Well, if you count both versions, which were released pretty close together, Rayman's my most popular vertex so far, and it pretty much looked like crap. There've been a few people who wanted to see a better one, and I thought it was worth a shot. (also wouldn't mind reclaiming the downloads lost to the repaint)
Changes so far: Much bigger eyes. That was the biggest problem before. Hair has been flattened out, so it looks smooth (as opposed to having hair antenna popping out the middle of his forehead) Whole head has been shrunk so it fits better. Bandana has been vertexed in the front, so it sticks out, and the shape of the overalls is gone. Almost everything has been recolored.
But anyway, I want to get it right this time, so I set out the preveiw first. Anything else you notice, you can say something. (actually, looking at the pics now, I think I'll try making his pupils a bit smaller)
Yeah, Peppy's mostly about Body type, and size relative to other Starfoxers. Plus Wario always needs more skins, while Pikachu always needs more slots. And I've heard that Pika's ears are near impossible to work with anyway.
For Blanka, it's fighting style. Might be half monkey or whatever, but he's not that big, and he doesn't really fight with muscles, he fights with claws, acrobatics, and energy barriers. Plus I'm already making a Street Fighter over DK, and I sorta don't want to see DK again after that. (stupid texture mapping)
Friends and acquaintances of Kitty Corp, I have terrible news. Some friends have finally forced me to download League of Legends. *dramatic pause* *cough* I sort of lost a week.
But, I've been finishing up the Zangief, which is now almost done (he's still got Haggar's head), as well as experimenting with a revamp for Rayman. (will have to do some weird stuff to get the eyes to look anything like they're supposed to, but it should work) The former will hopefully be out tonight or tomorrow, the latter sometime this week.
Well, I think I'm going to put my next big hack up to a poll, so I don't spend another three weeks without being committed to some project. Either the peer pressure will make me go faster, or it will just make it awkward when I disappear and reappear later.
Although....I can't seem to figure out how to start said poll...Don't see the option anywhere...
Hopefully someone can tell me how it works on this board...In the meantime, here's the things I would put on it.
Slippy Toad (Squirtle) Peppy Hare (Wario) KH Goofy (Lucario) Kerrigan / Queen of Blades (Pit) Blanka (Wolf) Zangief (DK)
So, I finished painting him, fixed all of the little details, played around with him in game, figured he's ready for release, my best work by FAR.
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And then I thought to myself, "hmm, wasn't there a Spyro Charizard on my system somewhere? I bet that'd make a cool snapshot", and so I found the right color and it was this.
And then I just wanted to cry a little on the inside.
Even when I think I'm getting good at painting I'm still terrible. So now I'm pondering whether to release, or to attempt to shoop in however much of Cuckoos texture would be possible.
Kinda excited about this one. Been wanting to do it forever, but it always seemed like it'd be too hard. It actually wasn't. As you can see, I've barely started painting it (and the only thing I have painted is too bright), but the shape is almost done (forgot the frill), and it works really well in game with the existing animations.
I took a few pictures so I could ask you guys for help with patching one of his legs which kept screwing up, but right before posting, I tried one last idea and it worked. But this is about all I can show for the moment.
Texture update update. Well, if you count both versions, which were released pretty close together, Rayman’s my most popular vertex so far, and it pretty much looked like crap. There’ve been a few people who wanted to see a better one, and I thought it was worth a shot. (also wouldn’t mind reclaiming the downloads lost to the repaint)
Changes: Much bigger eyes. That was the biggest problem before. Hair has been flattened out, so it looks smooth (as opposed to having hair antenna popping out the middle of his forehead) Whole head has been shrunk so it fits better. Bandana has been vertexed in the front, so it sticks out, and the shape of the overalls is gone. Almost everything has been recolored. Problems: Well, the shadowing on the back of the head still looks bad. But not hugely noticeable.
Zangief joins the Brawl! Some people might remember me posting a preview of him a long time ago, but halfway through, that hack was eventually turned into Haggar instead, and this was more or less abandoned due to lack of interest. But I ran a poll for the next project and Z ended up winning. So it’s finished.
The only thing that needed to be vertexed from the Haggar model was the mohawk and beard. The rest was just painting. Which was sort of why it was stalled. Vertexing can be an interesting challenge, and it can make something impressive. Most of the time, texturing is just irritating. (at least on my end)
Spyro the Dragon joins the Brawl. This is probably my most nostalgia-inducing video game character, so I knew at some point I would have to bring him on, in all his quadrupedal glory.
The wings animate nicely, the legs, not so much. Ivysaur’s skeleton is much wider than this vertex, so zooming in at the wrong moment will show limbs stretching in weird places. The entire tail had to be made from, I think, nine verticies, so it’s a bit low-res. I turned his vines into Dragonfly shapes, which means he has two Sparx’s at some points, but I figure it’s nice to be able to see where your hitboxes are.
The paint job leaves something to be desired. I saw Cuckoos’s Charizard hack after I was done, and all the pride I had felt about making it look better than my others just disintegrated. Ah well…
The Lemmings join the Brawl. They uh…..they probably won’t last long.
So I wanted to do something different, and the ICs need more good textures, and Lemmings aren’t what one would consider a high-res character, so it was an easy paint.
There are two (actually three) versions in the download. One where the two lemmings are identical, which would be most accurate, and another where the Nana is a lighter shade of blue so you can tell them apart. (and a third where those colors are reversed in case you want to place them in the slots FitPopo01, 04 or 05, where Nana leads, and thus, turns the coloring backwards)
Finally. Done with schoolwork for the rest of the year. Secured a workspace. Reclaimed motivation. Time for piledrivers.
