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Plan for Jeff Gran

Name:	Jeff Gran
Date Posted:	Feb 19, 2005
Rating:	5.0 out of 5
Public:	YES
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Blog post

Character Pack Screenshot.

So my first full week as an intern is over. It's been a fun one. I've been learning a lot. I've made sure to take time away from sitting and painting to go leech as much knowledge as I can from the other artists and programmers here. It's so nice to be able to ask the guy that wrote some code why it works the way it does, and to ask artists who have been through all the kinks of getting things working in-game about specific problems I might be having. One of the things I might be doing later on in my internship is to revise or rewrite some of the art pipeline documentation, to make it more clear and concise, but also to address common problems people have that seem to come up in the forums every couple of weeks. I know I did my share of forum searching after not finding the info I needed in the docs.

OK so let's get to the pictures:

So this is where I'm at. I hope the colors and values look alright... when I got home and looked at these just now they were WAY darker than they were on my monitor at GG, so I lightened them up a lot...

The character's eyelids will have bones so that he can blink, because I believe that blinking adds an incredible amount of believeablility to a character, for very little cost.

I will be creating animations for the character next. The animations will be non-FPS style. My intention is that these characters will be able to be used for architectural visualisation, 'extra' -type characters for games set in modern times, like GTA or Tony Hawk for example, or whatever. The beauty of it, though, will be that my animations will be interchangeable with Joe's Girl Pack animations, so buyers of both can use the FPS animations on my characters, and make his girl walk around in a less aggressive way.

Stay tuned for more updates. I hope to get this pack done as soon as possible, but there's a lot else on my plate right now too, so who knows.

Recent Blog Posts

List:	01/01/06 - 3D Language:Spain available for purchase 11/12/05 - Plan for Jeff Gran 11/03/05 - Plan for Jeff Gran 09/04/05 - Plan for Jeff Gran 08/15/05 - Plan for Jeff Gran 07/25/05 - Plan for Jeff Gran 07/17/05 - Plan for Jeff Gran 04/30/05 - Plan for Jeff Gran

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Timothy Aste (Feb 19, 2005 at 22:28 GMT)

Loking Awesome Jeff!

Joshua Dallman (Feb 19, 2005 at 23:53 GMT)

yeah, looks good! what's the poly count, skin res size/# of skins?

Jeff Gran (Feb 20, 2005 at 00:04 GMT)

Polys 2400 plus or minus some
texture res is 1024*1024
Just one.

I also forgot to mention that I will be including the PSD file that I painted, with all the layers still separate, so skin tone, color of each element (shirt, pants, shoes, hair, eye) can be altered with a couple of clicks and re-saved.

Josh Williams (Feb 20, 2005 at 00:52 GMT)

You're doing a great job Jeff. :)

Joshua Dallman (Feb 20, 2005 at 03:25 GMT)

I thought max texture size for DTS is 512x512?

From Tim's content packs readme:

"In the packs, I have all the default texture sizes at 512x512 at their MAXIMUM texture size. Depending on your system you will more than likely have to scale textures down that are being used depending on how much video ram you have available and what your target system is, please consider this! Without resizing these textures, you may have horribly slow frame-rates when you really start to get many many textures on the screen. I included all textures at their maximum recommended size so you as the end-user have this option on how you want to resize what textures and where so you can get the best results possible custom to your product or project."

I will be interested in hearing how you scale your texture size down or use multiple textures for certain areas to keep the detail found in the 1024 version as my modeler made the same mistake on some of our models so they need some work still.
Edited on Feb 20, 2005 03:36 GMT

Danny Ngan (Feb 20, 2005 at 04:05 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

Jeff,

That is looking really nice. Can't wait to see him animated. :)

Matthew Langley (Feb 20, 2005 at 04:57 GMT)

@Joshua: I may be mistaken but I beleive Tim's packs are all .dif's... not .dts' so might have different rules, though I do beleive 512 x 512 is the max size for .dts too (though again I might be mistaken)

@Jeff Gran: Great looking stuff! Just beginning to learn some 3D (I'm primarily a coder) I can respect your work very much lol.

Joe Maruschak (Feb 20, 2005 at 04:59 GMT)

Jeff,

this is looking great.. can't wait to see the finished product.

Joe

Timothy Aste (Feb 20, 2005 at 05:34 GMT)

Maximum as in the maximum size I created them at.

You can use any size really, but the higher you go the worse your performance is.
There is no hard-coded max size on textures being used by DTS & DIF textures as I know, there may be a limit, but it's higher then 1024.

The reason I recommend resizing them in my pack is multiple textures are being loaded into memory at the same time due to the way BSP(dif) shapes are created and textured, so you lose video memory fast unless your careful & creative about how you use textures. Where as most DTS shapes on average are meshes that use one texture per mesh. So yes, you get more detail out of a 1024x1024 texture, especially for a character, where as multiple textures on a DIF shape don't need that high resolution as much.
Edited on Feb 20, 2005 05:37 GMT

Jeff Gran (Feb 20, 2005 at 05:48 GMT)

I have put characters with almost the exact same specs as this in the engine before, so I know it works. The texture will be provided at full resolution but the buyer can scale them down according to their needs, just like Tim's. 1024 is a bit overkill for such a simple texture (I haven't tested it but it probably looks almost indistinguishable with a 512 version of the texture applied), but the hope is that people will be modifying the model and texture, and might need the high res for more detail.

Joshua Dallman (Feb 20, 2005 at 06:51 GMT)

Sorry for the partial plan hijack. I posted a forum thread here:
http://www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=26228

Your model looks great!! Almost a "painterly" quality to it. If this was the result of only a week's worth of work, it'll be amazing to see how much you come up with during your entire stint at GG...

Phil Carlisle (Feb 20, 2005 at 09:50 GMT)

Nice work.. of course, my suggestion would be to base the next character off of some GG guys :) specifically Jay... oh man, how sweet would that be... getting Jay "in game" to blast at!!! :)

Kidding!!!

Nice work anyway :)

Josh Williams (Feb 20, 2005 at 10:59 GMT)

Jay model + Chirs Calef's ragdoll animation pack = fun.

Adam deGrandis (Feb 20, 2005 at 19:14 GMT)

Hey, nice work!

I agree with Danny, I cant wait to see some animation. :)

Joshua Dallman (Feb 20, 2005 at 21:30 GMT)

At a company I used to work at, there was a dedicated computer area with 8 computers on a LAN specifically for playing Quake to unwind. Someone took pictures of all the managers/bosses and made them into skins. It was pretty fun.

Ed Johnson (Mar 30, 2005 at 22:16 GMT)

Looks almost lifelike, much props to you

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