(Model Preview) AVP Alien

[EvilEngine]

Just want to give any of you xenophobic UT players a sneak peek at what I am getting into the game soon. Just gotta learn a few more material fx and details on what a custom character needs to work properly(sockets etc) and then I will unleash this beasty onto you guys to play with.

[GoodAndy]

Not bad. Not bad at all.

[Phoenix86]

nice, its kinda creepy that his tounge is sticking out all the time though :P

im definatly looking forward to this

[EvilEngine]

nice, its kinda creepy that his tounge is sticking out all the time though :P

im definatly looking forward to this

Its sticking out to show what it looks like. Its animated, and will only come out when in certain animations. The jaw closes and the tongue slides into the mouth. The tongue also has its own set of jaws too, so they snap at ya. One thing I may remodel though is making the head slightly transparent and making a brain model(like in the Hot Toys model) so you can look inside its head.

[Caravaggio]

Awesome. Custom skeleton then? As an actual player and not an invasion monster?

Today I was just wondering what was going on with that Skaarj you started a while ago. I'm looking forward to that.

[Patarak]

That looks really cool.

[EvilEngine]

The skaarj is being remodelled, it just wasn't working visually as I expected.
The alien has a completely unique skeleton and animations. I just need to find out what animations the game looks for to operate correctly.
As for Invasion, man do I wish we had that gametype... I am waiting for some coder to create it for us to play again then I add this guy right in. As for a player model, it will probably look a little wierd playing as an alien, so that isn't my first choice.
I originally was going to use Gears for this alien becuase it has really nice AI, but the editor is brittle and crashes alot.

[Phoenix86]

here are some images i looked up to help ya with that detailing of the head

great job



these last 2 are from a "dog alien" from Alien 3 which i thought is interesting...plus it gives a great detailed image!



and perhaps scaling the head up would be a good idea, seems a bit small

this is one from alien: ressurection, they seemed to have made them super skinny because of CG being able to be used



btw Aliens is my favoite movie series thanks for doing this

[Patarak]

Nicely textured.

THREAD HIJACK!

I can't get things to become textured in blender. And until then, I cannot even begin to start my aspiration to become a modeler.

I have all the texture modes I want, the texture, the colours, all sorts of stuff. But I cannot actually apply the textures.

That is all.

Again, that looks to be really brilliant.

[EvilEngine]

Thanks for those pix Phoenix, I can tell you really like the alien too
I'm actually using my Hot Toy models as reference on this one , but maybe you guys could make custom skins for this guy too.
Heres what the Alien model looks like:
http://www.mwctoys.com/REVIEW_112906b.htm

[Phoenix86]

idk how to make skins ;P

that is a very detailed model :O

[UndeadRoadkill]

Looks frickin' sweet, I love those movies.

[Reverse]

dude that is sick, damn nice model! if you get that thing into the game it should defenatly be an enemy in Invasion, if anyone makes an invasion mod that is

[Sinnthetika]

Hey EE, great to see you're making stuff specifically this.

[angusm]

Chilling.
Not a big fan of the movies, but looks like a slick model.

[HaLLiS]

Just want to give any of you xenophobic UT players a sneak peek at what I am getting into the game soon. Just gotta learn a few more material fx and details on what a custom character needs to work properly(sockets etc) and then I will unleash this beasty onto you guys to play with.

Thats a mighty fine model right there!

Ive seen alot of your work and was wondering if you will be modeling halo's master cheif again for ut3?

[Sinnthetika]

After this alien, I'd rather see his Unreal related stuff, or original work like that one female model he did... I forgot the name now and my old link is gone but I still have it for ut2004. No Halo franchise but i bet it will creep back in. I rather is a Big Daddy player model than Halo stuff. But the Unreal/GoW designs totally beat and destroy Halo.

[fuegerstef]

Really great model.

[Emmet Otter]

Kick ass bro!!! I'm glad to see youre still kicking at providing cool models for the UT series

[BuffyTheSlayer]

my Game coming on 26/11/2007 !!!
cant wait for your Alien model and more and more !!!

[Catzenjaeger]

omg great work - when will you release it? more pics plz

[Rhyder]

ya any estimated time until released or w/e?

[EvilEngine]

Estimated time of release, I dunno. Right now I'm trying to fight UnrealED in displaying my normal maps correctly and with high quality instead of a pixalated mess. Seems when you import the textures(no matter what compression setting you use) the textures look wonderful and sharp but when you reload UnrealED and view the model again the textures look sloppy. None of the textures look as good as they do in 3dsmax, which I work in primarily and use the directx shaders to view all my normal maps in realtime.
I wonder if any other developer have run into this issue, or how they got around UnrealED's nasty compression artifacts.

