New Hi res Units Progress.

[Fortified Hooligan]

Hey all,

I'm using Cinema 4-d to produce the animations.

All of the rough animations are already completed, BTW.

I tried to be as accurate as i could with reproducing the look of the attacks
two sword, one sword, and two others i added which fit with the world
(no matrix flippy, spinny dance moves)

They need some more tweeking before i will be satisfied with them, but when they are i will post them here for you to look at.

I am still feeling lazy about porting them into the myth engine.

anyone want to do that for me? i will send you the renders and you can have engineering credit on them.

I think it would slow me down in the modeling department if i had to go learn that interface. I just landed an additional four animations for a client and i will be busy with those, so if someone else wants to help, we can get these units out there a lot faster.

Probably the regular soldier next.

[William Wallet]

I think you'll find more than a couple of people happy to volunteer to putting this stuff into Amber. I *want* to put my hand up for it, I just don't know if I'd have the time to be of much use to you! (Or anyone waiting to see these units in action, for that matter).

I might be peculiar, but the unit I'm really hanging out to see is the regular warrior. No doubt you've seen the hi-res promo art of that unit? With source material like that to work with, I have no doubt that you could do a brilliant job of it.

[Pyro]

Making the collection under Amber isn't hard, it is just time consuming. I haven't even finished messing with some collections because I procrastinate.

I would be willing to make the Fear tags for the units if you like. Those are easy, most of them would just be duplicated from the original units and slightly modified.

By the way, do you plan on making the flags more like the original heron guard?

[TarousZars]

I'm quite excited for the regular warrior. The warrior has always been my favorite unit.

[William Wallet]

Indeed!!!!! I'm glad I'm not the only one.

I'm also happy to hear you're avoiding 'matrix' style super attack animations, Hooligan. However, I kinda hope you might give the warrior a couple of different slashes.. that's probably asking a lot but it'd look awesome with a couple of subtle variations in his swings.

*edit*
Just thought of this ... maybe 2 regular swings, and then a swing for taller targets and a swing for shorter ones.... it would look badass for the warrior to low a low, sweeping swing to get at a dwarf, would it not!

Also; something I did to the TFL warrior collection a while back was to paint the sword out of his dying and dead animations. Upon his death, he drops a sword projectile. It seems a bit silly going to such lengths, but it does look pretty cool.

... but anyway! Keep up the good work, if the warrior works out I'd be happy to do the Amber work. I can't make a full time job of it but all the same it's been a while since I ambered anything and I'd love to give it a go.

[Fortified Hooligan]

That's an interesting idea with hight-dependanct attacks.

I plan on doing four attacks for each cheracter.
Some, like tree giant, trow will have two for small guys, two for large

archers different angles and knife attack, Thrall, slight variations on same axe swing (they arent very creative).

That is going to be some of the more fun stuff to do.

Is that the consensus then? to have the toons drop their weapons for use as projectiles?

It makes sense, and is not too difficult to incorporate.

[Pyro]

Is that the consensus then? to have the toons drop their weapons for use as projectiles?

Yeah, I can't imagine anyone saying it is a bad idea. Specially now with a the updates to Myth 2, the projectile and other limits have gone up. By the way, Hooligan, a little more than a week ago I sent you a PM because I didn't want to spam the thread too much. I guess you haven't noticed the links above, one being for messages.

[William Wallet]

That's an interesting idea with hight-dependanct attacks.

I plan on doing four attacks for each cheracter.
Some, like tree giant, trow will have two for small guys, two for large

archers different angles and knife attack, Thrall, slight variations on same axe swing (they arent very creative).

Sounds awesome. The warrior unit could be a good test-bed for this concept, I think. He's a regular sized guy, and his up/down attacks can be easily tested on dwarfs and trow.

Is that the consensus then? to have the toons drop their weapons for use as projectiles?

It makes sense, and is not too difficult to incorporate.

Well I believe it's a nice touch, yeah. I can't remember if I used it in any of my plugins, but when I did this I had to paint the sword out of the picture.
You will have the luxury, of course, of having a model to do this, so it should be heaps easier.

