Quake Reforged Project

[Lightning_Hunter]

agreed, also I feel the fur-effect looks a little too regular, almost carpet-like!
great stuff as always though...

The fur is REALLY hard to get correct in the game. It's even harder to accomplish while maintaining detail on the skin itself. If the fur is too clear looking, you have a furry Shambler that looks like a polar bear. If you make it blend, then it doesn't look much like fur at all. It's hard to get a good compromise. I personally think the fur looks decent in their current version. I don't want to be too picky, because it may never be perfect. It sounds like we definitely both agree on the black spots, however.

[Nergal]

Those black "dots" are darkened areas of the skin visibile where the fur is partly missing.
While making skins I prefer using higher contrasts, because monsters ingame are fast and seen for brief moments, despite the fact that you can slower the time with console commands to scrutinize them..
It's a trick to add in volume and make the model appear more 3d, but as I said it's a trick, glaringly evident in still images.
I liked it in movement but I've retouched the skin anyway


post-lunch edit
I wanted to address the problem with fur and normalmaps.
We usually produce normalmaps thanks to the nvidia plugin for photoshop, enhancing the effect afterward with our custom macro. The result is often exaggerated but compensates well for the low-poly models, which is a main concern here.
Metal and stone materials are easier to render, while fur and flesh are a different beast: it's a prevalent problem even in modern games, eventually called "plaster-hair syndrome", when fur is drawn with good detail, but lit as if carved from plaster.
We're not at the point of needing subsurface scattering (would be hilarious), but fur/hair are translucent so no individual clump of hair should be opaque enough to produce sharp shadows.
At the moment, we try to soften the effect with multiple copies of the normal, blurred and layered on top at different opacities.
This helps to solve the 'plaster' look, also with no effect on framerate, though I'd really like to test the old fur shader present in quake3 and not implemented yet in darkplaces.

[Hazza]

Whoa!
I LOVE that retouch!
And look forward to seeing this model with your modified light stats in game!!!

[osjclatchford]

...I LOVE that retouch!
And look forward to seeing this model with your modified light stats in game!!!

me too, and please forgive me if I seemed judgemental on the fur, I had no idea on the process and have made it evidently clear that, due to my naievity, I should stfu on such matters! The progress so-far makes me very excited, and I wait for the finished job with much anticipation...

[Nergal]

We said before that the Chthon skin should have been used for the Lavaman too, but I changed my mind.
This is the new lavaman (or another Chthon if you want)




@osjclatchford: please don't, we appreciate criticism. this forum stands out to be educated and if something seems incorrent, we simply provide more infos

[Lightning_Hunter]

Awesome! I like it a lot.

[osjclatchford]

yeah, good stuff...

[Mancubus]

Excellent! I would even want to use this as the skin for Chton, maybe!

THANKS!

[Seven]

...nothing more to say Nergal

wonderful.

[Hazza]

Splendid!! Incredibly lifelike!
(ignoring that a Lavaman probably isn't actually a living creature).

[smoketetsu]

Wow, I was just checking in and noticed no more updates\messages since the 28th of last month!

[LambentHammerBurst]

Skins with this amount of detail are not a single days work or even a weeks worth. They are doing very high resolution work then making proper normal and gloss maps for them too. One skin can easily take over a month.

As for messages with, well that's due to no new eye candy being released/teased.

[smoketetsu]

Yeah I could see you saying that if I where posting status update requests every night.. I in no way was suggesting what you where saying... that they would pump out finished skins every night or anything. I wasn't even asking for a release or for a tome of stuff. I was just wondering what was going on. But I guess I should just take the silence as "they are busy on it and everyone else is elsewhere" or something.

[LambentHammerBurst]

Ah we're all used to "silence" from the Reforged Team - it's usually a good thing as usually once they return, they have some new content to either release or show off.

[TR2N]

Wow! Good to see that the things are going on!