maconbot

ok just dropped ya some dough, wheres mine :-)

i was going to go throw you $15 to help keep things alive here, but the only support fund i found only gave $65 as an option. when is eta to fuse being added to lifetime member downloads? i see the leather one but what about the other 2?

fair enough, i won't argue...the rule is only use the poly's you need, and that is not done here.

 

i do know, fuse was a venture for steve. and i do think it is his best work to date. i do agree that other than the few low poly models on the store, usually steve uses too high poly count and texture atlasing can be improved immensely compared to his competition.

 

but price here is great too, but generally i need to clean up and optomize and rearrange everything. but that is not unique to steve's work, i have purchased hundreds of art content assets and literally less than 10 were done the generally agreed upon best way to go...which in and of itself has taught me a lot.

 

i would join you in encouraging steve to continue to improve in above areas and others, but in general i am pleased with this fuse work...i can take it from here. he has done the heavy lifting, and in time for me to use these with mixamo while adobe has it for free.

 

i do know i tried to take some of his OBF OBM models and turn them into fuse models and it was going to take several days to do. so i am glad to be saved all this time, and do also join with you in asking for the poly improvements eventually. i do know fuse has its own workflow, and an easy step one prolly necessitated high poly for first round just to get it done and have it look nice.

 

NOTE to ADMIN:

steve, on donations, i do plan to help you along...lifetime member here. but i have yet to use any of your art in my game. i kinda planned on donating once i started using your stuff i would then throw you some support bones as i could. any chance you can add these fuse models to the member download area. i see the leather guy in there but not the ranger. and the other one...townsman

tom (above poster) that is the nature of fuse. and yes that is at the top end for a main character on like a xbox one, etc. which is what you want. then it is up to you to LOD (level of detail) the models or make mobile versions by dropping the export into any of the various tools out there or into your own modeling program.

 

anyone in game design is encouraged to know how to make their own LOD, and mobile versions depending on target, as it is hard for creators to nail your specific poly count. i would not expect Steve to provide a lower poly model for fuse as that is not the fuse way. perhaps adobes mixamo may even come out with a cruncher of sorts soon. but there are a lot of ways to do this depending on game engine etc. this would be another topic, but not something i would ding Steve on.

wow 3 likes on my OP, my best yet lol. i like the new site layout, easier to navigate. any luck on that research?

Well, first thing would be just your "off the cuff" opinion (since you live in uk) what assets that you've created would still be historically accurate to use.

 

If I didn't care about authenticity, I would just grab the generic medieval guys and put them in...but I think they are more 1500s yea?

 

Basically need, clothing, armor, weapons, props, crating gear. But really most of the crafting gear would be universal so may consider starting there, because I believe that is one area you are light on? idk...or maybe just reorganizing all the existing stuff into a crafting pack and maybe add a few things would be a good place to start.

 

My personal game has a timeline, so I have some prehistoric stuff...but nothing really around 1000 AD. And I am allowing the player to advance through time so I at least need a few things to get them from greek/roman centurian to knights of the 1500s. I am still pretty weak on this period of history, as its ignored by hollywood for some reason...which is why I think doing some stuff there would be interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_conquest_of_England

 

I was doing some reading on the Viking conquest of England and thought this would be an interesting period of history not many people know about.

 

Would any of the art already created by you work for this period? What wouldn't work. Thanks Steve (and others)

best uma to date.

Thanks for clearing that up Steve. I think I was getting confused with all the additions being discussed what was indeed included with membership and what wasn't. I myself would even consider paying additional money to help support creating and providing scenes etc. This wasn't the problem. I think it was just getting hit with the same email 3x a week. Hopefully a better email list management system could be figured out at some point. I do want product news, but not sent 3x because of being busy and not looking into a better way on setting up something proper. I do again thank you for making the quality and quantity affordable. The 2D stuff just saves us all work. Hopefully icons, and inventory pics are on the agenda. Cheers. Chad

After the slew of emails asking me for money…I'd like to see something new planned free as part of the lifetime membership plan.

