Ploe asked me to make a thread listing what I was working on, so I'll do that here.

Current unit list:
- Woodelf Tree Hero
Progress: Model finished, texture finished, needs rigging and animating.
ETA: 23/09/06

- Highelf Dragonrider
Progress: Dragon model is finished, needs adapting and re-texturing.
ETA: 30/09/06

- Dwarf base unit
Progress: None!
ETA: 07/10/06

- Skaven base unit
Progress: None!
ETA: 14/10/06

My current model is a very very nearly finished Ent monster/hero for the Wood Elves.

I'm getting some weirdness from the transparency at the moment, so I need to fix that, and then animate him. I'm hoping to have him done by the end of the week, at the latest.

After that, there was mention of dragonriders, so I'll probably do that next. It won't take too long, since I already have a dragon made that I can convert over. I can probably do that next week.

After that, Ploe was hankering for some Dwarf loving, so I'll make at the very least a basic, 'default' Dwarf that can have various armours added to him in NIFviewer. That won't take long either. Probably less than a week.

What other stuff did we need for the females, by the way? Originally people asked for just a basic female model that they could tinker with in NIFviewer, and I made that. So what to do with it next? Suggestions please!

that is absolutely stunning neener!!! my god i love that!! did you get inspiration from Warcraft 3 night elf buildings? it looks very similar, by i like your more:D.

can you do tree kin also? they are very similar to the tree men, and dryads, kind of like a hybrid. they are basically dead pieces of wood, lods, branches, even whole dead trees, but they have been welded together with a magical forest spirit, who controls the mass of wood as a living breathing entity. there are pictures of them on the games workshop website.

About the females: are you able to animate them so they kind of, hover/fly? i was thinking they would make good woodelf spellweavers/singers, especially if you can also modle thier clothes, that would be awsome:D

any who, those are my 2 current requests

heres a link to the spell singers images:
http://oz.games-workshop.com/games/warhammer/woodelves/catalog/WE_spellsing.htm

and heres a link to the tree kin images:
http://oz.games-workshop.com/games/warhammer/woodelves/catalog/WE_treekin.htm

PS, oooh icant wait to see that treeman in action:D:D

Super looking stuff neener. :thumbsup:

The Treeman is awesome!:drool:
About females I'd love to have Witchelves and Daemonettes. Those could use a cool new animation though:)

What happened to the Orc and Goblin?

Edit: and the Skaven?

What happened to the Orc and Goblin?

They're both finished, more or less. The Orc was meant to be the basic worker, who can be adapted into other units. He needs a reskin to become a Savage Orc, and some armour added to him to become Orc Boyz and Black Orcs, but those should be minor. The Night Goblin just needs weapons added and animations, which again shouldn't take long.

Edit: and the Skaven?

The Skaven, though, needs to be completely redone, so I'll do that after the Dwarf.

EDIT- Oh and
did you get inspiration from Warcraft 3 night elf buildings? it looks very similar

Yeah, it was my main source of inspiration. As you guys know I graduated from a University degree in 3D modeling, and now I'm trying to build up my portfolio. I'm hoping to put some of my models for this mod in said portfolio, so I'm trying to mix in some designs that I like, even if they're not 100% faithful to the Games Workshop artwork. Hopefully you guys don't mind that too much.

thats cool, i like warcraft 3 graphics, but i like your's more:D i think this tree man would make an excelent Durthu hero for the woodelves. the beard fits his description perfectly, and the little lanters look almost like houses for forest sprites, (like tiny evil tinkerbells;) )

would you also be able to have a go at doing a more 'traditional' tree man too? one for the generic treemen like the games workshop one? i love that modle and think it would look awsome in 3d too.

Yeah, sure thing. To be honest this model has been a bit of a nightmare, what with all the transparency on the leaves. There's something really weird with Civ4 that makes planes with opacity behave very strangely. I think it's something to do with the normals of the polygons, because it only happens with certain ones. I'd have to show you to explain, but sufficient to say it looks awful when it goes wrong and once I've got this model done I don't think I'll be trying it again anytime soon. So a more Warhammer-esque treeman, with more branches than leaves, is probably on the cards.

wow, didnt have a look in here for a long time, that thing is absolutely fantastic,... now i know what the advantages of actually learning this in a professional way are (instead of trial and error in your spare time)... keep up that fantastic stuff, i am too busy with other stuff, so no time for working for warhammer mod right now.

well, the warhammer treemen are all branches, with lots of moss, so they should be a breeze for you. i mean you coud re use the leave from this one on the others, but that would make him less unique. i say keep this one as a hero unit, and have others which are more generic.
PS hows the animations going? (no pressure:p)

