Bone golem pre-modelling

[Danimal]

What do you people think could be changed in this concept to make it cooler before modelling in 3d?

http://opengameart.org/content/bone-gollem-concept-art

I think maybe cuff-like gaunlets with spiky blades and a hanging chain, i like the realistic but cartoony style.
I think i may do this since it looks simple to model.

[svenskmand]

The cuffs could be good. I think they should look like these:


It would be interesting if some of the parts that look solid in the picture where composed of allot of smaller bones, like in this picture:

That is just a suggestion. I think the idea at least has potential. Maybe you can use it when you make the finer details.

[Danimal]

That may be a hell to do, since the model will need to be small all detail will be lost. But there are ways to do something like that, a hi-poli mesh can be used along a bones texture to deform the mesh. Will try today a quick test of that.

[svenskmand]

Can you not just bake the high poly thing into normal maps? Is that not how Skorpio make the low-poly models have lots of details? Or is it the same you want to do?

You might be able to take some of the individual bones of this model and use them in for the high-poly model and bake it into normalmap?

[Danimal]

Svend pleaase have a look here and add if needed:
http://opengameart.org/forumtopic/conce ... mment-7702

Im using a different workaround, lets see how it turn out.

[svenskmand]

The license should be strictly CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported, because having many different licenses is HELL. We should not go there, and usually people have no problem at all with that.

I think we use 1000-2000 polys if I am not mistaking. The current texture sizes are 2048x2048. Regarding the look of the model then I think Dungeon Keeper 2 and Overlord are good examples.

Other than that I think it looks fine.

[oln]

Hm, we still haven't gotten around to find the right normal map format. Maybe you could do some testing to see what seems correct danimal? (I really don't know much about blender.)

Many programs and engines use different tangent space normal maps. Some have the tangent vectors inverted, others the binormal vectors, or both. Even Blender 2.49 and 2.5 use different normal maps. I wonder why NMs are not standardized.

That means if I want to use a normal map from Sculptris in Blender 2.49, I have to invert both the green and red channels, for Blender 2.5 I can leave it as it is, and for Ogre I have to invert the red or green channel. However, I'm not absolutely sure if everything is correct after inverting the channels.

Have you done any testing on this?
From what I can see in the shader code, RGB (0-255, 0-255, 0-255) is mapped to XYZ(-1.0 to 1.0, -1.0 to 1.0, -1.0 to 1.0).
This page: http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-236/normal-maps/ on the blender wiki states that for the blue channel, blender maps 0-255 to 0-1.0 instead. Not sure what versions this applies to though.
Would be nice to find what blender uses so we can tell people how the normal maps should be made.

I think the blender 2.5 exporter is usable now, though I haven't tested with animations.

[Danimal]

Just so you know, models are done hi poli and with lots of details, another model is done with barely any detail and low poli(simplifying previous model), the hi poli model is used to bake the normals on a texture. Thats its why its important both models are uv-mapped, about ligth maps i have no idea, will look into.

[svenskmand]

Ok