[WIP] Dwemer Steam Centurion

[nick_op]

Originally posted by Ghogiel
Why have that as a morph? I would just have a mace bone.

Yeah, that's what I plan on doing. I originally thought about the morph as I remember seeing a NiGeomMorphController in the Morrowind .nif, and I don't think the mace had it's own bone, so that plus my lack of knowledge in animating led me to the wrong assumption.

So a mace bone seems to be the way to go.

I do have a question Ghogiel. Do you know of any limit on what the bones can be called? I'm just trying to think of any possible reason why the Kwama Forager anims wont work when morphs are involved, though I imagine if naming bones worng caused problems, it would cause them for all anims.

[Ghogiel]

Not really any limitations on bone names I know of. There are hard coded conventions, like needing to name the bones Bip02 for mounted creatures. I would expect no difference on using a morphs or not. I haven't gone through morphs really. I messed with some in facegen, but morphcontrollers are a different thing. I can only suggest asking saiden, or post up a link to the nifs/kfs on ESF, and if saiden is around these days he usually is kind enough to poke into the nif for ya, there are also a couple other heads that might know more on the subject. GL with the kwama.

[nick_op]

Thanks Ghogiel.

Just a small update:

It has legs!

Just a few things to add now (kneeguards, spikes and the pipes and dial on the torso and the left hand off the top of my head). Then I can move on to mapping and texturing it. That will be the longest process.

After that, it's just a matter of rigging and animating it. Particles will come last.

[BusterWolF]

lovely work nick_op. I'm wondering wont it come out all polygon like in-game? well, what i mean will it look like that when you export it in the game?

[Dave_91]

I think that's because it hasn't been smoothed yet. There's a soften/harden normals feature in Maya like that where you can smooth edges/faces/verts, or harden them for noticeable seams without increasing polycount. I think they're called smoothing groups in 3DSMax.

[nick_op]

Correct, the smoothing groups have not been applied yet.

I find it easier to spot mistakes while the mesh is faceted, though I often apply smoothing groups and remove them while building each part of the mesh to get a feel for what it will look like.

On a different note, the hand is coming along well, with 3 fingers like the original. This is my third attempt at the hand, the others were scrapped because I wasn't satisfied with them.

The mesh weighs in at about 10,500 polys at the moment, with some detail left to be modelled. I'd guess that at the most, it'll be 12k polys, hopefully less after it's optimised.

[Lord Grievous]

How's this project progressing?

[nick_op]

Originally posted by Lord Grievous
How's this project progressing?

It's not.

At the moment I'm very busy - my band has been gigging a lot recently, we try to get practices in 2 or 3 times a week. My job (instrumental teaching) takes up a fair amount of my time (any teacher will tell you that teaching takes far more hours than you actually 'work' due to the preparation and so on).

When I've found the time I've been working on other projects. I've got a tutorial to finish off, which is far more important than finishing this. I'll probably be sorting out the kwama worker (and possibly the warrior) before I get to the Centurion.

When I do get to the Centurion I'll probably re-model it from scratch, as I understand much more about animation now than I did when I started it and could make it so much better. Also, I modelled this one using the Morrowind model as a reference, I'd prefer to do my own take on it, and perhaps have it fit in with the Lore Creature Expansion Spider Centurion.

To summarise - it's probably going to be a long while before I even get round to this project again.