I recently heard a rumor that the upcoming TF:TM game for the PC will be moddable. If this is so, then I can't wait to get my hands on it and start making additional meshes with a more G1 flavor. This is one such mesh I've been working on. It's a bit generic, with a transform scheme that's one part Sideswipe, and one part Windcharger. It turns into an Alfa Romeo GT. Here it is before I finished skinning the abdominal area: And he's done, and animated as a test of his rigging. First of all, the animation is simply motion capture of someone doing spinning back kicks, followed by him transforming into car mode. Second, the link is: http://valandar3d.fools3d.com/BotKick.avi The AVI is 17 meg, 30 seconds long, and uses Xvid Codec. If you don't have Xvid, go to http://www.codecguide.com/ and get the K-lite codec pack (it includes Xvid).
Thats a great looking model. I really liked the animation. But it looked more like some dude wearing a TF costume. Otherwise, it looks cool.
That's because of the Motion Capture I used for the spinning kicks and stuff. When it comes time to animate it for game I won't be using motion capture, but I'll be hand animating it instead, and having it move with more of a sense of weight.
Sweet work man. Low poly is an artform in itself, and you're doing a brilliant job of it. I have to admit to hand animating my TFs too; using human mocap makes them move too... humanlike for my tastes. Keep it up!
nice job, especailly on the rigging even if it is using a human mocap anim, HOWEVER this is taking low-poly to a bit too much of an extreme, it looks more like the amount of polys you would get in say a quake3 model.. TF:TM will have a -vastly- higher polygon count than this, as the previews have already stated the majority of the graphics power is going on the character models rather than the environments, so bearing in mind that there will only be a few TFs onscreen at a time, and that the PC version should be roughly equivalent to the 360 version, i would expect the models to be more along the lines of this level of detail: http://images.elotrolado.net/news2/220906230759_1big.jpg this robot model is about 30,000 polys, at a guess yours is about 1500, even taking into account the curved surfaces? the thighs alone can't be more than 14 polys each.. youve got alot more spare polys to play with! im expecting to see properly rigged facial features, gears and pistons in his joints, fully modelled alloys, the works! you dont want yours to look crapy next to the regular in-game ones after all!
I seriously doubt the movie game will allow 30,000 polygon models - even FPS games of the current "nextgen" are 6,000 to 10,000 triangles. Also, counting triangles, my guy's 3500 polygons. The reason is that if the movie game does NOT turn out to be moddable, I'm going to simply re-animate it for use in an old game called Freedom Force, which has a 2k poly limit (though up to 4k works decently if you have a relatively new system). As for additional polygons, in many cases they won't be needed - I'm replicating the GeeWun look, which means lots of boxes and angled shapes, which coincidentally means fewer polygons. My whole point is that if it's moddable, to have GeeWun style 'Bots rampaging through beating the snot out of the movie bots. And a final note, if the game is Normal map capable, then the above would have even MORE detail available to it from the Normal Map.