Looking forward to this! http://arteria3d.com/products/medmod-prepurchase

http://arteria3d.invisionzone.com/index.php?/gallery/image/31-screen-shot-2013-12-16-at-22838-pm/

 

Meshes OBM_Legs and OBM_Torso have a gap. This is in T pose. Added to my gallery images for ref.

You understand the instruction above even after reading 5x are clear as mud. Is it not possible to just have 2 links 1 unity package that is setup right and one generic. Had to give you the business a little this holiday season. Thank you however for getting this out, despite the confusing details.

Super thankful for this Steve. I was indeed surprised to see the female that quickly. It goes to show how much was already there just not obvious to us. And also goes to show how quickly you can bust things out lol. Great job and thank you very much for listening to our feedback. I am encouraged and look forward to continuing the learning curve together. Now it's my turn to learn. I think I'll begin researching solidifying the mesh and textures to a single atlas at runtime on the code side of things. That will probably be the goal this up coming year.

Thanks for the tips…I found this: http://u3d.as/conten...esh-baker-2/3DL

 

However if we are combining the current UV's into a mega atlas the size of any characters merged uv diffuse texture would exceed 4096 … as the maps currently are all about 2048 and we are talking a 2048 for a leg, 2048 for a hat, etc. I'd like to see some improvement on how these UV's get made up. It's something I am working on in my own art and will always be a growing need.

 

At first I thought, well with hard drives getting bigger and download times getting faster…who really cares in the long run. But I have come to realize, outside of the reducing the draw calls….that I will eventually want height maps, along with my normal maps and specularity maps. And in coming future we may even start wanting decals available. So that can get to be an extreme amount of file space. So less is more here.

With respects to the medieval content, and indeed the new Pirate - surely those all fit together. Counting all the styles in the medbase, medfemale, and the other characters, there are many many character variations. What other characters do you wish to see here.

 

I also agree with this request and we have danced around it in various other threads. As far as the above mentioned fantasy models:

...what I found was that the base kits were overwhelming at first and very difficult to find out what types of characters I could make with it. I quickly found out that really the base kits are just all the different models you see in the store put onto one skeleton. I found that if I tried to wear one leg type with a different torso type it wouldn't line up and look really bad. If there are a crazy amount of character that do line up - a sample Unity Scene along with a text file containing what matches what would help a great deal. The Unity scene would contain each major variation of the model, although really having any minor variation might be the best bet. So we can really know where we are at rather than just assuming it is workable…with out trying to use it in a practical sense like we have.

 

And really to have a great pack…all interchangeable pieces should attach not just a few. As I opted for membership I still feel I've received the value and beyond of my membership…however if a person just bought the base kits I think they would be at a loss and feel the kits are disorganized from a coding perspective.

 

I think what we are experiencing here is the typical communication gap that exists between the artist and the coders. We certainly all need to come with one voice so he is not hearing 20 different voices and ideas. My main frustration was finding as described above - a lack of standardization of the models and textures and materials. Making a unified female and male character controller seemed to almost require as much work as building one from scratch as it just wasn't setup the way it needed to be.

 

Also yes the bone weights have problems especially in the female models on smaller framework game engines like XNA.

 

I agree with above suggestions. And I think doing the following will make your library more enjoyable for you as well as for us.

 

The List:

Single mesh nude base male and female

- optional underwear/bathing suit texture

Ideally the same equipment mesh fits both male and female

If this is too hard, the same look is available for male and female with 2 meshes but same material and texture files

- optional looks can be added later that are unique to sex later, however we need a base for a start that is the same for both

Standard Naming Convention and Nomenclature

- Single Track and Broken out FBX animations all have the same name

- Textures are all the same

- Materials are all the same

 

Using this approach we can begin to come up with different materials that allow for equipping our character. If we want to allow a sheep, bear, cat, bone skinned leg armor - this should be easy to do in the UV mapped texture. You also can soon offer 30 different textures that fit a basic leg and torso setup and have great value.

