202 réponses à ce sujet

[MerricksDad]

@Jenna WSI, about robes and armor parts:

My drow are already in robe form, with some accessory items floating over the robe which attach to the normal body parts, such as torso_g and pelvis_g nodes.

As for making robes for humans and elves out of these drow, it should be easy, but know that my drow slightly defy the normal elf and human p models. what I mean is that while they still reference the normal a_ba/a_fa animation sequences, they have their body parts shifted from the normal positions. In general, the arms are in or out X and Y a few cm based on sex, and the torsos are positioned Z+10cm from the norm in both sexes. I use this primitive technique to make my elves look more thin than humans, but generally not much shorter. Very much unlike the NWN standard elves. A few side effects exist with how I am doing my drow. One of those happens to be that two-handed weapons might look a little odd (due to arms being shifted). Basically the weapon appears correctly in the main hand, but the offhand might not line up correctly where you would expect it to.

As for creating body parts from them, well that is another story completely. Not many of the parts you might find in the robe could easily be made to fit the normal wood-block style nwn characters. I won't say you can't try, and you can certainly pull textures out of my files to work with. Basically you would be better off starting from scratch to obtain geometry like this for NWN standard sized elves/humans. In fact, you might just want to use the texture bits and wrap them to existing body geometry. I'm trying to keep my textures put together in such a way as to allow swapping chunks in or out easily (mostly so I can do it myself).

Hope that helps. When these are released you will definitely see what I am talking about.

[Draygoth28]

7 is not a bad number.

Modifié par Draygoth28, 17 avril 2013 - 02:09 .

[Draygoth28]

Did you fix your crash issue with the Drow Priestess? If you have shadows on the skin, this sometimes causes crash issues.

[MerricksDad]

Not yet no, I got to playing with the internet downloading images for more drow instead I totally missed the 2012 official content, minis and what not and kept forgetting to view them when I was at coffee shops. Lets see, I have some objects which may cast shadows upon the skin, but I do not have a trimesh associated with the skin so its not casting its own shadows or anything (is that even possible? I was unaware...) I have another female model (the archer) which also does not compile for viewing in nwnexplorer, and occasionally also stumps the game on model unload. The same happens with the skinned draegloth on onload. The draegloth definitely has a shadow issue because as it moves sometimes I can see a poly spike over to 0,0 and back really fast. Probably something in the head since thats where it seems to come from.

[Shemsu-Heru]

Did someone ask for a Spider shuriken?

[MerricksDad]

Make the shuriken gem a vial of poison !! with little lines running to the legs to make an injection

[MerricksDad]

Maybe somebody else could help me a bit if they had some time. I can't seem to figure out what's up with these models. After testing a bit more, I find that if I SetAppearance to my model and don't move, it works fine. But as soon as I move, its about 5 seconds til crash or so. I've checked all the skin verts and they all seem reasonable, no 5th bone, no weird little fractions.

Edit:
Actually, it would be helpful if somebody better at reading C code than I could make it so I could figure out exactly what things could make Torlak's model compiler (in nwnexplorer) NOT compile a model, and/or make it so it told me what things were stopping the compile process.

I have a dropbox account I could use to share the drow mod with. I've tried 3 times to upload to my drow project page on here and it keeps telling me my .zip file is not of the proper file type, even though its a .zip file in .zip format. Go figure.


Edit, Again:
Two words: BONE COUNT
While working on my Robe as Base Model concept stuff, I found some articles that stated the limit of bones was something like 14. I disproved that when I successfully migrated up to 28 bones (so far) in a working player character skin. I just counted the bones in the drow priestess at 30. After painting the entire skin to a single bone, the issue went away. So all I should have to do is split the skin at the robe and hair and it should be good to go. Same with drow05:archer. I don't know that the engine, or the nwnexplorer model view, have any specific issues with actual bone count. Its just more likely that the number of bones combined with the complexity of joints and lightning math is what is crashing the engine. Still doesn't explain exactly the nwnexplorer non-compile issue.

Modifié par MerricksDad, 17 avril 2013 - 06:23 .

[MerricksDad]

Works great now!



Ever wonder how some of the art for book covers allows the clothing to stay on the characters? Well now you know...its just spiders.

Modifié par MerricksDad, 17 avril 2013 - 08:24 .

[MerricksDad]

Hey, not to totally steal this thread and make it all about me, but I was doing some speed testing today after I got the above priestess working, and I found that the 800 poly priestess loads and runs the same as the 1600 poly priestess. There is NO lag during play after load even up to 1800 poly priestess, even with 12 spawned DE's on the immediate area. ALL the lag is during the actual model load during spawn-ins and is probably due to the fact that its a skinned model, not block parts. Just a warning I guess, that this could be a game-killer if these critters are not pre-loaded before a player enters a zone. I may have to rethink my intentions of doing a total NWN conversion to skinned monsters at some point.

