JC Denton [ Beta 2 download]

[SDX]

Name: JC Denton model + voicepack
Version: beta2
Compatibility: any PC version (tested only with 2.1) (PS3 version not planned)
Description: Deus Ex main character scratch made for UT3
Comments: The project is frozen, so this version is the best you can expect unless someone takes over all the assets from me.
Screenshot:
Credits: made by me + texture artist who would help me
Download: JC Denton for UT3 (beta2) (cooked version - 3,6MB)

Status for beta 2:
Model - working fine in-game

All high-rez meshes - Done (still testing)
Physics - 93% (custom made with new trench coat bones, ragdoll still needs a bit of work)
LOD meshes - 99% Done (testing)
1P arms - I am not making this. I tried, the Epic's arm rig sucks, so arms are not coming.

Voicepack - 100% Done (from Deus Ex JC Denton samples)
Textures - 20% ready (rough diffuse maps, some details)

Materials - 97% Done (some problems with alpha hair)
Team colors - working
All texture mapping - Done (also UV mapping and Shademaps have been rendered)
Diffuse maps - 20%
Normal maps and specular - 15% - Help would be welcome, otherwise I can filter something out from diffuse
faction/character pics - % - something made, but could be changed to much better
+ about 100 reference pictures available for everything related to JC Denton and texture details

Scripts - Done (faction, preview pics, English descriptions)
Full SDK (for extra parts, own textures, derivatives or anything) - will be available with the release version of JC Denton model

Older beta1 screenshots:

[CVROY]

If you get the team colors going I think you'll have a winner here

[INVICTRA]

Wow this char is awsome! I played with it for a few minutes, and did notice the physics of the clothes are not finished yet. But I believe the character works as intended. Good job on this one

Some more random thoughts:

• Dead things should act like dead. If you press F the character struggles for 3 sec more before he is completely still.
• I opened the package in the editor and changed the box sizes of the front coat. When in game the clothes would stretch to 15m if enough force was generated. Lol was fun, need to learn it for my own character.
• I'm doing my own char. and I'm only a beginner at this but looking at your char. I got motivated

[SDX]

ok, I will explain things I get in comments from different forums...

So to cvroy - I spent about 8 hours in total during today and yesterday trying to fix TeamColors, guess what? it doesn't work! I have a couple of ideas to try more, but they involve some tricky material editing for each mesh in 3dsMax then exporting with ActorX and then reimporting into UT Editor, then changing settings in AnimsetEditor aaaand then I will have a chance to test it all again if I struck the right issue or Not... btw there are more than 30 meshes to work with considering all LOD levels and stuff, so BE PATIENT.

Head and face - some are complaining that the model does not look like they expect JC should look like. I have 2 things to say:
1- it is really quite easy to remodel Any shape of the face, head and hair as you feel right and I can provide initial .max file to do so.
2- I believe there is No single "right" way JC Denton looks. I based this model on the best original art from Ion Storm I could find, still I have seen at least 6 significantly different variations of JC. The plain face in the original is not the best example of JC, because in the original Deus Ex all trench coat models, including bums and scientists used the same generic model, so there was no way for JC to look different from the crowd. I uploaded some of the best reference pics of JC I have, so if you want to judge, take a look for yourself: http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v173/SDX9000/UT3/

Coat with the multiple cuttings - I did not do that because I wanted so... Unfortunately character cloth or rather "flappy bits" physics in UT3 is so basic, that you can only create strings of physics bodies. I had no choice. What you see here is already pushing the technology of UT3 to the limit and from my testing I believe it turned out quite well. About pushing the technology - this model uses 75 active skinned bones out of 75 bone limit for a character in UT3.

Body proportions - one more case where I tried all I could, but had to comply to UT3 limitations. There are only 2 basic human skeletons one can use to make UT3 characters, so I had many painful resizing exercises in the process of fitting proper human model based on MakeHuman0.9.1 mesh to the UT3 skeleton.