Okay, the model is totally finished now. I fixed the transparency, although it was fairly painstaking. I hit upon a better technique at the 11th hour, so next time it should be a little bit easier, although not much. Here he is in his finished glory, with a size comparison too:

http://www.all-one-word.org.uk/images/warhammer/Treescreeny2.jpg

Animation is going to happen tomorrow. It'll be very very easy to just give him the Praetorian animation, so that he's at least working, and then I'll spend the next day or two tweaking it to be more fitting for his character. Does anyone have any specific suggestions for animations? I'm thinking his attack should be either a big heavy clobber with his hand, or he should stomp people underfoot. Also, if I can make it happen, I'm tempted to make him get chopped in half when he dies :D

Can you make multiple attacks? im thinking a couple of diferent big heavy clobbers with his hands like you said, and then him bracing himself, and a mass of tangled roots shooting from the ground to slash his enemies. :lol: he could also have a ranged attack where a swarm of tiny nasty 'fairy' type sprites fly out of his beard and stab his opponent with millions of tiny poisoned spears. :crazyeye: (sorry, im taking ideas from the description of the Durthu Character in the Woodelf Rule Book.)

His death colud be him falling apart, his arms falling off, top half sliding off, and legs falling over. :D

Can you make multiple attacks?

I'm not sure. I think there's only a fortify attack and running attack, but I could be wrong. Rabbit or someone is probably the one to ask there.

and a mass of tangled roots shooting from the ground to slash his enemies. :lol: he could also have a ranged attack where a swarm of tiny nasty 'fairy' type sprites fly out of his beard and stab his opponent with millions of tiny poisoned spears. :crazyeye:

:shifty:

How about you do those, eh? :P

:lol: yeh, i was expecting that kind of reaction:lol: those were really just jokes, but i posted them in the hopes that you would take them seriously and attempt to do them:lol: its a crule joke i know :crazyeye:

Great looking unit neener. Awesome!

The Treeman is finished and I'm steadily working away at the Dragon. Work in progress so far:

http://www.all-one-word.org.uk/images/warhammer/WIPdragon.jpg

Apologies to all for being slower than I originally intended.

Treeman is attached below for you all to have a go with. I'd appreciate feedback/bug reports etc, since I'm not terribly happy with his animations. It was a real pain to try and make him appear big and slow within the time constraints of the event codes. For example, making him slowly topple and fall as he dies proved to be impossible to do in 30 frames (one second). Also, I don't know if it's possible to slow down the movement of a unit between tiles? Because the way the CIV animations work is that you animate the character taking one step, on the spot, and then the game just cycles the animation as it moves the unit horizontally from one tile to the next. As such, I can't stop the Treeman from running at exactly the same speed as an ordinary unit. It looks a bit weird for this hulking behemoth of a tree to be jogging spritely from tile to tile. But oh well, he works, and he's my first animated unit, so whatever!

Right click and save as! (http://www.all-one-word.org.uk/images/warhammer/Treeman.rar)

Awesome checking it in right now!

Works perfect just the animations are a bit "hasty" you're right.
Maybe we can find out later if it's possible to slow down the game, great job neener!

Woot, glad it works!

I don't think it'll really be possible to make him any slower, now that I think about it. Even if you did manage to slow down the movement between tiles, his run animation would still play at the same speed, so he'd just look like he was running into the wind or something. The only way to fix it would be to slow down his actual animation, but according to the Firaxis PDF the event can only be 20 frames long at most. Really not sure what I could do to fix it.

Hm for the idle and fortify animation the positionchanges between the frames could maybe be reduced a little that would probably make him appear slower there but for the movement no idea. I also wonder what this line is doing in the unitinfos:
<fMaxSpeed>1.75</fMaxSpeed>
Maybe we can try to find out.

Ooh, that could be promising. By all means knock yourself out changing stuff with him. :)

Is it possible to have soundtriggers for him? I'd like to give him some custom sound like the Dragon has.

I tried around with that xml line but to be true the standardvalue delivered the best results. lowering or adding to the value didn't change much:(
Only result was the idle also had sort of a hickup effect like the fortify currently does. Nevermind I'll leave the standard value now.
I also gave him a nice selectionsound already. Soundtriggers for attack and idleanimation would be nice as well but aren't that pressing.;)

Can units have two classes at once? (eg horsearcher being archer AND cavalry)

If so, I'd suggest creating a new class called 'flamable'
and a unit ability called "fiery attack" = +100% strenght vs 'flamable'

-flamable are:
-treemen
-mummy
-dryad
-saprolings?
-wooden warengines. (oO: siege engines! decrease citywall-defencebonus x%/unit in stack)
-Trolls? (denies regeneration...)
-machines with possibly explosive bits.
(such as warpflamethrowers->detonate:collateral damage)


Units elligable for fiery-attack (could be magical unit upgrade too):
-fire_archers.
-fire elemental.
-wizard
-fire_magic.
-several war_engines.
-angry_mobs
-dragons
-several demon_types
-grenadiers, and other explosive stuff


EDIT: If you are still looking for usefull sounds, I have the old 'Shadow of the horned rat' and 'Dark Omen' games lying around somewhere...
I'm certain SotHR has some funny sounds. not sure whether the DO sounds are approachable.

