drake staff HD-remake

[IronWarfare]

Great! Can you also make the M.I.R.V. launcher?

[talisa]

fixed the link of staff in the first post of this thread.
JD noticed the link was wrong, so i fixed it.

also @ warfare
hmm mebbe, but its not so high up on my list of things i wanna make.
but i do totally wanna make a complete HD drake some time, starting with textures and such.
like copying over the hi-res textures available for hexen2 for the hexen2 monsters used in the drake mod and such, and the crossbow.
and making textures for all the different versions of standard quake enemies for use with the hi-poly models available

and i wanna find out which textures it are that are used in unforgiven and something wicked map-packs, and make a pack which hopefully replaces all the textures with HD ones, which will hopefully be possible since most of textures used are taken from hexen2 and doom

.

but it is on my to-do list too, the mirv-launcher, since its one of few new weapons,
and that one should be to hard at all since it has a quite basic shape

[kal27]

tailsa, you do not cease to make amazing things, i like the look of this!

[talisa]

haha thanx, i dun think im that amazing though.

this was a rather simple model since it just consists of same basic shapes, and for the texturing i used textures i found through google for all teh materials.
and the animation is a straight back-and-forth type animation so that was easy too

[talisa]

randomly found my staff again and had a look at it again to see what i could fix
since i got more experience with modelling and learned some things on how to better UV-map

went and fixed UV-mapping on almost all parts of the staff so its much better now


-all the rings on the side of the staff have straight UV-mapping now,
several of them were mapped in strange curved shapes.

-the top curved part with the knobs now is UV-mapped like a square rather then like a sphere,
which makes a lot more sense and makes that i can make the textures on all parts be lined up better.

-UVs of knobs have also been fixed, so that all knobs use the exact same pixels of
texture instead of 'approximately' the same space, and their UV has been sized up a bit

-also ive repositioned UV-maps of all parts along the length of the staff to make more sense.
left row is wooden part plus above it in order topring - center - bottomring of top

-UVs of rings of bottom part were weird curved lines and were rotated 90degrees,
which i fixed and i also adjusted the position of UVs of the bottom
to be the same order as the parts at top

-fixing all this also made more space available on textures
so now the gems on sides and the big diamond on top all
have bigger UV-maps to allow for more details on them.

-also, ive fixed the top part of the staff where the diamond rests on.
before the UV-map of that part was oval-shaped, now its round

.

all of that together took me... just over an hour or so,
and the UV-mapping of pretty much all parts of the staff are much improved over how it was before

.

tomorrow or so i will re-do the textures to match the new much improved UV-mapping,
and then i will fix it for both ground and hud versions and export new versions of both with the new UV-mapping

and ill also be adding reflect-maps to make the gems have fancy shine while ill be busy anyway

[talisa]

also, in case you were curious... this was the old not-so-great UV-mapping


its much better now, not?

[MadGypsy]

i dun think im that amazing though

Sure you are, maybe you could even say "awesome"

See how you did your UV map over and it's better? That's something an awesome person would do. So, by default you are at least practicing how to be awesome.

Now back on topic - I agree that your new way is much better. It looks like you used the ol' overlap trick too, on the big gem. As far as the model goes you named everything you can do to it. What about in-game, though? It probably needs some sparkle dust or something when you wave it. The wand equivalent of a muzzle flash.

[talisa]

@Sza
i use blender myself for modelling


@gypsy
overlap? you mean that the gems bottom edge is slightly inside the top of the staff?

about sparkles... yeah the original model has this

but that would look just plain lame on a fancy-looking model.
i still stand by what i said long ago that id wanna add a spikey-halo like flash to it

completely forgot about that flash, while i am gonna re-fix the staff anyway i might add some kinda flash to it

[MadGypsy]

Nah, the overlap I am talking about works like this:

Say you made a character model and unwrapped it in such a way that the arms were separate. You could take (ex) the right arm, flip it on the x and place it right on top of the left arm uv's. This would allow you to:

1) use one arm graphic for both arms
2) use a bigger UV layout because everything is consolidated in halves. You have more room and half the stuff

It looked to me like you did that with the gem, cut it in half and then placed one half on top of the other.

[talisa]

ah yes yes, ive done that the gem at top yush, mapped it so that front&back of it use the same part of texture

[talisa]

dun dun dun.....



new updated version of the staff! now with better UV-mapping, more detailed and nicer textures on gems, and reflect-maps to add fancy shiny to the gems and to the gold parts of staff

btw did i ever say i love reflect-maps?

GET THE NEW VERSION HERE!

.

EDIT: whoops forgot to add the cubemaps to pk3 which are needed for the reflect
fixed link to new version which includes them

[talisa]

earlier today i looked at the staff again cuz i wanted to use it in second life,
and upon looking at it again closely i felt it could look even nicer with some small cosmetic adjustments

-firstly i made the wooden part longer, which i mentioned before a couple times i thought of doing but never did.
now it looks more like a staff instead of a scepter which it looked like before

-secondly i made the wooden part also slightly thinner which looks a bit nicer and also makes it look more like a staff

-and lastly, i upscaled the pick-up a bit cuz it felt a bit small.

first it looked quite small which made it look a bit like a toy or such.
now its roughly the same size as the swords enemies carry, which is more a fitting size for a staff

.

DOWNLOAD VERSION 1.3 OF DRAKE STAFF

[Sza]

nice texture work

[talisa]

thanx