So I guess I promised a Zangief. It exists, but about halfway through making it (which I guess places that somewhere between two weeks and two years ago), I noticed that, you know, it would be a lot faster to shift gears and make Haggar instead. And then once I was done it would actually be easier to go forward and finish the Zangief, because I’d have most of the texturing done already. I thought about releasing them at the same time, but it’s been far too long as it is, and the rest of you are making me look bad. So I’ll just send this out.
The texture has some issues, as always. DK turned out to be a pain to work with. His forearms appear to have non-euclidean texture mapping and smashing his toes into shoes leaves some ugly shading behind. He also has one too many suspenders, but, not much to be done about that.
Master Higgins from Adventure Island. I remember this as being one of the first textures we used for Mario back in the early days. But even though I’ve got friends who are fans of the games, the texture’s been removed just because it doesn’t hold up against the current stuff. So on request, I put in a few hours of modern techniques, and the result is this. Some recoloring, mostly I just reshaped the parts that made it way too obvious that he was just Mario + Paint. The overalls, shoes, hat, mustache.
The original texture was made by Dhragen of Stack Smash, who doesn’t appear to be active anywhere, so all due credit to him.
There have been a lot of Chun Li projects attempted, by good hackers, but I'm not sure I've ever seen any of them released. Maybe getting this character perfect is so important that by the time you might get it finished, the techniques you're using are obsolete. Or maybe something HAS been released somewhere, and now I look silly for making this. But I don't think so. Anyway, this is a pretty extensive vertex, so hopefully I'll at least have the edge in that regard.
Hair completely redone. Ribbons and Bracelets added. Legs and feet are appropriately sized. The texturing's my best work thus far. And it's released.
This is now, probably the coolest thing I've done on the internet.
It's not perfect. Zooming in, particularly on the back of the head, is not polite. But it definitely looks better than my other stuff thus far. Obviously, the limbs have been pinched away. The head has been completely reshaped. I used some spare polygons to add a 3d knot to the back of his bandanna. I renamed a few bones to make his hair permanent, and as I understand it, that's probably going to screw up your Wifi (I never really use Wifi, so I've never paid attention to that)
Looks pretty sweet in motion. Body parts flying everywhere, accentuated by Luigi's strange animations.
For those who don't know, this is the hero of the strangest game of the last several years, Deadly Premonition. You should go look it up. Anyway, my Smash crew essentially demanded that this texture must happen. So I took it as an exercise in learning Photoshop techniques. The result is...adequate. Also attempted to make a stage, but you don't want to see the results of that. I did however Brawlitize 9 DP songs (which if you've played the game, you'd know that's basically the whole soundtrack), but I've never really bothered to upload songs before, so I won't worry about it unless someone wants them.
The Balloon Fighter. Now with a balloon! (and a harness, a helmet, and a nose)
You'd think that this sort of vertex wouldn't hold itself together, but it seems to work surprisingly well. Plus, due to the physics behind the backpack (or something), when you're in the air, the Balloon will actually follow wherever you point the stick. (most evident when descending from a single jump). Totally looks like I did that on purpose. (I did not)
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That aside, this isn't the best of work. Zooming in you can find several little holes in the texture, some of which I don't have a clue how they got there. The Balloon hasn't been reshaped at all yet, it looks fine in motion, for the most part, but one side of it is very flat. I should really take the time to experiment a little more with different angles and lengths of string. But I'd rather have something imperfect, uploaded and available, then to sit on it until I think it's perfect. That's why "amateur" is in the topic title.
Also, I'm still a terrible artist, and in the end decided to borrow from another texture rather than stick to my own abilities (which produced a two tone monstrosity) So I used Pako1034's Balloonist as a starting point. There's an issue, in that I don't think that's the same Pako from StackSmash, and the PM button seems to point to a dead account. So basically, I don't know who made it, and posted it anyway. But it appears that the original was basically a copy-paste job from Blue Mario, so hopefully it isn't a big deal.
Any feedback you might have to offer would be VERY appreciated. Especially if you find that I did something stupid, so I can hopefully be able to fix it.
Spike, the protagonist of the original Ape Escape! I Used Syrus's "No backpack/hat brim" file as a starting point, and the spikiness of his hat was done (somewhat sloppily) by me. Comes with a free stun club.
... (not sure why his hat looks pixelized in this shot. Hopefully just something with the BIN converter)
One of Ape Escape's titular Escaping Apes! The jetpack is designed to look vaguely like UFO tech. The Hat was removed by Jack H. The helmet was shaped out from his head (ouch) by me.
Machop is also finished. I meant to release it last night, but someone on my team site Koo.pac released a new hack and I didn't want to bump his post off of the first slot before it could even get a comment.
I'll release Machop later tonight, then present Ark and Machop on Koo.pac tomorrow.
Heh. Honestly, I don't really think the blog moves fast enough for the top billing to be much of a concern. (Plus, having the most recent post just makes me want to slack off)
I'm honestly a bit puzzled as to why the two are separated. It's getting to the point where you hardly see one without the other. Where's the distinction?
My stuff is clearly more vertex-heavy now, but it wasn't back when I was starting out. Should I be trying to move the topic? Start a new one? I dunno.
They kind of are. I think, starting on the head, I assumed that messing with the eyes would be way too complicated, too many little polygons and textures, so I avoided altering anything nearby. in retrospect, everything else I had to do to get the head in line, was every bit as complicated as that would have been, so I probably could have handled it, but I don't really want to bother with it now. Already made a release. Might go back to it if I ever get to updating any of the other ones.
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But this is about all I can show for the moment.