 

I agree start with fantasy, and then build these suits/armor sets/equip sets into sci fi etc. Keep the same base model offer different faces and hair…and let's clean up the UV maps while we are doing this.

 

From a texture artists perspective there needs to be a lot of clean up. Draw calls need to be reduced on static objects. Materials should be shared and reshared as much as possible. I recommend creating a palette of textures that you continue to grow. I would much rather have a building that uses 5 materials but those materials are shared across my 30 building scene…and thus only have 5 draw calls versus…each building have it's own texture and now my scene has 30 draw calls, huge file size and I am limited to desktop apps only.

 

I have some examples of great texture artists that I can share with you if need to see an example.

 

I appreciate you being willing to accept feedback. I love the models and your style…just a continuous improvement thing here.

 

Cheers,

maconbot

I just discovered flattr.com it could work perfect for the voting system idea...but makes it simpler. There are a few other options out there CentUp.com etc. But flattr seemed to be the first in.

Could create a separate forum, but hopefully its in same domain as this one, just a link or something. I'm more familiar with Wordpress so I'm not sure what in vision zone offers. Perhaps anytime someone posts a request on the current forum you drop them a link to go vote. There may b some google docs type survey that's perfect for this. If not interested in the kick starter approach. May consider letting people start with 10 votes. These votes are free. They can buy additional votes for X dollars and get Y votes. Perhaps you just do this manually until you find something that automates it for you. Once a project hits Z amount if votes it starts getting worked on. I know as an artist myself I'd do 50% of my time what inspires me and the other half what brings in money.

chicken shaders (or I forget what go used in the pack) are pretty expensive btw (in Unity - i'm on a mac). You may look at switching out to the shaders in the AngryBots example as I think everything you are doing (reflections, etc) is done in there and way cheaper processing too.

I'd love to have a 3 way and 4 way corridor connector as well. The construction pack works (as pictured) in allowing manual creation of a 3 way hall. However this gets tedious when a connector with sides and roof can be created for us.

It is good to know that you already put this to practice. I'd suggest making this single person request ability for non exclusive material a little more public such as a forum topic of something. Just so we know we have the avenue if we need. I'd also suggest doing the poll system and not trying to merge the two ideas as they function better separately. Polling is a way of crowd source funding for you...a bid process would be even more fitting. And if our bid wins we pay...could even consider utilizing a service like kickstarter to handle this bidding for you i.e. create different project ideas and we can go agree to pay, lock in our bid amount...if it gets funded bam all $ processing is done for you with little hassle. Then just point to it from here. This also increases you exposure to a new audience. Obviously the balancing act would be not to get overly busy and miss expectations.

What about making some "proffesional edition" without compromises targeted at advanced users? Price can be much higher.

 

Good points. I'd prefer a donation goal or something, rather than making lifetime members pay again. I'm sure Steve would avoid that. However setting a donation option would allow us to pay for things we want first, money always motivates.

I am looking for the LOD's mentioned here http://arteria3d.com/collections/animated-characters/products/fem-scifi-base

 

 

Model is supplied with 3levels of Detai l

Main:8986

Lod1:5050

Lod2:3556

Lod3:1748

 

I was also trying to find the Female Recon here and had no luck looking in downloads area.

 

I've ran into a problem with the base pack in that having 3-4 models wearing nothing, slow due to try count on Xbox 360 and mobile. The characters are the largest tri count objects in my scene and when I hide them my frame rate goes back up. Draw calls I'm sure are a factor as well but I understand it's a give and take. Having access to the LOD's will let me decide where and when to give. Thanks!

What engine r u using? They both use the same rig...so it's just a matter of applying it.

Are you planning to add all weapons to the revised Male Base? I had mentioned here but not sure if you saw it.

 

Thanks for all your hard work!

 

http://arteria3d.invisionzone.com/index.php?/topic/87-weapons-on-base-packs/