Battle of The Bots - Who would you want?

#1 You could easely make a game version of that good looking bot... its not becuase the one you show has that many polygons you can't make a low poly version from it.

#2 Ummm.... maybe you could. I dont think LOD would help, it would require some serious tallent to remodel it. In which case you might as well do it your self. Just my opinion

#3 I mean just look at the wires, man... the wires alone. Just one wire is ten times more polys than the Good ol Amped bot. But so noted.

Amped Bot: 0
Good Looking Droid: 1

#4 I assume its simply not meant for games. There's such thing as TV, animation, print etc :)

#5 The Droid is sweet. The Amped bot looks like it would be fun to turn into scrap metal. You should seperate the body parts, and have it so you can shoot them off. It would be cool to see it wig out after you shot one of its arms off.

#6 Let's say the good looking droid would be able to be inserted in a game and work.
I still don't know which one I would pick. I think that would totally depend on the concept of the game, since the two bots have quite some stuff incommon.

#7 Most high poly model's are made from a low poly mesh and then mesh-smoothed a few times, I'm sure that the good looking droid's base mesh would still look good in a game, and be a reasonable amount of polies. It would probably require a bit of work to make the most of it in a Real-time enviroment, such as replacing the wires with alpha'd textures, and removing the complex detail geometry on the joints.

#8 This is like comparing apples to oranges Britton. Your model is designed for low-end gaming (performance) and the one that you are comparing it to is designed for use in Film/TV VFX (presentation). This is blatently obvious.

Since you want my honest opinion of 'What would I buy if I had $300.00', it would be the nice fancy model because it has a better look, feel, style and appearance to it and I know that I am getting my $300.00 worth out of it. You could offer your model for free and I still wouldn't want it, it just doesn't appeal to me or live up to the levels that I personally would want out of a resource, sorry.

In regards to whether or not you could get a model of quality of the 2nd one in a real time game engine with that look/feel to it. You most certainly can, there is a lot of detail there that could be simplified down to good texture mapping and deformable polygons.

Logan

PS: Nice shameless self-promotion thread Britton :)

#9 Hmm... take the super high poly robot, make a normal map from it, use poly-reduction to decimate it to an acceptable level... then go from there

#10 I agree with you Logan, I would bet you could get that high poly one in the 5k - 10k range poly count wise, and it could be as good, or better yet 5k with normal maps :)

#11 ...

#12 Britton,

Your bot isn't bad... if that's what you're getting at.

The high poly bot *could* be reduced quite easily though - though I'd personally just snapshot it and "rotoscope" from scratch - it would really be a pretty simple model to do in low polygon form - wires and all... rigging might be another story though. =P

#13

Quote:Ummm.... maybe you could. I dont think LOD would help

Why wouldn't LOD help? sure the multiRes modifier would probably screw up like it does most of the time, but a good manual LOD would work just fine, and the lowest LOD would only be like 100 polies.

And about the wires... you can make low poly wires, and in the LOD versions replace them with a plane with a transparent texture on them. Those wires aren't too much of a problem actually, depends on how you model them.

And offcourse "you might as well do it yourself"... I would only consider buying game models if they are extremely good quality. Like this guys model, or Bravetree's packs (altough now I'd probably do it myself anyway, becuase I can make them the same quality now, maybe even better if i spend some time on them, but I did buy a bravetree pack when my 3D skills weren't evolved yet)... and you are asking 3 times the amount for maybe 15 minutes of work. That's just assuming people are stupid (wich is a fact in most cases... i know.. but still).

Perhaps you should try to promote it as an example on how to rig a model and get it into torque rather then compare it with a non-real time model.As a rig-example I'd say its worth 15$ at most.

#14 Also, this high poly model up there has NO WAY near the polycount you're claiming, that's just stupid. Excuse me Britton. :/

#15 Well, since you dont mind what we say about it, i will go ahead and say what i think without question. I seriously dont like amped bot at all. I'm sorry to say but it doesn't look like it can move or do anything, the expensive bot seems to carry on something that makes it seem realistic. This doesn't mean I'll buy the expensive bot, because I don't want to waste time working on it to get it in game. I also agree with the comments saying the bot was meant for games only. Infact, if I ever saw your bot in a movie I would feel disappointed in seeing it. What I'm getting at is There's no reason you need to be comparing bots. And if your

Quote: just having fun

then i'm really not gonna be willing to pay 69.95 for it if you're just having fun sorry if i disapprove a professional attitude. and your quote in your .plan,

Quote: You bet its crazy! Thats why I'm selling it on turbosquid. Those rubes will buy anything.

also dissappoints me. So your saying your out to screw everybody who shops on turbosquid? Whatever.

