Skin of the WEEK

[Jester]

An other skin from Aberiu (I really enjoy your skin, nice work )




DL link: http://forums.epicgames.com/threads/984 ... ter-Rocket

[Azarael]

Incredible. Looks totally professional and the specular mask is art. The best character ever made for UT2004.

[iZumo]

Is that for UT2004 or UT3?

[Ollievrthecool]

Is that for UT2004 or UT3?

2004

[proof]

Yea looks good, especially the specular like Aza said already, Im only judging by the screenshots though. But there is one thing that really bothers me and which you should redo - the shoulder. It appears to me that she has no shoulder, if any almost no muscles. I cant see the end of the pectoralis, it looks just cut off (could also be the result of bad skinning). Even though "sexy female characters" require almost no anatomy knowledge, you shouldve spent more effort on it. Also the head is too big imo but thats artistic freedom, so if you want it like that, its fine. There are a few minor issues but players and other non-professionals wont bother. So yea, overall good work.

[Aberiu]

Can you share a few tricks on skinning? The shoulder area has always been a huge pain in the ass for me. Since there's no twist bones in UT2 skeletons and the game doesn't seem to support skin morph and similar stuff, I'm not sure what can be done about this. Every time I skin a character it ends up weird:

[proof]

Well, I dont really know if there is much you can do since youre using the rig provided by epic, right? Anyway, there are a few things I can share:
1. The "T-pose" is usually the middle between the extremes to reduce geometry- and UV distortions to a minimum. If you look at the UT2004 T-pose (or even at the one from UT3 which is more extrem) you will notice that the characters arent ment to raise their arm like that at any time (no climbing, grabbing, etc). So any animation which raises the arm will have its difficulties.
2. If the characters have to raise their arm in UT2004, most of them have huge shoulder pads to cover those areas.
3. Also, most of the characters inlcuding yours from the gif are quite lowpoly. Having only a few Polys available on areas with a lot of movement is obviously bad But... old engine, cant be helped.
4. A proper edge flow will help reducing difficulties to a minimum. Many beginners just extract an arm out of the upper body (like this: http://digital-sculpture.co.uk/wp-conte ... geflow.jpg or this: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GKFG2TRQht8/T ... dymesh.png ) and that is complete crap. The pectoralis and the delta muscle have to be in one edge flow (like this: http://blenderartists.org/forum/attachm ... 1354815017 or this: http://www.creativecrash.com/system/pho ... 1277393552 )
4. The rig itself (bones, joints etc) is very simple in UT2004 and doesnt support much of the extras provided by maya or max. As far as I know it doesnt even support Blend shapes. So yea, like you already said, having only joints and bones available makes life hard.
5. And at last one important thing which I see being done wrong very often. Most of the motion when raising your arm comes from the shoulder (the trapezius) not the delta-muscle. You can try that out by letting your arm hang relaxed and putting your other hand on your shoulder. Then lift your arm slowly straight up (some sort of a flying motion) and you will see that the shoulder will start to raise very very early. I dont know if the animation from your gif is made by epic, but you will see that the shoulder doesnt move up even a bit. All whats moving is just the upper arm and the result is the twisted shit. Besides, the whole arm is completly out of order when its up. Someone really fucked up there.

[Aberiu]

I dont know if the animation from your gif is made by epic

It is. I'm not really into animation. There are quite a few animations which involve raising hands and the default characters also look terrible while performing them.

A proper edge flow will help reducing difficulties to a minimum

The polycount in my case is 6500 tris. Some people on the epic forums are still complaining about high polycounts of the custom content so I wanted to keep it as low as possible. The characters on the screenshots provided by you seem to be subdivided, so they are not even for the games, right? I doubt it will be of any use to me.

Here's a T-pose of my character: http://fav.me/d78wffk
Do the shoulders look weird? What do you think?
You can also download the character and see the wireframe in UEd if that helps.

Upd. Now that I think about it I might lower the vertices in the armpit areas a bit. I've already found at least 3 things which are broken so I was going to make an update anyway. Maybe next week.

[proof]

Yea making Characters for a 10 year old game is always a struggle. One the one hand the engine cant take many polys, many players still have old PCs and most of them want the characters to fit into the UT2004 setting (as in 2-3k Tris, 1k Tex for Head and Body I think).

Well, yea the character on the first screenshot seems to be just noob crap with a high polycount. The other 3 however have a reasonable polycount for games. I just wanted to point out the difference in the edgeflow so I googled some random pics.

Well, in the T-pose without a diffuse it looks better but still not good. Not sure, if Im allowed to post something like that on this forum, but maybe that helps to understand what I mean about the shoulder (besides, hows she gonna raise her aim with those tight shoulder pads anyway?). The arm just doesnt get thinner in the area of the shoulder, in your mesh however it looks like it does.

[Azarael]

You're clear to post nudes for modelling purposes, go ahead.

Michie, stop shitting up this thread.