Redo of Soldier Body model

[vedrit]

Very nice work on the head, and good thinking on the fingers. But, when its all said and done, The hair looks like theres a tower growing out of his head.

[Destructavator]

Very nice work on the head, and good thinking on the fingers. But, when its all said and done, The hair looks like theres a tower growing out of his head.

Yeah, the Flat Top haircut did come out a little funny (strange).  The funny (Ha-Ha) part is that I used to style my own hair in real life like shown in the pictures, I'd cut a Flat Top and let it grow upwards *long* like that.  I don't do that any more though.  (The secret to that is using un-flavored gelatin mix, mixing it very thick with less water than you normally would if you were to eat it, and keeping it in the refrigerator.  It works much better than commercial gels and hair spray and also doesn't have those nasty chemicals.)  Or, if you want hair like that you could stick your finger in an electrical wall socket...   

Anyways, I don't think it looks that bad, and players won't see the model up close very often in the game anyways.  At the very least I don't think it looks worse than some of the old heads in the game...

[bayo]

Yeaa it is very nice; the hair cut is a little strange, but with the body it look cool.

[Destructavator]

Please also keep in mind that I've re-made this body a number of times - By comparison that soldier head is still my first completed one.  The next time I make a soldier head it should hopefully come out better.

[vedrit]

The secret to that is using un-flavored gelatin mix, mixing it very thick with less water than you normally would if you were to eat it, and keeping it in the refrigerator.

So....you made augar? You know, that stuff that they grow bacteria on?

[Destructavator]

So....you made augar? You know, that stuff that they grow bacteria on?

Huh?  No idea what you're talking about, unless "augar" is a typo for something else - When I say "unflavored gelatin mix" I'm basically talking about un-flavored Jello, the food served cold as a dessert, except purchasing it without any flavor or color added to it.  Here in America where I am it can be found in a common grocery store, typically near cake and brownie mix and other cooking ingredients (such as sugar, flour, corn meal, vegetable oil, muffin mix, etc.).  I don't really know where you're from - I apologize for putting you on the spot - but I'm guessing you're from somewhere where you think I'm talking about something very different.

P.S. - I Googled "augar" and didn't get any results anything like what you were talking about, although my results from Google are custom-tailored for Americans because I'm accessing their site from the United States.

P.P.S. - I also searched Yahoo and the Wikipedia, I only found an agricultural drill-like tool and A number of famous people whose last name is "Augar."

[bayo]

maybe he type 'a' instead of 's'

[Destructavator]

maybe he type 'a' instead of 's'

If you mean "sugar" then that would also be different than gelatin, although in the flavored and colored mixes, like most Jello, sugar is typically mixed with the gelatin in the mix.  Un-flavored gelatin I don't think typically has any sugar in it.  Therefore I'm still confused here...   

[vedrit]

my bad. Its agar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agar_plate), you can understand my mix-up.
I did a science project that required the use of agar, and we used Knox, which is a brand of unflavored geletin, and yes, there is sugar in agar. What else is the bacteria going to eat?

[Destructavator]

Ah!  That solves that little mystery, thank you...   

As far as hair styling, gelatin is actually common among people with punk-style haircuts all the way to mohawks, it works better than regular hair gel or spray if its done right, and as I said it doesn't have all those chemicals that can build up and cause hair loss down the road.  All one has to do after mixing it is take it out of the refrigerator and apply it, using a hair dryer on a low setting to make it stick once the hair is shaped in whatever wild style is desired.  (At some point, now or later someone is going to stumble across this thread post on the net and have to try it out just for kicks...)   

Anyways, in the interest of steering back on topic, do you have any other comments for improving the soldier's body model before I add little details and another skeleton?

[bayo]

Then, can we redone the head with regular hair gel?

[Destructavator]

I discovered I messed up the hands in the last one when I glued the fingers together, I fixed this issue in this version.

Also, I figured out how to add the Phalanx badge/patch without too much hassle.

If this looks OK, I can add a skeleton, vedrit and I can work on animating it, and this could be the body version if the player doesn't equip any armor (either because they forgot to add armor, or some other reason).

[Destructavator]

Well, I put together a skeleton for this model, and screwed up - on the other hand, I learned quite a bit about how Blender does skeletons and got much closer to a working one.

One little irritating thing about Skeletons in Blender is how it only lets you rotate one end of each bone, and it isn't always the end you would want.  I also found that if I put the first bone in the head and worked down, then if I wanted to rotate the head the program would instead rotate the whole rest of the body and keep the head stationary, the opposite of what I wanted.

I have to build another skeleton anyways, what I might do is place a "base" bone in the torso that isn't connected to anything, so that all the other bones are child bones of that base bone.  I think that would make the animations much easier, if everything rotated out from the center torso area.

Of course adding such a base bone shouldn't affect the end-resulting MD2, since as far as I know the export doesn't include the bones with the MD2 anyways, just the vertexes that the bones moved, and the bones are only used within Blender for assisting in moving and positioning vertexes.

[Migel]

By the way, why you can't use old animation? Just asking...

[Destructavator]

By the way, why you can't use old animation? Just asking...

Several reasons:

- The existing animations for the older (current) soldier models don't include new things we would like them to do down the road in the game's development, such as lying prone, crawling, climbing ladders, etc.

- We don't really have complete source files in the data_source folder for loading the original meshes for those soldier models, before they were exported to MD2 format.

- Vedrit and I both tried to import the MD2s of the old soldier models and attach a new skeleton for new animations - It didn't work, and we concluded that new replacement models would be needed.