[Draygoth28]

Glad you got her fixed. Yah I had a lot of lag up front on my mounts, due to load animation time. Thanks to OTR, Rolo and Tarot I figured out how to compile them correctly and the lag went away totally. If they are already complied then I'm not sure what to do about it.

[MerricksDad]

Never compiled them before I use them (these drow). I have to assume they would be substantially faster in game if I did. I was also wondering how much time tga's take over dds formats. I generally always release stuff in the most open formats I can, such as ascii models and over-sized tga textures.

I generally use the nwnexplorer's model viewer to alert me to any issues before I get into the game to test models. Without fail so far, every model that doesn't auto compile in the explorer has at least minor issues. Of course it never tells you why or what they might be, and usually I find they are not at all related to those warnings given by the nwmax export scripts.


So, after downsizing this priestess in polycount by about half, and having basically no distinguishable change during play, I am switching modes with the upcoming two drow wizards and one hooded priestess. The next few models in the set will potentially have a much smaller poly count. This afternoon I built a completely new half-poly-count male model (from 1380 down to 730). I suspect it should look pretty good with some robes and lots of wizardly gear dangling about.

[Ssythilac]

MerricksDad: These drow are excellent! Looking forward to see the wizards and the hooded priestess.

Shemsu-Heru: The spider shuriken is a very cool idea, Have you think in work with the hand crossbow model of NWvault to give it a more dark and drow feeling?

[Asymmetric]

Really nice stuff.

But concerning that one-handed crossbow: It has no animations. In order to use it as a weapon you'll need to create some animations for firing, idle, ... .
That being said, is it even possible ? I know that in the baseitems.2da one can specify the animation set to use with a weapon/item, but is it possible to create a new one ?

Modifié par Asymmetric, 18 avril 2013 - 09:42 .

[MerricksDad]

I may need to revert on the drow priestess a bit. She's got feet issues, pointy toes and sliding ankle issues. Does anybody think I should put some butt cover on her?

[Rolo Kipp]

<covering...>

@ md: you could map a handkerchief to a completely transparent part of the texture.
That way delicate sensibilities could always retexture it in leather or lace or something...

Edit: me, I think she's overdressed ;-)

<...his bases>

Modifié par Rolo Kipp, 18 avril 2013 - 01:20 .

[Shemsu-Heru]

MerricksDad wrote...

Make the shuriken gem a vial of poison !! with little lines running to the legs to make an injection

That's a good idea!....

[MerricksDad]

Shweet Shpider!

@Rolo: nice link

[UA DM]

Ssythilac wrote...

The amazing work you guys are making for this challenge motivated me to start a project in an underdark environment, with a few tileset improves and changes. Here are a few images:

http://social.biowar...lbum_id=1331148

I can`t hardly wait to use your drow stuff in this module!

Also, an idea: drow/underdark related inventory icons. Spider things, drow house pins, stranges mushrooms and these sort of stuff.

Ssythilac,

Those screenshots are amazing!  I don't recognize those tiles.  Are the fungi part of the tile set or placeables?  Is that tileset one made or a large number of new tiles to the bioware Underdark tile set?

UA DM

[_six]

Shemsu-Heru wrote...

That's a good idea!....

Ooh, that is a good idea.

I'd love to see spidery arrows/bolts next.

[MerricksDad]

New wizard model looking good so far. Only 888 poly count without his accessories.

[Draygoth28]

Very nice, a great improvement over the stock wizard.

[MerricksDad]

I think I can probably modify this one slightly and make one of Selvetarm's paladins (Drow Judicator)

[MerricksDad]

I'm noticing a lot of pics of drow on the internet don't have classic drow gear, such as piwafwi and enchanted boots. Of course that iconic (what 1st ed) death lance is missing from art for a very long time. At what point did elven chain fall out of fashion?

[Ssythilac]

@UA DM: Ey, thanks! Well, I`m buiding the basic environment of the module with two tilesets; a modified versión of Senemenelas`UD for the great caves, chasms and vaults -the basic terrain-, and another masterpiece, the spidercaves of Baba yaga for the tunnels that connect the caves. The textures and mushrooms are also his creation, I`m only merging, and adding a few features. For example, I extract some of the fungi, make them placeables, get them bigger, etc.

The idea is to créate a truly inmense and alien underdark environment. For me, this landscape always be one of the most interesting in all of D&D.

@MerricksDad: Great, great work with the wizard! It`s seems to look very cool!

[Shemsu-Heru]

MerricksDad and Draygoth28 your Drow creatures are amazing; Thanks for doing that!!!

Because of some request, here is finally the Drow hand crossbow.
There is a version with a web string, and other without, I couldn't decide what looks better.




It have been added like light crossbows, and use the same animations. Well guys I thing that this are my last weapons for the moment....

Modifié par Shemsu-Heru, 19 avril 2013 - 03:25 .