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Showing content with the highest reputation on 07/21/2022 in Posts

  1. 2 points
    I'm delighted to finally be able to open this thread. Here, I'll be posting updates on my latest project. I've been posting pictures on the KOTOR Discord and in status updates here on DS for a while. Now I'm finally stopping the teasing and will instead post new stuff here. After my Juhani mod, I was inspired by Koru's work on creatng high poly head models for K1. I felt that the aliens in the Kotor games were in dire need for a makeover, and after much much trying and failing, I have learned modern techniques used in 3D character creation. I was able to apply it for no other than Master Vandar, the first entry in this modding series. Animation.mp4 My objective with this project was to create a character from scratch that would fit the vanilla rigs to facilitate the process when it comes to porting the 3D model to Kotor. I started off from a bunch of very simple objects. From there I slowly formed the main shapes, and refined the details until I had a high poly sculpture I was happy with. I then retopoligized the model. In plain English, this means I created a low-poly version of the character on top of the sculpted one. In the process I would ensure that the geometry was suitable model for the game engine. The final model has about 12k triangles, including 3k for the hair cards. For the texturing part, I used Substance Painter. I baked the details from the high poly sculpt onto the low poly retopologised geometry into a set of textures called mesh bakes. Within Substance Painter, these are used to drive the procedural creation of layers of color information (but not only), mostly using masks. Very similar to the way Photoshop works. This looks really flat though. Remember that Odyssey doesn't use much more than the diffuse texture (i.e. the base color information). To create a sense of depth, I've used the mesh bakes like the ambient occlusion and curvature maps to add shadows and highlight to the texture. Other bakes were used as well to add even more fake lighting. Final highlights and shadows were then painted by hand. The eyes were fully painted by hand in 3DCoat. Also, I stole a neat trick from this 80LV post to add some depth to the eyes. The iris has been sunk in, while the geometry for the cornea was cut separate from the rest of the eyes and features a painted reflection. That's it! After some preparing, I then brought the model over to 3DS Max to deal with the skin weights. As I had planned ahead for the model to fit pretty much perfectly to the vanilla rig, I had no real issues in the weighting process. Pictures and gifs are nice, but discovering the model in 3D is much better. Check it out on Sketchfab here: https://skfb.ly/ow9Mn Make sure to zoom in to evaluate all the details in the texture ! I hope you find this post was insightful! I'll include details on the next pieces of the project in the next messages of this thead at a later stage!
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    It's not accounted for in the current version, but I have plans for an update that will add a starting cutscene for Canderous when he is the chosen jail breaker (since he's the only one that lacks one), and in that he will automatically re-equip his gear, just like now happens for the PC (and Bastila/Carth) at the end of the escape. I'm still working on the stunt animation at the moment. I may have to add an additional sequence to the end because the collision around the beds is too excessive to allow regular scripted anims to work as intended (a character can't get close enough to the bed). Either that or I need to adjust the walkmesh. I'm taking a break from it for a while to work on some K1CP additions, but here's a couple of snapshots of the WIP: