Die Orc Scum (WIP)

[bigdog5994]

ok thats what i was wondering what color they are in viking traditon i was just about to google it.(i was thinking of the one in LOTR)

and i think the spear is the right size i mean when you compare it to the other units in that pic on post #7 the spear staff seems to be almost a human arm width.

 

[Bjornlo]

update:
smaller, has some hip sway.
Also, the run anim is mostly done. (not shown)

Here is the scale I think I will use:

big enough to be scary, not so big as to be unuseable.

 

[Kyriakos]

Very good

 

[Plotinus]

That's great, Bjorn. I think that's the right size: it will still look like an enormous creature in-game, but without being ridiculous. I find that things look larger in-game than you expect - I suppose that normal Civ-scale is always rather smaller than you remember.

 

[DJ Bonebraker]

Yeah, I've found that myself, which is why I Compared my earlier units with similar Firaxis units, and once I figured out what scales worked for infantry type units, I just re-used that set up for similar unit projects (hence why most of my humanoid units are rendered at a 160x160 frame size).

 

[Wyrmshadow]

If you want modern models, you know where to look.
Here's a hint poeple: I give my stuff freely to those that will A) actually USE what I give to make B) QUALITY things.

I've given my stuff to some that have dissapeared (WTH is Mosca????) and others that make garbage. I'm very cynical about being generous with things that have taken me years and $$$$$ to accumulate.

 

[Bjornlo]

If you want modern models, you know where to look.
Here's a hint poeple: I give my stuff freely to those that will A) actually USE what I give to make B) QUALITY things.

I've given my stuff to some that have dissapeared (WTH is Mosca????) and others that make garbage. I'm very cynical about being generous with things that have taken me years and $$$$$ to accumulate.

I will definately be taking you up on that. I just dont want to take advantage of your generosity too far in advance. As you know, my schedule is sometimes a little hectic... and I can go weeks between being able to do stuff. For my next one after this, I think I want to attempt that thing I showed you...
After that... I might come a-knockin...

 

[Grandraem]

Sorry, nothing constructive to say. Just wanted to mention that the unit looks great.

 

[CamJH]

Looks awesome Bjornlo.
My only suggestion is to make the spear sway a little less in the default animation. Some movement is good of course, but I don't think I'd be swinging it quite that much if I were standing still. Seeing that animation loop for a while in game might be a little much. This is just nitpicking though, you've done a great job with it so far.

 

[Bjornlo]

CamJH,
You are right; the spear was a bit active... looks cool in a preview... would have been very annoying in game. It now wiggles alot less.


Update/Status:

Working on the death anim. not completely happy with it so far. The feet seem to slide a bit, when in fact they do not. I might experiment with having his feet come forward just slightly while he is falling. I may adjust his arm movement as he hits the ground... not sure.
I had hoped to do a different death. The classic troll death would be to turn to stone. But, this would involve rendering 2/3rds of the death frames in Poser, then exporting everything, and trying to line everything up, match the camera, textures, shadow detail, lighting (which are not handled the same way at all in poser and Bryce) and once every thing is lined up rendering the last third in Bryce. The problem is that Poser doesn't seem to have any means to animate a texture... which is a real shame.

 

[Plotinus]

No, you can't animate a texture in Poser. But the simple way to do it is just to render the first two thirds of the frames. Then you change the textures to what you want. Then you render the rest of the frames.

Of course, this assumes that your model is going to change textures in the blink of an eye, as it were. If you're thinking of a kind of gradual change (I don't know if this is something easy in Bryce) then I would guess you would have to what I suggested above, but frame by frame with your different textures. Probably less hassle than it sounds.

 

[Quinzy]

yeah, bryce can do a gradual chance easily enough.

 

[DJ Bonebraker]

Bjorn, here's a few advance poser tips, if you're willing to try them:

The way to keep the feet from sliding behind him on the death is either to first set the figure up so that both legs use inverse kinematics, and then either:

(a) just leave the death animation as you have it and select the main figure and mark the position of the feet in the first frame on your screen with a china marker or wax pencil (so you can wipe it off later), then go to the last frame and move the whole body forwards or backwards (adjust the Z tran dial) until the feet line up with the line you drew or

(b) Move the hip object in the death animation (the feet will stay where they originally were when IK is turned on).

I've used both methods, but generally preferr (b) since I can export it as a custom animaiton pose and have it do exactly what I expect when I load it into a future figure that uses similar animations. Method (a) requires that you do the whole "Mark where the feet are and move the body Z tran dial until they match" thing every time you load the animation into a different figure.

It is also possible to use animated textures in Poser, however it is a very daunting task. If you look at my esperling animation previews, you'll see that she turns blue during the transformation (a.k.a. fortify) sequence. I accomplished that by taking the texture I wanted, and made a blue version by putting a colored layer over top. I then created a series of 5 images with the layer's transparancy starting at 80% and ending at 20% (I had a 5-frame transition for the skin color change in the foritfy animation), and then I took the original skin tex, the 5 transitory textures, and the final modified texture and created a 15-frame AVI file in Animation shop. I then went to the texture options, and made all the body textures use an animated texture, which then allows you to browse for AVI files... It's under the 2D texture node options in the materials room...

The only problem with this method is that the last frame, inexplicably was textureless, or basically, white. Since the fortify animation's last frame and the attack animation's first frames were the same, I merely did a quick C&P to fix that (the attack animations and death animation all used the non-animated blue skin texture, and the victory is merely the fortify animation reversed). It also is very complicated and requires some serious screwing around with the texture node to get it to work right.

 

[Plotinus]

Well, I didn't know that. Thanks, Hikaro!

 

[Bjornlo]

Animating textures such as gradually chaning from one to another is very easy in Bryce.

The feet do have IK turned on, and it is the hips I am moving. I only glanced at it from the side, but it seemed the feet were stationary. I think it is an optical illusion. I will see about finding a wax marker later tonight.

I had not thought about just render, change textures, render change textures.... what a pain in the 'ole seat cushion... though ultimatimately simpler than trying to sync a half poser and half bryce anim. Ugh... Clever, though. This might be easier than using animate AVIs or GIFs for the textures. Using animated textures is nice... being able to animate them (ala Bryce) would have been alot nicer.

 

[Bjornlo]

Bjornlo, couldnt you just fade to gray over several frames?...that sounds so cool...

It sounded very cool to me too... But if you read Hikaro's comments, you can see what a booger it would be to do this in Poser.
To do a graduated fade to gray, you would have to retexture the entire thing in a AVI.... The troll is a fairly detailed model, so this would be pain by itself... then there is the making of the AVI. Presently there are like 5-6 textures, but worse is that a number of the colors are poser colors and not a texture at all. And so would have to be converted to a texture which would in turn have to be animated and so on.
Or, instead of rendering the animation 8 times, I can render it manually and do it as a series of mind numbingly dull frame by frame renders. 15x8 = 120 frames. Assuming I only fade him the last half, that would still take several days to do.
The alternate is to not do it gradually, but in a series of steps... This would look alot rougher, but could be done as only 45 renders. Each one taking several minutes.

btw: on the feet moving... it was no illusion. IK was turned on, the movement was from the hips, but the feet still moved. So I just manually moved 'em back. I have run into a number of bugs with Poser which really piss me off.
This was one. Another was in the same animation, when I carefully plotted the spear. Key framed it... looked at it a dozen time to make sure I liked how it was falling, and then moved on. Later, as I was reworking the feet, I noticed it had lost its keyframes and animation. This is in P6.
Plus on a 4600+ with 2gb of very fast ram and good other hardware Poser is often mind numblingly slow. And when you iconify and go back... sometimes you can not get the main (background) frame to come back. And, yes I do have the current patches applied. It is just that I had expected Poser to preform better then it does....5+ minutes to load.... slowest program on my HD, 1-2 minutes to display the figures, etc... Poser is slower than Bryce, and Bryce is old old code. Lightwave, which is a huge resource user, never bogs like this. Poser is the ONLY app I have that hates to multi-task on my dual core system. And can we talk about render times?? Ugh! a tiny preview with no background, and a fairly simple model would take seconds in old bryce (and any other 3d app)..
Thus far, I love how easy it is to poser a human and just loath everything else about it. I tried to just re-organize stuff and make parent folders and even that is not possible. It promptly forgot about those figures.
ok got that outta my system. Just grumpy cus Poser just crashed (again).

 

[Stormrage]

Poser 5 loads pretty nice on my crappy ol` bucket? Mebbe you should Downgrade your version

 

[DJ Bonebraker]

Yeah, I'm running Poser 5 on my P4 2Ghz single processor machine with only 768 MB of DDR ram and a GeForce 4 MMX with 64 megs of video memory, and I still can render stuff faster than what you're describing Poser 6 doing, plus I have never had Poser 5 crash on my desktop... My SOny Vaio PCG-FX77S/BP laptop with P3 1 Ghz processor, 384 MB of ram (up to 16MB of which is shared with the Video card), OTOH, has had the occasional crash, which is why I uninstalled Poser 5 from my laptop and installed it on my desktop once I got out of the Navy (no room for my desktop on the last ship I was on... I had a nice hidey hole for it on my first ship, but that was before I got Bryce or Poser).

 

[Bjornlo]

I wonder if it is Poser 6 being buggy, or if I just installed too much content in to it? Also, part of the render speed is that I haven't been using much of the Kinboat & Utahjazz7's freebee's... but trying to push the learning curve by doing it myself. The result is higher poly scenes. Not a big deal to Bryce, Lightwave, etc... but Poser?? Who knows.
I have poser 5 on disk here still. I could always install it in parallel and see what happens... of course then I lose the 1000s of things I've installed in P6 unless I can live with duplicates.
For me, Bryce, despite being old as stink code, has been really stable. Same with other 3d apps. Only poser is giving me problems... but Poser with its funky locked directory structure is quite different in how it does stuff.

 

[DJ Bonebraker]

I wonder if it is Poser 6 being buggy, or if I just installed too much content in to it? Also, part of the render speed is that I haven't been using much of the Kinboat & Utahjazz7's freebee's... but trying to push the learning curve by doing it myself. The result is higher poly scenes. Not a big deal to Bryce, Lightwave, etc... but Poser?? Who knows.

I don't think it has to do with content... I have over 1000 different figures, mat poses, regular poses, animation poses, hair objects, props and textures that I've added to my libraries, and it has not affected how Poser 5 runs in the slightest.

I also will admit that I've only ever used Kinboat's Paper doll figures on three occasions: The Chocobo Knight, and my still in progress Captain Jack Sparrow and President Rufus Shinra units. Two of my units (Kunoichi and Yuffie) used Isop's Free Miyou (P4 woman custom charachter), 1 unit used Victoria 3 (Al Bhed Machina Hunter), and all the rest used Aiko 3.

I found that the biggest slow-up with rendering was the resuld of me using texture mapped textures for the clothing and props. Now, with the possible exceptions of the base figure and the hair, everything uses Textures I "borrowed" from Kinboat's and UtahJazz7's figures and props. I've even used their props (especially the guns and some of their hats and/or helmets).

Just by eliminating imagemapped textures, I've cut my rendering times by at least 25%.