Coolias on Next Gen

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That’s a very nice model. Thanks for sharing, Lagi.

Imagine a next generation Panzer Dragoon game with creatures like that… :anjou_love:

Great job.I don’t like it that much but I reckon it’s well made.

Woah. You, sir, are GOOD :anjou_love:
Love the detail on the model and the skin is just as top quality (though I’d like more variation in the color of it)! Add a shader effect here and there and it’s stuff of the caliber of things displayed to show off UE3. Great work.

Hella cool!

Just to be clear- I didn’t make that model. We use Zbrush at my work and it is much easier to get that level of detail than ever before.

Yeah- Coolias in an unreal 3 engine could easily be that detailed … Sega let’s have it!

Ahh, okay. I’m sure you are just as good :anjou_happy:
Where do you work now? I forgot. Or you can’t tell? Anything interesting you are working on atm and would like - and be able - to share?

I have never really wanted to connect my professional work w/ fan stuff I’m into.

We are doing unreal 3 stuff …

Never checked out ZBrush, but I think similar stuff can be achieved with normal displacement maps, can’t they? I mean the hires model is just for rendering the normal maps, so it doesn’t really matter how you add detail to the finished model, the faster and more efficient, the better I guess.
I have to look a little more into normal maps, but until now my graphics board was not capable of them.

One guy who works for Ubi claims the Unreal3 engine is very complicated and it will be next to impossible for modders to come up with stuff that looks halfway professional simply because they lack man power.
Maybe thats a misconception, but do you really have to use all features of the engine? I think it’s cool that you CAN use them, but if you have a solid art style, you don’t HAVE to use unique maps but can stick to defaults in many areas, can’t you?

Looks very… gritty for a Coolia. But an impressive model by any and all means.

[quote=“lordcraymen”]One guy who works for Ubi claims the Unreal3 engine is very complicated and it will be next to impossible for modders to come up with stuff that looks halfway professional simply because they lack man power.
Maybe thats a misconception, but do you really have to use all features of the engine? I think it’s cool that you CAN use them, but if you have a solid art style, you don’t HAVE to use unique maps but can stick to defaults in many areas, can’t you?[/quote]

You CAN stick to defaults but then the fans dismiss the modification for not looking as good as what the new standard is sadly.

Still, I think what he said IS a misconception. The modding community has always evolved alongside the game development companies always catching up to their standards. I mean, look at the likes of modification that came for Unreal Tournament 2004. Pretty professional looking productions for sure. If you showed UT2004 to the world a couple of years before it actually came and told people it would be modable, they too wouldn’t think the community would be capable of doing those things when up to that point they would be used to seeing Half-Life (the original) quality things at best.

There will certainly be modifications that simply can’t keep up but, hopefully, if they are worthy, they won’t be dismissed by the fans and will be recognised by the for their playability.

Stiill, there will certainly also be a new “Red Orchestra”, “Alien Swarm” or “Frag.Ops” as well from dedicated near profesional teams. Besides, the people who were half decent “yesterday” will be excellent by “tommorow” if they were serious about it.

I imagine one side effect may be the less content. For example when this current modification has 6 different player models per team, a next gen one may start with just one or two per team due to lack of time/manpower. But I don’t think that will have a big impact to the overall quality of the modification.

Still, just like UE3 will allow more, there are always new tools coming to help with that as well. Like the aforementioned Zbrush. And the UE3 level editor also has a lot of aids built in. For example I remember this demonstration where the mapper only built a flat “block” as a wall and then just by chosing various properties (or whatever) that block turned into a fully 3 dimensional brick wall with every brick being individual (not just bump mapped) via automatic displacement mapping or something along those lines.

yep, that’s exactly what I thought.
also normal maps can be infact use as bumpmaps, too, where you can just use lots of stock material. I don’t think it takes longer to model a highres character than a lowres character, because the important thing about lowres is not that it has less polygons, it must at the same time be way more accurate to look good and animate well (joints etc).

Creating high-res artwork like what Epic is doing takes a physical long time, and a lot of current-gen artists don’t have these skills, much less mod community. There will be some standouts, but the gap is widening, and may be there for a bit.

Like you are mentioning, you can take old fashioned b/w bumpmaps and make normal maps out of them (we use Nvidia’s tool for this all the time, especially for stuff like concrete walls) , but for the really nice detail work, it is best to go from an up-resed model.

Zbrush is cool because it thinks about 3-D in a different way- the easiest comparison is to think about how voxels compared to polygons. It isn’t entirely accurate, but you get the idea. For example, Zbrush doesn’t care what hardware card you have- it only cares about processor and ram. It is very easy to sculpt high-res 3-D models- no nurbs, splines , etc- it is like virtual clay- we have a concept artist at work who has never used a 3-D package before and was able to make the most amazing statue in Zbrush, because he understood sculpture.

Is a graphics tablet a must? If these damn things weren’t so expensive, i’d get an A4 or something.

Is a graphics tablet a must?<<

I’d say about half of our guys have them- you can still use something like Zbrush pretty smoothly with a mouse because it is so responsive. A few people have the Cintiqs at work, which are just crazy- can’t wait for teh pri8ce to come down and everyone can get one …

Looks pretty nice, I could definatly envision a coolia looking like that. How many polygons is the model? The low-resolution mesh looks to be around…6,000? Or don’t they have a “low-poly” version of it yet? Although the wireframe model only looks to be around 1,500, is that what the “in-game” version would look like if it was for a game? Either way it looks very nice, although these character maps are getting so complex that the textures have to be in an EXTREMELY high resolution in order to capture all the detail. Pretty soon these 512 meg cards might become mandatory for some of these games…

Great looking coolias or khoureats it’ll look good on my collection though, I’ll print it right away YEAH!!!

Wow, that’s some very awesome work there Lagi.

I can’t imagine something to that scale even for a panzer game.