Kwama Worker

[Ibsen's Ghost]

Nice update. Great to hear news of progress on this!

[nick_op]

I managed to find some time to have a look at the animations again. I'd previously made the idle and forward animations, but I decided to scrap the forward one as it was terrible.

I started work on a new forward animation and it looks much better (and it's not even finished yet!), so hopefully once that one is finished it'll start the ball rolling.

[SACarrow]

Let me know if there's any support stuff I can help with.

[Ghogiel]

I was curious, so I dled the nif and textures attached in Steve's last post. and I have some dislike of the mesh and textures.

I like it, and the whole flavour of the mesh and direction of the textures. And the warrior and forager. which is imo the hard part done . kudos.

however, the body part of the mesh needs a retopo. the mesh looks to be made from a stock zsphere. you could get away with that without retopoing it..... but it is poly bloated because of the terrible edgeflow, as it is,it needs some excess poly to compensate. it's get 'awayable'. (cept the forager!, madness.)

What is not get awayable, is that ZB will not render a normal map with its current UV. It is full of overlaping in the UV. This must be fixed, even if no retopo is done.
Then simply reproject a new normal and textures onto the corrected UV.

all this is correctable. sort of. The texture looks borked to me too. I dunno if it was done in ZB, poly painted or what, but it is wrong. i imagine this is another compounded issue of the dodgey UV and edge flow. please atleast fix the UVs and reproject the normals. it

sorry if I sounded harsh in my critique.

here is an attached snip of the normal, showing what happens when ZB tries to project ovelapped faces in a UV... notice the sharp diaganol lines.

[nick_op]

Thanks for the critique Ghogiel. :goodjob:

Unfortunately, The Modax Jago, who created the mesh and textures isn't around here very often, and he's the only z-brush user.

I've actually considered remodelling the creature from scratch to fix up the issues there are with the mesh, but I'd rather get the animations sorted first and rebuild the mesh around them. I do think that the art direction TMJ went for is spot on, though, so I'd retain as much of that as possible.

I spent a lot of time optimising the meshes for all 3 kwama creatures as they were all far too high poly for my liking, and while I managed to knock off at least half the polies for each, they're still a little bloated for my liking.

[Ghogiel]

I fiigured you'd be on it. I could reto it insisde zb (it a awesome way to do a retopo) but I might not be able to recontruct the subdivision. I did it before but the last 2 times I did a retopo I couldn't get the the detailed sculpt back onto the new topology. anyway if someone passed me the zb tool I could solve the edgeflow in a couple hours if it was needed.

[nick_op]

Do you need it the zbrush format to do the retopo, or could you import the files posted earlier in the thread? Only TMJ has the zbrush files, to my knowledge.

If you could sort out the edgeflow it would be greatly appreciated, it would save me a lot of time (and likely frustration ).

[Ghogiel]

i'd need the zb tool to do it right. I could use the other files to do just the retopo and UV, but would rather have the new edgeflow, uv and textures fixed in one easy session. otherwise it'll irke me.

[nick_op]

I've sent TMJ a PM asking if he'd be willing to supply the meshes in z brush format. Dunno if the PM system is currently working, though, since all of the inboxes are cleared out.

[Razorwing]

Originally posted by nick_op
I've sent TMJ a PM asking if he'd be willing to supply the meshes in z brush format. Dunno if the PM system is currently working, though, since all of the inboxes are cleared out.

The PM system is working fine, it was just emptied.