original 2D backgrounds throughout. I might be wrong of course, we don't exactly have a "mission statement" for this

Anyway, some good thoughts there. I'd be very happily for some assistance if you've got a good idea of how to compensate / correct the stuff mentioned and generally make this work better, easier and quicker (especially regarding the normal maps from projection you mentioned before).

[Johnnybravo]

This really makes me wonder how detailed original models were, because it pretty much seems to be close already without many additional details.
I'll try to look if normal maps could work, as it seems texturing job will be much easier than we thought ( perhaps really close to solid colors ).
Have you tried solid color without any shading whatsoever? It seems with this per pixel lighting it might even give better results than having it in texture (which obviously blurs detail a little and might not look correct).
Perhaps we should play a little more with our lighting settings, including mainly ambient lighting and direction of diffuse light.
It might be also challenging to find out what materials really used specular reflection (though it's at least obvious for metal surfaces :d).

[Luther Blissett]

It's difficult to work out. I think our only useful frames of reference other than original sprites are these bits :

Inventory sprites, which I suspect are possibly renders off models in most cases
(from Fallout Wiki)

And this chap used in these promo images :
http://images.wikia.com/fallout/images/1/12/Fallout_GURPS.jpg
http://images.wikia.com/fallout/images/e/e1/TITLE.GIF

I know of no equivalent shots for the bluesuit or other models - but I'm pretty certain all these three are from the same source model, and I'm about 50%/50% between thinking this is or isn't the same one used on the character model. Of course, if that's their promo shot - it's a safe bet that the character model has equal or less detail than that. Certainly not more.

Oddly enough, if you look at the equivalent sprite, I'm not entirely sure if it matches up with those or not :


Initially I thought it did, but closer inspection seems to show a lot of inconsistencies between the two (i.e. shape of armour, bit wrapped round leg would need to be twice as thick to show up like that etc). It makes me wonder if a separate and simpler set of models were used in game.

I had tested completely flat colours a while back - it does need a little "help" with detail in a few places, but it is surprisingly close when you consider it's nothing more than a flat fill without the slightest bit of detail on it at all. A slightly better shade of blue would be closer, of course.





[edit] note my slight error - I left the shading layer turned on for the yellow stripes when I just re-exported this.

So, possibly not quite solid colours, but certainly not a long way off it would seem. That "under chest" angle seems the main one - it's basically a black line on the sprite, and a gentle gradient on the shader.

Regarding specular stuff, I was initially thinking the metal armours were potentially a nightmare, but to be honest it doesn't look too frightening to me. I'm pretty sure there is such an effect on there, but it's not an advanced one by any means - it's reflecting pure white, rather than an HDR skybox or anything.



If the "projection painted" source textures are of any use to you for working some of this stuff out, I'll zip them up and send them to you.