WIP Player/NPCs models

[poVoq]

How about this little fella (cross post from the artistic style thread):
http://opengameart.org/content/little-box-knight
It just needs some more animations, but it otherwise ready to go (and under a CreativeCommons license, thus free to use). If you point me to a list of animations I could probably even make them for you (but I am not the original creator).

 

[Skaldarnar]

I think Maternal has done some animations for his Oreons, so probably you should contact him to be consistent. Moreover, overdhose is playing around with the Oreon models/animations for his Miniions, so maybe you has some requests for new animations

 

[Cervator]

The Oreons would make a great starting "imp" (Dungeon Keeper) race to help out with basic stuff, although we still do need a couple more humanoid races like the box knight, @SuperSnark's steampunk fellow, some of the dwarf models we've got, etc. Creating/enhancing some of those would be a good idea

In general I'm hesitant to use public CC models for anything other than placeholder art. Both from it being "alien" to our artists (good for examples though) and from who knows where else they'll show up

 

[overdhose]

Not a blender wiz myself, tried before and lost quite a bit of time on it , which doesn't mean I ain't willing to give it a shot, but even then I'd prefer updating the oreons so they'd walk on ground as a test case to see if I could achieve anything decent. But so far I've been to busy with code and there's a lot of things I'd like to explore in that area left, like growing plants and building structures.

 

[poVoq]

Ok, nice to see some (careful) interest here. I contacted the original author to see if there was some interest of collaborating with me to make a small set (and we could crowd-source a lot of hats like in TF2 ).
I don't think it being publicly available is a big issue... especially if we make a set for Terasology.

Btw that is the licensing status of your other art files? Also under Creative Commons licenses?
Oh and what model file type do you use? For ease of use, I would recommend this: http://lee.fov120.com/iqm/ if you haven't already implemented a nice system yet.

Last but not least, are animated textures possible for facial animations? Would be really cool with that knight

 

[Cervator]

Free hat, free hat!

Art and licensing hasn't been officially worked out yet

Some artists are fine with releasing their work completely, others would like to reserve commercial rights which I fully respect and want to protect.

Model format details and such I'll leave up to the experts to comment on, I am but a humble bureaucrat buried in my own paperwork!

Animated facial expresses (or even the expressions themselves ..) would indeed be neat, we've had some talk in the past about using said facial expressions on flat faces as opposed to using blocky features on faces instead. Not sure about the current technical details / requirements

 

[Immortius]

I suggest artists select a Creative Commons license of their choice, and make it known. We also need to keep this fairly clear in the repository - for assets in modules, add some author and license information into the mod.txt. For assets in the engine, we need some similar mapping of art to author and license. Basically we need enough information so that anyone using the assets can see the license involved, and if we ever do a commercial version we know what can and cannot be used.

 

[poVoq]

I agree... that would really be a big improvement if all assets would fall under the CC-by-SA for example. Not really because of commercial aspirations, but rather for the opposite even And in general it is really beneficial to have it clear legally.

Back on topic... I played around with the model a bit, and the texture can be easily made smaller without loosing any detail. 512x512 would be best I guess, but 256x256 still good looking. The current 1024x1024 was probably really only the editing size and not meant for in-game displaying.

My current idea is to separate the hat and other props from the mesh to free texture space (and have them easily swappable), and have the facial features on a slightly larger transparent plane for making cool beards, keeping it shaper and making simple facial animations easily (just swap the face texture).

I guess I will doodle about with it some more tonight and over the weekend.

 

[Cervator]

Excellent, thanks!

Yes "modular" models would be great

 

[poVoq]

http://opengameart.org/content/little-box-knight-female-version

Doodled around with it a bit over the weekend. Sadly the original creator replied that he is too busy with some commercial game he is working on to help out.
For now I will probably expand the vector facial expressions set a bit more as that has many more uses than just Terasology inclusion However I am still interested to helping out getting these guys into Terasology if there is any interest at all (and media licensing gets sorted out).

Edit: I didn't do any modularization with it so far, but it really isn't very difficult to do so.

 

[Cervator]

Not bad at all - nicely done!

If you're up for making a custom set based on that one knight for inspiration then I could see that work in the game - after all the license is open enough. Mainly I was concerned about solely using existing models off a public site like that but if you're coming along for the ride to do more work just initially inspired by that then that would be excellent

The main trick is being able to maintain a consistent style over time. That's why we need actual artists that can continue the work. You in?

The model seems a fair fit with some of the other stuff we have, texture is a little high detail as you mention, but the flat-face modular expressions & body parts would be a great angle to work and in line with one set of older works.

I'd be very curious to see a steampunk and/or "organic" (nature hippie) take on the design

 

[poVoq]

Quite honestly, I really never bought into the minecraft hype, and while Terasology looks different enough that it might be interesting for me to play, I really can not promise any longer term motivation.

Right now however I would like to play around with those a bit I guess, and I think the more modular (and vector graphics based) I make these, the easier it would be for other artists to make models by the exact same style in the future. I am also only working with open-source tools and promise make all the source files available, but that is really all I can ensure you off at this point

 

[ToasterStrudel]

also add that the NPC can interact with you like build and stuff.

 

[Adeon]

The other day I met a painter. I told him about our project and persuaded him to draw the main character for the Terasology=)

Here are early concept sketches:

 

[Adeon]

And yet - the more we describe the character, the better he will draw =)

 

[Cervator]

Very impressive concept art! Also very detailed for a voxel world

I imagine different game types will have different player characters. This almost seems like it would be some sort of more realistic looking / less blocky setup?

 

[Adeon]

This almost seems like it would be some sort of more realistic looking / less blocky setup?

And why not? =) But What do you mean by "less blocky world"? =)

 

[Cervator]

Well, a highly detailed model should probably go with a highly detailed world

Low detail world (blocky, low resolution) normally goes with low detail models

That might just be me being weird and not very artistic though

 

[Adeon]

Ok, I will ask him to draw less detailed character =)

 

[adelino1951]

why not use minecraft skins?