Gratuitous Eye Candy Thread

[Casuir]

The thickness of limbs is relative...and I think the later versions of GW miniatures just went way too far. These are humans after all!

Sorry to disagree but they're not actually, the fluff says that their armour is fused to their bodies and cant be removed, sortof an exoskeleton if you like. That'd be my main gripe with these guys, they look too much like normal guys wearing armour. Its the helmets I think, they look a little oversized compared with the rest and faces shouldnt be visible through the visor, a black slit would be much more menacing.

[Eufarius]

true they do look thin maybe making them buffer will help?

[Dogman55]

true they do look thin maybe making them buffer will help?

The thing is Bwian says that if they look buffer, annimations and joints begin to look sloppy, I think. But this also leaves me to think, what will you guys do with creatures like orcs and Lizardmen that are either much taller, buffer, or both more then a man? Can you rework skeletons to make it less sloppy?

[Bwian]

OK .... reality check time:

1) Yes ..we can make the skeleton change to broaden the shoulders and make the model look beefire. Downside is... you would need a COMPLETE set of animations for the movements. I will be doing this for the greenskins and will re-use the change for the Lizardmen and a few others with some scdaling. I will also do it for the Dwarf race, since there is no other way to do Dwarves. I have already planned to treble the number of animations in the game, and this has a resource overhead....both in terms of the size of the mod, and of the speed of gamepley. I don't want to further up the size of the animations file unless I absolutely have to.

2) If you make limbs too thick, they do not bend well on a skeleton like the game has. The subtlety of movement goes unless you ramp up the polygon count and sculpt the msucles to hide the effect. I have gone for a compromise that allows us to get something workable without looking too bad.

3) The head is already underscale to give the illusion of a bulkier body. I can take that a bit further ... but again....there are limits before things start to look a little odd when seen against the other models in game.

So...where does this leave us:

First off, I can change the face texture of the helmetless variant easy enough. Something more pale and unhealthy will be the order of the day. I wanted the faces to be visible on the ordinary warriors, but not on the more elite units. These guys would probably want to keep their faces hidden! The upgrades will also be featuring mutations on some of the visible bits.

Secondly..I have some ideas how I can bulk up the arms and legs with some added plates to uncrease the size of the pieces, but leave the knee and elbow joints untouched. There will be some issues ... but I think I can hide most of it. Whatever I do here, I must work with the stock skeleton for now. If it is possible to introduce a scale factor without the need for multiple versions of the animations, then I would fiurther decrease the size of the head and up the overall scale by about 5-10% ... but only if I can do it without animation pain!

thirdly ...don't worry about the greenskins or the Lizards ... they are sufficiently non-human to need a rebuild anyway. I just don't want to overdo the new skeletons ... there are limits if we are to keep it playable.

Casuir raised an issue about the armour on a Chaos Warrior. I double checked the text, and the ordinary Warriors are definitely human. They are the best of the warrior Northmen, who survive long enough to rise in the ranks. The Champions have the Chaos Armour that never comes off ... not the ordinary guys.

Finally ... we are constrained by some of the game mechanics and underlying hard-coded features and functions. There will inevitably be comproimises, and we will do what we can to work around it .. but there will be times when we can't do exactly what we want. For those of you familiar with modding this game, I am sure you have been there! For those of you who have never tried to mod an TW game ... welcome to reality!