Playing With Game Models

[RS3D]

I have been experimenting with some of the game models available at http://thefree3dmodels.com. There are over 1,000 models there, most are in OBJ and 3DS format.

The site is free and the models download pretty fast. Because many of these models were used in the game industry, they are set up to be efficient in terms of detail.

They are much smaller than the usual file sizes for these formats. It is interesting to see how they were put together to maximize the ease of use and texturing processes.

The included textures alone are worth examining the models.

 

I got interested in one of the face models because of its simplicity and the way it takes decals without too much distortion when used from various viewing angles.

 

I have attached some pictures showing some of my experiments. The first one shows 4 different faces, all made with the same face mesh. The 2nd, 3rd and 4th picture

show how one of the faces looks from various viewing angles. This model is just the face mesh (+ my own hair model), with a decal slapped on it. I also attached a MOV of the helicopter pilot showing how the model holds up in an animation situation.

 

I did spend a little time on the helicopter pilot model. It has a bump map and specular map in addition to the color map. I think I can get it even better with a little more

work on the decals.

duri2save.mov

[Rodney]

Very nice! Thanks for the heads up.

 

I imported a weapon from that site that (with one a minor exception that was corrected quickly via a tweak of spline bias) converted very nicely.

[Gaduunka]

How exactly do you guys import these models? Everytime I try to... A:M just freezes up, and crashes. And when they do import, they have no textures.

[RS3D]

One big thing in dealing with polygon based models is to look at the size of the model ( either 3DS or OBJ). If it is more than about 1.5 meg for OBJ or more than about

300-400 k for 3DS it is probably not worth the effort. I have converted a few of the OBJ models at around 1.4 meg in around 5-10 minutes. After you do that, you can look

for the parts that are the big space hogs like spheres and other curved surface items and copy them to another model, where you can work on them by using them as

as a rotoscope to help in replacing with the Hash primitives that will look the same and require about 1/100 the amount of space. By replacing (copy/paste) the original parts

with the new Hashified parts you can start to get the model down to a size where you can work on eliminating most of the triangles.

 

As far as textures go, sometimes the textures work with the converted model and sometimes they don't. It seems like around 50-50 chance they will work

automatically as a result of the conversion.

 

However, if you look at the groups section of a model, you will notice that the groups tend to be parts of the model that correspond to the textures that come with the model.

Then it is just a matter of importing the texture into the Hash project and reapplying the texture to the proper group just as you would for a standard Hash model.

 

I hope that is helpful.

[robcat2075]

How exactly do you guys import these models? Everytime I try to... A:M just freezes up, and crashes. And when they do import, they have no textures.

 

On older versions of A:M the import would appear to freeze A:M but it was really still working, most models would finish if you gave them enough time, perhaps many hours. Resave it as an MDL for normal loading later.

 

Import is faster in V16 but you still have to wait it out a bit for large models.