This better describes what I am talking about:

[Elis]

i dont think its compression at all, its probley just not rendered nicely, check the textures in photoshop before u port them in, make sure all is ok, but i think its just how unrealed renders it, im sure ingame itll look fine.

[Lord Vipes]

...This better describes what I am talking about:

You have a Spartan in the works?

[EvilEngine]

i dont think its compression at all, its probley just not rendered nicely, check the textures in photoshop before u port them in, make sure all is ok, but i think its just how unrealed renders it, im sure ingame itll look fine.

All the textures are fine, becuase in 3dsmax they are at thier highest quality when rendered in real time. And as you see in the comparison pic above, unrealed renders the textures at the same quality until I reload the package.
Is there a way to make sure all textures are Uncompressed ?
Also UnrealED wont allow the import of DDS textures anymore so I cant precompress my textures anymore, only the editor does it now.
Btw heres some updated pix of the alien :

[Lord Vipes]

Evil, mind teaching me on how to model charaters and do stuf for them? I have Maya 2008, and im working on 2 species.

[EvilEngine]

Evil, mind teaching me on how to model charaters and do stuf for them? I have Maya 2008, and im working on 2 species.

Sorry I wish I could but thats something you will have to learn by reading modelling books or finding tutorials on the internet. Theres many classes available that teach you the basics of game design. My friend John teaches them in the Los Angeles area, maybe he can speak to you if you live anywhere in that area. I might write some tutorials after I master this whole custom character thing, but right now I know as much as everyone else and thats very limited right now. It's very hard to find information at this time, and I hope to make that easier for all you guys someday.

[Lord Vipes]

is this a good tut? http://www.highend3d.com/maya/tutori...ter/300-1.html

[Karmapolice]

nice!!! can it be customized too like stock models?

[EvilEngine]

nice!!! can it be customized too like stock models?

Sure, I'm thinking having the Alien have different types of spikes and maybe different types of heads(bony,or shinyhead or maybe the see through head).

[Agent-X]

I teach Maya at Montecito Fine Arts School, which is in Monrovia and near the Los Angeles area. I teach Maya and ZBrush modeling there. If you want to learn on your own, I recommend
www.learningmaya.com
www.3dtotal.com
www.3dbuzz.com

also with the vtms from UT2004 there was maya modeling tutorials.

Both me and EvilEngine are working on a mod together with several other team members and we will be using several applications to create the art assets: Max, Maya, ZBrush, Mudbox, unfold3d, Photoshop, CrazyBump, Bodypaint3D, XNormal, and ofcourse the Unreal 3 engine.

[Raze.at]

I'll definately download the Alien skin. Awesome

[Lord Vipes]

So how do you do charaters for UT3? do you model the body parts septely, then put them together? How would you do the customizable parts? cuz my race has facemasks that show scars and stuff, and i need them to apear even when there is a helmet seleteced, and how would you model customizable parts? on the charater? sepetrly? How?

[Caravaggio]

This better describes what I am talking about:

That's pretty screwy.
I remember they used to hide editor properties in the world properties window, outside the browser, but I can't find anything like that now. It's like they tried to simplify the process and of course frustrated the evil in the world...
Hopefully it'll be better in-game and it's just that the editor is using a lower mip map?

[Mr.UglyPants]

Awesome models EE, great stuff as usually.

[Mr_Rose]

I'd just like to second all the "awesome model" comments first, before I ask how you got the model into the editor, because I can't find anything specific in the public areas of the UDN....

Nicely textured.
THREAD HIJACK!
I can't get things to become textured in blender. And until then, I cannot even begin to start my aspiration to become a modeler.
I have all the texture modes I want, the texture, the colours, all sorts of stuff. But I cannot actually apply the textures.
That is all.
Again, that looks to be really brilliant.

Here. UV unwrapping in Blender.

[Caravaggio]

Hey mister engine, you ever figure out the display problem? I noticed that if you right click a texture, open the viewer there's a field called filter. If you move it from linear to nearest it changes the sampling to make it look sharper, but it's more like a pixel sizer because it's still not the original resolution. I thought defer compression would have done it, but it doesn't do anything at all apparently, at least on the stock models.

[HaLLiS]

maaan. Id do anything for tht mc model good to know your doin one

[EvilEngine]

Hey mister engine, you ever figure out the display problem? I noticed that if you right click a texture, open the viewer there's a field called filter. If you move it from linear to nearest it changes the sampling to make it look sharper, but it's more like a pixel sizer because it's still not the original resolution. I thought defer compression would have done it, but it doesn't do anything at all apparently, at least on the stock models.

Seems the best quality so far is to import at the stock settings and leave everything alone, included LOD properties. By default the filter is linear, but the quality does change when you use a different compression like tc_normalmap. It looks like that setting changes the whole look of the normal map , so stick with the tc_default.