Quick question, this might seem obvious so forgive me; will the dying/dead animations have any blood and wounds to them?

[Fortified Hooligan]

Yes, the dead/dying will be dead from visible wounds.

[Renwood TWA]

Looking good dude!

Yea the boots should be the same color as the armor mb. And somehow they look a little too big/high on the leg.

The end result after ambering and then put in the myth engine should be VERY close to what we see here.

nice to see the progress coming along well!

[oogaBooga]

I would be honored to be an Amber grunt, I am a very experienced Amberer, and I can even tell you the style of rendering that would most benefit someone who knows how to do batch-imports in amber (which eliminates the need to hand-tweak each frame, which is an ungodly powerful time-saver).

Basically, you render every image with a large-ish background. Large enough so that if you were to overlap every single image of the bitmap, one on top of another, no part of the unit's bitmaps would go outside of this square.

I think the term is uncropped bitmaps, but i'm not sure what it's called on the 3d program's side, so I just went ahead and simplified it to make sure i'm understood.

Also, the naming convention of the bitmaps should go either
"atk00view000" meaning the first frame in the "atk" animation (attack) and the view is from 000 degrees (meaning with the unit staring directly front, toward the camera).

As long as the bitmaps are both uncropped, and have a naming convention that goes "sequence name" then "viewing angle" or vice versa, then the importing and animating of the unit could turn from a three day project into a one or two hour project.

So yeah, let me know if you need any help, I would love to get myth 2 some new high res units - in my opinion the ones Bungie rendered look pretty bad.

[Fortified Hooligan]

Thanks Ooga.

I have to tweak a couple of things, boot size, color, slight adjustment of shoulder armor, before i go through with the final renders.

Like i said earlier, i will post them here, or maybe link to a you tube video of the completed animations for people to check out.

At that point, if you are still interested we can work out the file transfers and whatever particulars are needed on your end to work best with Amber.

[Fortified Hooligan]

Pyro brought up making recently dead versions of the living units to use as undead, or thrall versions.

That was something i though of earlier but thought would be too complicated for replacing the thrall in-game, due to multiple animation sets for the same unit.

Pyro says it can be done pretty easily so i plan to do the regular thrall, plus, since i have already modeled the other units by the time i will be done, thrall that look like recently dead Herons, Warriors, bowmen, maybe Crids too.

That would be fun.

Single player maps, bungie's or third party i suppose, where after a few battles thrall that look like dead warriors show up, or journeymen. I always wished that would have happened in-game.

Pyro, It's cool with me if you want to post info like what you provided in that PM on this thread. Anything about these new units that you think will help, probably will, so dump it here.

Thanks guys.

[Pyro]

Well, if ooga is doing some Ambering, then there is no need to explain some of the basics on collections like I did on that PM I sent. Ooga has tons of experience with Amber and collections.

One way you can transfer files to him would be if you get yourself a folder on the udogs hotline. All you need is to download one of the hotline clients. For windows go here for the 1.8.5 version of the hotline client and for Mac go here for frogblast. Once set up just log onto the server hl.udogs.net and ask an admin for a folder. The admins (with red names) might not be around so either PM one of them or come back later. They will just ask you to think of a username and password, which you will use to log onto the udogs hotline so you can upload to your folder. When you upload files choose ZIP for compression.

[Renwood TWA]

Yea hooligan the recently dead herons being turned into thrall (undead version of herons) is the same thing we are working on with our wind age project.

It WILL add a lot of work though, only you wont have to start from scratch for each undead version since you will allready have the living models.

Its the coming up with different zombie like animations and rendering them/ making collections out of them that will take a while.

Also for these new living/undead units to be of any use you will need somebody to script them on each of the maps you want to place them on (hint hint to scripters out there)

Ooga and I have allways wanted to be able to play a multiplayer game where you could kill somebody's warriors and then cast a spell to raise them as undead versions of themselves, now under your command.

Being able to increase your forces from the dead bodies of your enemies would be VERY Mythy indeed.

-Renwood