Rolo Kipp wrote...
I am in awe with the speed and ease with which you continuously toss off quality stuff, AD.
Speed, sometimes. Ease, sometimes. Quality, working on it.
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These five particular models are not really complex, there's no animation, very little original texture work. I don't have near the 3D modeling skill of some folks (especially when it comes to textures). I do a lot of adapting the work of others to my vision.
- Stone arches: started with a large sphere, applied reef texture from lord of worms' Undersea tileset, changed to editable mesh, deleted some vertices, moved others around, copied reddish coral pieces from one of the Undersea tiles. Cloned stone section and chopped off the top for the .pwk. Exported, then changed model name for the next one, changed reef texture for bedrock texture, exported again.
- Bubbles: took a VFX bubbles placeable from the 1.67 or 1.68 patch (with NWNExplorer Reborn), straightened out the emitters, stretched them out to 500 x 10 cm, increased the emitter birthrates by a lot, exported.
- Water elemental: took my remade "classic" elemental, stripped out all but the base torso part and eye emitters, changed torso to be unrendered, used my water elemental as a supermodel for animations (it's designed to match up with that model's appearance anyway), exported.
- Penguin: pulled BioWare's penguin and falcon models out with NWNExplorer Reborn, imported both into gmax at the same time. Rotated/moved penguin parts to more closely match up with falcon parts. Renamed penguin torso, head, and wings to match body, head, and inner wing section names of the falcon. Deleted the falcon parts (but not the model base!). Deleted the penguin model base. Moved a few vertices around to slim down the penguin's posterior and move it's feet. Exported.
Oh, and I do
a lot of Reset X Form. Unlink desired parts, reset x form, re-link desired parts, export the model, reset, import the model to keep working. Anytime I move a pivot point, rotate a part, scale a part, or do anything other than moving individual vertices, I make sure to unlink/reset x form/link as soon as I think I'm likely done with that particular change. Saves me lots of headaches later.
Also, anytime I make a new object/part and want to apply a texture, I make sure to apply it
before converting to an editable mesh.
Speaking of textures, they are my biggest weakness when it comes to models (besides animating!). I'm pretty good with using seamless textures for many shapes, but things like texturing a brand new creature part (such as a face) are currently beyond my skill...although redoing an existing texture for an existing face is quite doable.
For those out there considering starting on model making for NWN, I suggest starting with existing model and altering them to see how gmax's (or 3dsmax's) various tools work. Play around. Ask questions here in the forums. I personally have no formal training with any sort of software, it's all gained by playing around with programs and asking questions when I can't figure something out.