Other skin colors - yes there are 4 very different skins for JC in the original game, and I have nothing against them. If someone is willing to make new textures for this model, I can provide you with original Deus Ex1 textures of all JC skins and everything else one can wish for.

Other trench coat characters - obviously by just adjusting heads, textures and perhaps some details this model/rig can be used to make Paul Denton, Walton Simons or anything unrelated to Deus Ex universe like Matrix characters, Blade, etc. I will give away full SDK of JC Denton to everyone for any purpose as soon as I have decent textures for JC and my model is finished.

hope I answered some of the concerns about this little painful project of mine. Thank you for comments.

[Jade-Phoenix]

Ok 4 words THAT IS TOTALLY COOL!

[SDX]

Wow this char is awsome!

Thanks , this probably is the first really positive comment I got so far.
The bouncing of the ragdoll is quite stupid and I really have no idea which settings affect that. Possibly it has to do with "Linear brake threshold" for the joints, but it is now set back to default level.
I will definitely change mass scale for cloth physics bodies and then as usual it will be trial and error "fun". The size of the cloth physics bodies is so big, just so that coat surface doesn't get inside the leg geometry.
if you will find anything interesting in physics editor, let me know. So far the official video tutorials for UDK about characters are the best resource I have found for physics assets.

[INVICTRA]

I can help you with the team colors. Actually I can make you the team colors. The same way I did it for my character. I don't do it like the default team colors are done ...I like my approach better tho.

• I tweak the base material to get team colors.
• In the Family code I disable the BaseMICParent.
  

Unfortunately this breaks the following stuff in UT3:

• hmm
• ahhaaa!
• -.-"
• I did not do enough testing. I didn't notice anything unusual.
• Why do we have to provide the BaseMICParent in the first place?
  

For the textures... I never did any but in the last hour I learned how to do NormalMaps.
So I googled a bit and found a Leather texture on a fashion page. From the 400x400 texture I made a 256x256 NormalMap and a SpecularMap. In the Material I made them 8x bigger to fit your textures. I never did this before so here it is:



Left: Specular + Normal
Right: Normal only

[SDX]

looking nice INVICTRA, I haven't got time to get down to bumpmaps and speculars yet, as you have seen they were mostly blank. I know that the latest CooL way of making normal maps is to sculpture surface texture in Zbrush or Mudbox but yes there are tutorials to make them only within Gimp or Photoshop (I have links for different resources and plugins also).
I have seen your model it really is pretty much amazing I must say. This model is my first work also, but your model is pure sex (hmm, maybe JC is pure sex also, only for girls...) About team colors I have now been testing and trying for so long that I feel like I am almost there to make team colors work the traditional way. Notice that I do not ask for help on this, because I know I have messed with different things related to materials and probably only me alone has got into the trouble I have now. With the help of UT3 log file and Discmage's tutorial on character setup, I think I will make it work today.

BTW I have already significantly remade base material setup and settings like "SRGB" on textures compared to beta1, therefore it is safe to change textures, but the rest I could have already changed Very significantly, up to replacing most meshes with new .PSKs.
One more thing INVICTRA, i haven't tested your color change mutator yet, but it does look like impressive, only so far I think I need only 2 colors: bese/blue and red, maybe someone wants a black version. For me that would be enough, maybe if there are some requests to tweak colors from people, I could look into it, but thank you for offering.

[INVICTRA]

That's good to hear. You seem to be the same as me, got an urge to learn something new. I hope you don't also have my laziness

My char. is riped from a game so I can't take any credits for that. It's been 3+ years already since I tried myself at Maya for UT2004. Somehow I couldn't get back to it. Everything looked so difficult and out of reach. But now I'm back and after I complete my Elyos project, I will do a costume char. You know, when I saw your post for JC Denton I thought, HA I'm not the only one that is struggling at characters for UT3. Sometimes you might think EPIC did the whole UT3 thing so hard only to see us fail. But the best thing is to see ppl overcoming their problems and continuing on their projects for a better UT3.

[SDX]

Yep INVICTRA I guess one can understand all this trouble only by doing it by yourself till the end. BTW I used MakeHuman software to generate head and hands, so I tried to make it as fool-proof as possible, so I am not a great artist like some people here

So after close to 30hours of work I finally... found the problem for team colors, BUT I can't fix It This is maybe a 3dsMax problem, not UT3, but the conclusion is, I am still stuck and now am looking for someone with mad 3dsMax skilzz to suggest what can I do I discribed everything about my 3dsMax problem in this thread: http://forums.epicgames.com/showthre...9#post27091149
aah, people can never realize What was once done to make such a simple thing as red and blue team colors to work

[SDX]

Beta2 is coming very soon...
After spending just 4 days on fixing team colors tomorrow I will touch at least a little bit something else not connected to team colors and probably will upload what I have now.

I am so tired of this teamcolor truly epic sh#t that I can't be pissed off anymore. If I would mention what things I wanted to say about UT3 and 3dsMax developers I would probably get permanently banned from the Internet.
On the other hand today I jumped up only once to go and punch the wall (it helped) and after that my idea about model using too many bones eventually proved to be right.

this must be the modding F.U.N. ! [F*king Unbearable Nonsense]

I am going to sleep.

[Bl!tz~]

Beta2 is coming very soon...
After spending just 4 days on fixing team colors tomorrow I will touch at least a little bit something else not connected to team colors and probably will upload what I have now.

I am so tired of this teamcolor truly epic sh#t that I can't be pissed off anymore. If I would mention what things I wanted to say about UT3 and 3dsMax developers I would probably get permanently banned from the Internet.
On the other hand today I jumped up only once to go and punch the wall (it helped) and after that my idea about model using too many bones eventually proved to be right.

this must be the modding F.U.N. ! [F*king Unbearable Nonsense]

I am going to sleep.

lol....yeah if all is possible with UT3 ed.... it often use complex/unexpected ways

excellent job on the leather brillance....amazing

[SDX]

So, the beta2 is out.
This version probably will be the last beta, until I get all textures properly made, and so far I have no estimates how long will the textures take nor who is going to make them.
Not much has changed in Beta2 status log, but in fact there are A lot of changes since beta1, so here is a change log for those who tried beta1:

• Team colors now work
• Made preliminary normal map for coat and pants.
• completely reworked Material instance structure
• enabled normal map on body material (bugfix)
• replaced one third of all meshes with fresher exports (material fix)
• fixed small glitch on boots mesh
• tweaked physics asset (still not perfect, but hopefully good enough)
• Cooked package (4-7 times smaller file size)
• now model leaves completely error free log.
• other small tweaks

btw, my GeForce M8600GT produces less than 1fps when I nearly maxed everything to take 2 screenshots in the first post And current top videocards run such settings with more than 60fps - I want a new computer

[INVICTRA]

Glad to hear you have finally fixed the teamcolors. The first thing I noticed was the normal map. GJ on that one

[SDX]

hmm....



http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=716380

[shamanlord88]

alternative links? For some reason Filefront doesn't work for me.

[SDX]

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=DJUSZ0WA
but strange that you can't use Filefront, very strange.

[Cirdan]

Pretty cool! Can this be viewed in the UDK? I don't have Max, just Gmax.

After reading about the "skeleton" issue, I'm curious now to see how one could create a different skeleton for the UDK, so you didn't have this issue. I'd love to help you out with materials, but I have a lot more catching up to do in terms of understanding UVW's, unwrapping, etc. I sure love the UDK's material editor though.

[lowenz]

Any news about a final version?

[Private Tux]

Good looking Deus Ex main character, but the link is already dead. Re-upload the model please. Thanks.

[LordBret]

-> Tux Android :

Here my file : http://www.mediafire.com/?xpcl730qw5gmgn3

[Private Tux]

Thanks for the link LordBret.

[LordBret]

Of nothing the friend it is normal to help, it is the purpose of a forum.

I received a lot by this forum, then as soon as I can help, I the fact.

[Private Tux]

Direct mirror added:
http://ut3.ut-files.com/index.php?di...&file=Deux.rar