WIP - Gnomish Warlord

Hey, this is the first time I'm posting something here, response of any kind is appreciated. :)

I've read through a lot of stuff on this page, including the 'why it's not a good idea to post your first model'-Sticky, so here is actually my third model besides tuts.

The Gnomish Warlord





A mounted gnome, riding a mechano strider (I have to admid to be kinda influenced by WoW, played it several years) and wielding a lance. Being the spearhead of gnomish melee forces this well trained warrior impales his enemies with high precision while on the back on his agile strider.

I try to keep the look of it warcraft'ish, but i seem to use too many polys (got 1400 already, legs & Mount still missing).
As mentioned above, WoW is mostly my main source of inspiration (though partly unvolunteerly) due to the lack of gnomes in wc3.

Thanks in advance for critique of any kind. :)


As a sidenote: I use Milkshape 3D 1.8.2 but haven't done anything with the ms3d exporter yet.

This is for Wc3, so no need to make real hands. Just make it a big square'ish lump. Also the dots on the shoulderplates aren't nescesary, just do that with the texture. You could also reduce the quality of the horns a bit without any real loss ingame.

Update -



Finished the model (open for critque to improve it), now trying to draw fitting textures. The Gnome doesn't really sit on the strider yet, i found it easier to model this way. I hope to achieve the result through animating.

I also got some problems with unwrapping my model using LithUnwrap, not only it takes me ages to get a single geoset unwrapped properly, but also the result is very poor and inconvenient to work with.
Any nice Tuts you'd recomment? (The ones here and on Hive are mostly only for 3ds max, and the few covering MS3D unwrap things like boxes or speres - doesn't help me that much)

Never used MS3D, try contacting either Rao Dao Zao or TotallyAwesome, they both have knowledge about the program.

What's the final polycount?

Oh and the spear, it seems a tad too long, or am I off here? I don't play WoW so I am not sure if it's supposed to be that length, but it looks highly unpractical having a spear three times as long as yourself.

The detail on the lower part of legs on the mount will most likely go to waste ingame, but I'm not entirely sure. However, seen or not, I'd simplify it a bit.

All in all I like the general look.

Polycount is 1982, I didn't reduce it that much yet. (Hands still modelled and there's a whole head inside the helmet, could easily reduce it by a fair amount i guess)

I guess you're right regarding the spear, the proportion doesn't seem very realistic. Although thats a general problem with gnomes i think. I have the feeling the legs are too short too, but when I make 'em longer the model doesn't look that gnomish anymore.

Thanks for the response anyways, I suppose I'll be revisiting the spear once I'm animating, should be easier to see once that baby is in action.

Wireframe plz, seems the topology is hell, and there are lot of useless faces.

Here's two wireframe views -





Definitly going to rework the arms and hands.

Woah woah woah, look at his head and shoulder pads, there's tons of vertices, why is there that level of quality?

Don't bother modelling parts that you cannot see, and don't bother going into great detail on anything but heroes, and even there it should be kept rather low as it's for Warcraft 3, an RTS, and an old one at that.

Yes.

Mounted model in WC3 have extremely low poly counts on the rider. Look at the PotM or the Orc Raider or the Knight. There are a lot of faces that you can remove there. The chest doesn't need that many. Maybe half of those or something. You could make helmet horns with about half of those. They won't look as good up close, but they will look the same from the game view. The arms and hand use a lot, too.

For proportions I recommend making the chest smaller. A main difference between dwarves and gnomes is that dwarves have larger chests, while gnomes have larger heads. And the spear length could be cut in... half?

I really like the mechanostrider. The changes I mentioned would be helpful, but aren't absolutely necessary or anything. The model looks very nice

Instead of just placing primitives and moving vertices, you need to actualy EXTRUDE. I mean, the body should be made out of one single primitive, you extrude stuff and thus make the model, that's how it's done in wc3. Also, topology is hell, not to mention there are segments you don't need. Basically, the model needs better use of faces, and less spam of them. Talking about neck of the strider, about arms (make it with 3-4 slices, and 3-4 segments, hands should be simple boxes with a texture. Basically, everything has more polygons than it should. I know I am sorta hypocritical for saying this, but when I go nuts with polygons, I actually make it matter, all you've done could be done in third of the polycount.

Thanks for the Feedback : )

The first thing to do will be to rework the model regarding the points you addressed. I will however not go as far as with the PotM, she's really ugly even for wc3 in my opinion, but I'm definitely going to reduce polys whereever ingame-detail won't suffer as much.

Conc. the proportions - it seems you're quite right there indeed. I will try to make it more gnomish.

Edit: Question for you TA (and everyone else of course too) - is there a way to apply two-sided textures in MS3D? And if so, does the exporter support it?

Yeah, I agree the PotM is crap. Maybe something like Thrall?

Okay, Update here -



Got rid of a lot of unnecessary Polys, now down to 1513. That's still quite a lot but I'm going to stick with it for now as I have the feeling anything removed from now on will go at the expense of details.

I also finished my first attempt of texturing the model, it's far from 'good' and even further from 'done'. I have to say I hardly used Photoshop before and therefore really suck at it. Proper lighting/shadowing seems to be the thing my texture lacks most.
It also seems to have too much teamcolor and the blue parts in the boots/gloves/helmet don't really fit. The red parts in the spear aren't teamcolor, not happy with them either.

I'd be very happy for any suggestions on how to improve the texture.

As a last thing, I took my first attempts of animating my model (The screenshot is taken from a simple stand animation). I got two major problems so far:
1) The animations speed - I've read in a tut that 1 second ingame equals 960 frames. That definitely can't be true for milkshape's definition of a frame though. Can anybody help me out?

2) Those marked spots on the screenshot - I've read somewhere the game engine would fill those automaticly, which doesn't seem to be the case. I didn't find that covered in any tut though being a very major problem for me right now. Am I missing something?

Milkshape is, by default, 24 frames per second. Though this can be altered, I do believe the Milkshape exporter is hard-wired to use this value.

I really must insist that you at least try to come up with more original ideas rather than just copying the (terrible looking) models from WoW.