Alright, monthly update of the year. Anyone remember my previous engineer hat? Well, now I’ve got myself to do a remake of it, and it shall be submitted to Valve when I finish it.
And this hat is more beaten up than the previous one! Who said the Engineer kept his graduation hat in a trophy room? However, the Golden Wrench victims are kept in his trophy room.
The hat needs to go to the texturing phase, then I’ll add some jigglebones to the tassel and I shall finally see how it looks in TF2. Oh, and it currently is 450 polygons, a way, way better number than my first attempt. I’ll keep you guys updated on it.
I recently got myself a laptop with an over_powered card for a mere 450€: the AMD Radeon HD 6650M. It fares very well, can run all Source Games on High with Anti-Alliasing. And man, things look pretty.
The only things I don’t like about this card are:
While GIMP is open, it sometimes shows graphical artifacts for a split second.
GMod’s Super DoF only works 50% of the time. How the hell did a Intel GMA manage to have only an 90% success rate is beyond my knowledge.
I get paranoid when the fps looses consistency.
Selecting a bone in blender takes 1-2 seconds.
Minecraft runs at 70fps, and all source games run between 60 and 120fps.
Expect more videos in the future, since Blender’s preview of the animation is always constant.
Quick little info from my holidays: I’m on holidays for two weeks, however, I STILL have access to the computer. Wish it was my Windows Computer, but we need a new one anyway…
This means I’m still a bit active on the interwebs. Just saying.
First of all, sorry for the lack of posts. My computer recently went down, and I’m now stuck on my brother’s Linux Computer until I can afford a new one. This means I can barely access Steam (only to play HL1:S) and I don’t have either Sony Vegas nor the models of TF2. Actually, I do have the models, but I don’t have the textures. While I can still animate in Blender, I can render videos with TF2 Characters…
That brings us to Minecraft! Since I’ve got everything textured and ready, easy to pose, and just recently learned how to do some awesome lighting shenanigans, here are some wallpapers I’ve whipped up.
Also, the download page will be removed for a more convenient download category. Also, I forget way less this way. You can also check out my Youtube Channel for a quick 11 second animation, but it’s crap because of it being rendered at 16fps and that playback testing was at 3fps. 3FPS, YOU HEARD RIGHT! Also, all downloads go through adf.ly, in order to generate me some “revenue”. They all lead you to Photobucket in the end.
I’ve whipped up a new sapper for the spy in a single day: from a basic rectangle to the textured finale. I used a reference of the sapper that I’ve imported into Blender to get the proportions right, but that’s all.
Something I found annoying was that itemtest does not allow you to change the sapper! If I replace it by a different weapon slot, it goes into the spy’s… well, that part, ahem. You see, right?
The concept of the Saboteur is that it is a prototype of the stock Sapper, and it has been modded: that explains the lack of a screen and the battery inside that’s been added in. However, the wires and such are burned up, so it explains the black colors inside the sapper.
Here’s some stats I’ve been thinking about for this weapon:
+25% Sapping Speed
– Any damage inflicted to the Sapper can remove it. (Approximatly 2 wrench hits damage). This includes bullets, rockets, melee and stickies. Fluids like the Jarate or the Mad Milk also remove the sapper.
I have no plans on releasing this, but if some people are interested, let me know and I will think about it.
So a few posts back, you’ll notice that I showed off two animations of TF2 Characters, and a hat. Well, proud to announce that the hat is finished! Will it be given to the TF2 Contribute? Hell no:
I’m not too proud of the jigglebones. They work okay in the model viewer but are non-existant in TF2. Why? Beats me.
The texture is not too great either.
The hat goes for a whopping 9000 polygons! The max for a TF2 Hat is 800 polygons. That’s a lot.
So here’s a look at the Engineer’s Graduation Hat.
If you’d like to have the hat, tell me through commentary, I might place this on the download section.
For the Team Fortress 2 Story Mode (still need to look for a nice title), I’ve been thinking that using Team Fortress 2 Music only isn’t going to help. Using Valve music is not going to help much either, because that’s either Half-Life, Portal or Left 4 Dead, all which differs greatly from the Team Fortress atmosphere. Using music from other video games might help, but can sometimes offer a huge contrast between sound (from 16-bit tunes to some orchestral) and it’s non-usability when dealing with more “commercial” ends.
So what’s left? Here’s one: Jamendo. It’s a free music hosting site that offers Indie Open-Source Music for Free. Under creative commons, they have music from Attribution to Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDeriv, etc… The site is in French, so you might need to learn that before going forward.
Now I’ll be showing off a selection of tracks that could go great in the TF2 Story. Hit the jump for the tracks.
To think that one version ago, Blender was a ugly, un-comprehensible, and complicated 3D Modelling Program, it was a real shock when I laid hands on Blender 2.5… I strongly urge you to get it here, as for people who can’t afford to get 3DS Max/Maya/etc (or will not take the way of piracy), it’s a really great alternative. It’s just like The GIMP and Photoshop: GIMP wasn’t that great (let’s be honest), but as soon as it became more friendly and with more options, it’s easily the best alternative to Photoshop.
I’ve started doing, up till now, two projects: a Team Fortress 2 Hat, and a “Story Mode” for Team Fortress 2.
Let’s go to the hat. Here’s a quick screenshot of the hat needing better textures ASAP:
It’s a graduation hat for the Engineer. The base is supposed to be more mechanical to represent the fact that the Engineer is so good that he had the time to mod his hat on graduation day.
Another thing I’d like to add would be the Tassel of the graduation hat with some bones, so that it would be affected by physics. According to Wikipedia, there is no Tassel color that corresponds to Engineering, so I guess that it would be either Red or Blue based on the team. Funny enough, Red would be Theology and Blue would be Philosophy. Odd.
Next comes my two test animations, featuring the Engineer and the Spy. It would be extremely helpful if someone knew how to export theses animations into a pre-existing Character model in Source. Really.
The engineer one was my very first one. Did not know much about the timeline so the action is a bit too fast.
The second video, with the Spy this time, offers a slower animation. Seems a bit more subtle, a bit too subtle, actually.
Again, if someone knows how to export animations into an already existing source engine model, please let me know. Oh, and I’m planning on using more Blender and less SFM. I might even abandon SFM if Blender provides better end results. Time will only tell.
Excuse me for yet another month of pure emptiness. I just had a lot of stuff going on, mostly on the negative aspect, but whatever. Here: I’m not dead. Now that I got rid of that, here’s a few things I was waiting to say about one project.
Team Fortress 2 RPG Story Mode
Screw the RPG, the story that was written for it is PERFECT for a TF2 Story Mode (cinematics and such). Stuff will be animated in Blender if possible, then rendered in GMod. If I have too, I’ll go the extra step of taking out my Creative Suite 3 disc and installing the After Effects. Yes, this is really the “MaxofS2D”‘style of animation, but it’s a pretty badass one, you have to agree.
I’m also trying to make this the most professional possible. The lines of work might require me to hire some voices actors. For characters like the nine classes, a similar voice would be awesome. The original voice works would be for NPCs (such as the announcer or the Scout’s Mama).
Another thing is that I’m going to try to make a common soldier model. This Soldier is like the common worker of BLU Team, because having two teams of clones in a Story just dosn’t do it.
Sapphire Ice 