I think every unit can be in only one class.

What about this:

mummies, treemen,... get a promotion "flamable": -50% (or more) against dragons.

If it's -50% defence vs <list of fire-users>... maybe... but it's not very elegant.

I just thought the 'civil unrest' effect could be the perfect forrestfire!

I think we need a promotion controlled by pythonscripts to handle this. As soon El Loco is back I ask him about it.

The groaning sound of a tree starting to topple would be a perfect soundbyte...

Actually, if you look in the woodelf army book, dryads arnt flamable (presumably because they are 'green wood' ie green wood dosnt burn, it only smolders) but thats kinda irrelevant:p

That dragon looks amazing neener! are you going to give him a rider? Dragons need riders:D
i havnt tried the treeman in game yet, ill just wait for ploe to upload it :D

That dragon looks amazing neener! are you going to give him a rider? Dragons need riders:D
i havnt tried the treeman in game yet, ill just wait for ploe to upload it :D

Yeah, I'll definitely give him a rider. Right now I'm trying to get the polycount down from the original 2,600 to something a bit more reasonable!

Question: Will any other races be riding dragons? I know Orcs have Wyverns, Empire has Griffons, Dark Elves have Manticores..but they also have Malekith on a black dragon. So if I was to do Malekith, would a simple reskin (with a few tweaks) of the High Elf Dragonrider do him justice? Because if not I should plan for later conversions while I'm making this guy.

Yeah Malekith would be nice as well as Imrik(Highelves) so later conversions should be planned beforehand. A Wyvern also more or less is just a two legged Dragon so maybe the animations could be made in a way a later Wyvern could use them as well. Another idea would be a rider on an eastern Dragon for Cathay and/or Nippon. We also could think about a Zombiedragon maybe. And probably more so keep it plugable;)

Woodelves have forest dragon riders, they also have a hero called Naestra and Arahan - the sisters of twilight. twins which both ride thier dragon friend.

Highelves have lots of dragon riders, and like Ploe says, we need Imrik

Dark elves have tonns of different beasts, Black Dragons, Hydras, manticors, giant spiders, you name it they have it. most of them are able to be ridden also (except the hydra i think) and like you say, we need Malekith.

Chaos have Chaos dragons with 2 heads.

Orcs and gobbos have wyverns

Empire have griffon riders,

Brettonia have pegasus knights.

Zombiedragons would be cool for vampires.

Perhaps a sphinx monster for Khemri??

I think a Chinese-like dragon for Cathay and nippon would be cool to, with riders.

thats all i can think of at the moment:)

How many polys do you want this guy to be, by the way? He's currently about 1,600 without the rider. I'm expecting the rider to be pretty small and he won't be animated, but it'll add a few polygons one way or the other. I'm just starting to run out of places I can optimise the mesh, so I thought I'd find out how small I need to make it :)

The Easternstyle dragons could be recycled as seadrake monsters.

So what IS the poly/vertexlimit for CIV4?

The Easternstyle dragons could be recycled as seadrake monsters.

So what IS the poly/vertexlimit for CIV4?

Somewhere in the region of about 900 polygons for ordinary units. I've been trying to keep mine much lower, more like 700, and rely on slightly larger textures instead. For the hero and special units, however, where they're going to be bigger and rarer, we've been talking about increasing the polycount to go over 1,000. I'm fairly sure I was told at one point that 1,500 would be okay for a hero, but I can't remember. That's why I'm asking again :)

Anyway, to keep you up to date, here's a very sketchy work in progress shot of the dragon. As you can see I'm still skinning him :)

http://www.all-one-word.org.uk/images/warhammer/WIPdragon2.jpg

Fantastic!

AMAZING!:eek:

Don't worry too much about the polycount. Dragons are rare enough. Very nice progress.:)

That is magnificent! i cant wait to see him finished!!

nice!
a bit more work on that texture and it's almost perfect.
IMO the tailspikes would look better if similar to those used on the head.
(e.g. either go for fins/spikes or horns on a dragon/wyvern)