pixelplucker

That looks pretty good. Are you doing dashboards and inside view for racing? I noticed that the backdrop tree line has an anti aliased edge that doesn't match the alpha, you may want to trim the alpha back a pixel or 2 so. In photoslop you load selection from alpha and expand it then re-fill it black.

Pretty much wrapped this model up for everyone. I didn't do the face rig because I'm not sure which one people preferred so if anyone is ambitious enough please feel free to modify and post it. I put in a ReadMe so please check that out. Anyone contributing to this file set please post an quick render of what you have done and append the model (don't use the original model name) so it doesn't get confused in peoples libraries. Super Thanks to MTspeaks for the new rig and all his help on this. woman1_2008r.zip

Bummer the variable doesn't work in this case. Does exporting an mdl without any subdivision and doing that within uu3d on just the areas needed such as bumpers work better?

Does look good but there are still many edges that aren't needed along the flat areas where there are no curves. Too bad you can't dissolve those in UU3d. What the dissolve function does is deletes the selected edge, face or vertex and automatically reconnects the adjacent. How does the base mesh look if you do the Variable option on export from AM? I'm thinking this might work pretty well where you have a good contrast between edge angles.

You should be able to keep the poly count really really low. If you reduce the AM visual smooth to it's minium then you would be able to get an idea how the base poly export would be without any subdivisions. Low poly work is really tough because it is 90% good smooth angles and textures to make up the difference. Lower poly counts will give you more options such as alternate models for crashes. When I did a slew of weapon models for some UT mods, including the arms, hands and weapons were under 500 polys. When you do your poly counts if your counting quads then double that number to know how many triangles there are. Games don't use quads since they are too resource heavy to calculate. Video cards can display quads but are actually rendering polygons in pairs. I don't know the limits in Dark Basic since I never used it but most game engines typically work better with lower polys. This frees up resources for the rest of the stuff such as collision detection and physics. The car does look really really nice btw.

When you export there is an option for "variable" this might do the trick for you rather than a fixed subdivision. In some cases Variable works ok and in others you may need to manually reduce edges. The problem with dissolving edges is that it will destroy any uv work you may have done in AM. Within UU3d you can use the Mesh Smooth Faces and selectively smooth sections and still preserve the uv's. I did try to get Brad who makes UU3d to make a plug-in for it to read in AM mdl files but he wasn't able to use the SDK since it lacked some information. I thought this would have been a great tool to use with AM especially since it has LSCM which would allow people to literally unfold their models into clean stamps. This would be really sweet for game development and would really work great with 3d Paint since there would be very few seams.

Looks pretty nice. For a real time sim you need to reduce the number of polygons. Seems a bit much unless that is the only object in the sim. You may need to play with smoothing angles rather than add polygons to make it smoother. There are a bunch of intermediate edges that can be removed to save you poly counts. I would export from AM in the lowest count where a single 4 point patch = a quad (2 polygons) and you can sub divide that within UU3d to various levels of detail (lod). I don't know that much about Dark Basic but if it handles lod targets this would let you build and texture the object once within AM and export out to .x then make your lod targets from that without the need for re-rigging and texturing. Take advantage of the flat spots on the car body and reduce the patches there such as the door panels and roof.

Ahh I get it. You probably want to smack me upside the head with a 2x4 by now hehe. I'll fix her up and noticed the front of the legs sink when bent, need to fix that as well.

Like this? This is the cfa'd model If I can scrap up the $$ I will get AM Track, if anyone already has it, maybe they can jump in. Not sure on the compatibility between Track and the other face rigs out. w12008r_11_23.zip

Have the model completed except for the textures and face rig. Should I hold up on the face rig and let people do their own? I was originally going to set it up for AM Track but i'm not sure how many use that and there are a couple of other face rigs out.

Thanks for the compliment but I am just ok at splines, I have done the majority of my modeling with poly's, sub-d surfaces and nurbs. Still pretty green at splines. I re-weighted and fixed the fingers up a bit. I do have one crease I need to fix between the forefinger and middle finger and need to redo that spline so it doesn't run into limbo or criss cross. The fans do work very well, nice work MT. Anyways check this out and hollar with suggestions. w1halfrig.zip

Finger is better but still seems noodly to me. Definately a spline thing. I think I can just shorten the bias handles does the same thing with fewer patches. The shoulder seems ok once everything is done. Maybe I'm just used to other programs where you define the joint type and set constraints directly on those bones. Ill rig the cps on the fans and weight them toward the adjacent geom bones. You're definately right I would get a better results after looking at how you did it. Thanks

Thanks, I'll redo. I do have a couple of problems, I added spines on the fingers between knuckles and it makes no difference, they still are too noodly. The other problem is the shoulder itself. isn't the shoulder usually a ball joint? I can't seem to get it to rotate along y axis and only on z. x should should have a very limited rotation.

I did weight against the fan bones. Had to especially in the leg to pelvis. Wrist should have assignments to the twist as well.

Yup your right, she has noodle fingers, I'll add a spline between the knuckles. I didn't notice the missing cp assignment, it might have happened when I cfa the model and mirrored bones. How is the weighting on her?

Woman all rigged up with MT's new 2008 rig. I still need to do the face rig but at least give this a test and toss me some feedback. The 2008 rig is pretty simple to install and I really like working on an actual half model then cfa it after rigging and weighting. It really saved me in a couple of spots where I had to reconstruct some splines and move hooks. Just hiding the half wouldn't have worked as well. woman1_2008r.zip

Look good but are those a couple of artifacts on the arms on the character on the right? Might want to check the normals and make sure they are ok.

Seems to work pretty well, thumb control is still pretty touchy. Almost done with rigging my character but have one really stupid question, Do I assign the majority of the cp's on the foot to the foot geom bone? I don't like the auto assign cp's because it seems to make more work undoing what it assigns to. I find it much much faster just to assign manually.

Sweet Thanks!

Nice model, MT is coming out with an updated 2008 rig, you may want to try it out. It isn't that tough to install.

Yup, i have to smooth that out, I did a lot of work on the last model half that I posted. Because the bias handles don't work in mirror mode and are not undoable it is best to make the model as perfect as possible in it's half stage. If you download the latest version just to see what has changed you will notice that around the eyes had been refined and many of the creases smoothed out around the nose. Don't go crazy with the old models, they were posted just for people to comment on.

That looks pretty good. I need to tweak the face some more, the brow is still wrong. I like the hair. Once the new MT updates the rig I will put that in and weight the cp's on half the model. This will be our base of bases for characters of that proportion. Having the source and working files available for people might be more usefull since they can then modify, cfa and texture. I think many of the actions made can be applied to the models and adjusted per character. This should save time for running, walking etc.

Was bored so I tossed this together

You should be able to import the rigged model and modify it as you want by adding clothes, hair, change skin tone etc. The rigged half will allow me to make variations of the model so long as the joint positions don't change. I'll wait for the new rig, shouldn't be tough to install. Thanks MT

You should be able to import the rigged model and modify it as you want by adding clothes, hair, change skin tone etc. The rigged half will allow me to make variations of the model so long as the joint positions don't change.