#16 This is silly.

The model on the right clearly isn't designed to be used in a video game just as the model on the left clearly isn't made to be used in high-quality cinematic animation.

Why is there even a comparison? Apples & Oranges.

#17 Nauris, yep. The droid has its place. It rocks it is uber cool. Amped bot is just a fun thing to play with but it does work in the TGE very nicely.

@Josh, right you are!! Thats the idea. I'm working on making two models of each bot.. the left arm can be shot off since it is not holding the gun. I'm making another model minus the left arm, and then a spawnable pick up item that gives you points for picking it up, that looks like the arm. My hope is to make the arm twitch on the ground. Any of you pro modelers / programmers have any advice? Should I switch out the mesh models based on damage or just make the left arm invisible... I dont know how it will be done... just an idea at this point.

@Stefan, you are too diplomatic, but thanks anyway.

@Mark, yeah I'm sure we could get a decent looking version of the droid in game. I wonder if you think it would be doable as is with LOD and multi-res or if you'd start from scratch (assuming there was no lower poly version available)

@Labrat!! Yeah dude I knew you'd have some good useful advice

@Foster, yeah this is my first crack at modeling and I'm excited that it looks like anything at all. Its liberating to think I can actually do some of this myself. I'm going to start looking into blender too. Yeah its shameless self promotion yet again. Transparent as usual.

@Cameron, got your goat! Baaaa Baaaa! ;)

@Joseph, good points and well taken. The question is what modelling tool? Should we include exports for all, or would a 3ds file with the dummy objects and bones defined work?

@Tim, Yes this is silly. But it brings me to the heart of the matter...

@Ward, you rock. Your art is awesome and I'd love to see some of your models as content packs. What I'm trying to do is draw people into a discussion on character content packs, you and Mat Mitman might be able to help the whole community out here and make something for yourselves on the side. The real question is what would people want or neeed here.

And I want feedback good or bad. Would anyone buy a conetent character pack for any price and put it in their game? Does it "cheapen" the game? Do you sees something and go "Star Wars... seen it" or "Ah thats so-in so's content pack"

Would generic stuff like swat team members and terrorists be of any value? Or ist art a must have but a "unique" must have... meaning character content packs are not needed, but a good way to get unique character models for you game cheaply and effectively are needed. I see tons of great code submitted here all the time and I can see the engine being developed at a rapid pace. I dont see lots of art content being added. And I dont see an easy way of adding "unique content" in for every game.

How do we fix this? One idea we've been toying with at game beavers is having some basic nude models. And then giving content packs of clothing, back packs, helmets and such. You can download the character and then add the pieces you want... maybe by mounting the clothing and hats through script in game. Just another idea at this point. Now most of the uniqueness is shifted to texture and skin work. Would this help? I mean the same basic body could be used in operation green light and outfitted with a helmet and WWII uniform... or given a german officers hat. etc...

Just wanted to raise the issue what are we going to do for art? Especially game chacters. I plan on selling a bunch o bots for a cheap price in a content pack to see how well they sell, and give some accurate feedback on the numbers.

I'm having fun with the turbosquid stuff. I'd like to see something similiar for the TGE. Would you guys prefer to use turbosquid? Or does it matter? I spoke with Jeff and Jay here a while back about art content packs. What they'd like to see is both code and art in a content pack, which makes sense. But alot of us need art (and on an inide budget)

We also want good looking quality unique art... but unless you are an artist or have a kick butt artist on your team that is not easy.

#18 So the deal is I plan to start pumping out some cheap and easy bot models, and I hope to forge a path or a discussion on what is good or bad and what is needed. And maybe it will end up in a lot of affordable character art content packs, that we can all use and need.

#19 For the shoot-offable arm, make the robot model without the arm, and position mount1 at the shoulder of the robot. Make the arm itself with weapon mount nodes (mountpoint, etc). Then you can just mount/unmount the arm like you do a weapon. When it gets shot off, unmount it and spawn it as a separate object roughly in the same place, with an impulse to launch it away from the bot (similar to the 'drop' functionality.)

You could even have interchangable multi-function arms that way. Rocket-arm, big-fist punchy arm, whatever.

#20 Hmmm... thats a good idea. But I dont want to shoot off the weapons arm. Mount0 is for the waepon, mount1, mount2 for flags and vehicles.... ya suppose I could use mount4? Seems like the right approach though. I like it.