TaruenSpiritChieftanV.225

[Moderator]

12:19, 18th Oct 2012
Kwaliti:

Normally, I wouldn't approve simple rewrap jobs, but you've actually put some effort into making this look like something.

 

[Sin'dorei300]

Not bad!

 

[PROXY]

Looks good, even for a simple edit Too bad mine got deleted when I was uploading it a few years ago, because of "simpleness". ^^

 

[Deros]

Could be useful.

 

[Codric]

indeed

Not bad at all good job

 

[JokeMaster]

Looks to similar to those frankster made but this one is definitly not his. Well you got a

 

[Gojira2000]

Great job!

 

[kellym0]

thank you everybody! im glad you all like it

yea, all I really added was a 3d axe and more 3d boards on the totem. everything else is just a long process of uv wrapping

and more cool horns I guess.

EDIT: added new internal name because I realize alot of models have this internal name and I dont want to cause you guys download problems.

 

[InfernalTater]

The file size is a bit too high for my taste, but this does look very good, and it's done well.

4/5, good job on your first unit model.

 

[Marcos DAB]

Exagerated file size for a model so like to the original.
Unusable for me, 400kb.

Overall, seems pretty good.

 

[SpasMaster]

Exagerated file size for a model so like to the original.
Unusable for me, 400kb.

Overall, seems pretty good.

That, +1.

Apart from that the model looks good.

 

[kellym0]

yea, in game it is pretty big, theres no way around it though, because yea, the portrait file is like 68 and the tauren him self 385 for a total of 460 kbs and there wasent much I could do to make it smaller except make some 2 sided materials 1 sided. except not give it any more custom animations.

I realize its not that useful, but im glad you guys like it any way even if you dont find it as useful.

 

[TheWhiteWolf]

Nice model, but I don't understand why the filesize is that big. I mean, there are no custom textures or anims, right?

 

[Deleted member 212788]

Very nice, we need more taurens here on The Hive

 

[InfernalTater]

Nice model, but I don't understand why the filesize is that big. I mean, there are no custom textures or anims, right?

It's an edited blizzard model. Blizzard units always have higher file sizes, mainly because of how many bones they put in the skeleton that aren't really even necessary for the animations.

Also, to kelly, as I said before I like this, but I see some room for you to make an improvement off of the original model. Blizzard models always have terrible hand wrap; you could improve the wrap on the hands. It wouldn't change the file size at all.

 

[WhiteDeath]

You could reduce file size by reducing geoset numbers, there is no reason for geosets that have the same material and geoset animation to be left as separate geosets. Also you could erase unnecessary bones and helpers and make animations linear and add the portrait animations to the unit model itself so that it wont be necessary to import the portrait model.

You should know that making animations linear will reduce the file size by at least 100kb but it might also cause the model's animations to act freaky at some frames so you are going to have to fix them there.

 

[RakEnRoL]

The idea of the model is good. It might be useful to related maps and such. About the size, I'm very strict to the file sizes myself and would ignore the model.

 

[kellym0]

The hand wraps hard, TLI-Inferno, because the point at the very end of the hand along with other points randomly scattered around also, are welded, which makes uv wrapping alot harder, there isn't any thing I can without deleting the hands and starting them over from scratch like the horns weapon and totem that wont stretch the part of the texture in the hands used to show the hole in the closed fists palm. or more specifically, the part where the axe gos inside the hand out the other side. without keeping it pretty much the way it came, that hole gets stretched and the axe passes through the hand out side the palm hole in the texture, seemingly penetrating the hand weirdly. hard to explain but I did the best on the hands I could. being they were welded. which profusely irritated the living crap out of me.

I also did realize some of the bones are not all animated and are hence not necessary for the animations. indeed some can be deleted. the problem is determining which ones can be. because I attempted to change almost all the animations just a tiny bit, I did manage to learn alot about the model its self and what bones do what. I was attempting to make 3 or 4 custom new animations to make it more cool (Punch, kick, priest hand lifty heal, even perhaps a weapon throw or a cool looping channel spell raising his weapon over his head chanting like the tusken raider from star wars 4), but in doing so I realized that editing and even deleting some bones that seemingly do nothing causes errors that are un detectable in the editors MDLvis or magos. the reasoning for this to me isn't clear, what is clear how ever, is that when I did edit or delete these bones, or some of these bones, the model editor MDLvis editor and magos, would show animations doing one thing in the editors, but doing something completely different in game. I mean COMPLETELY different, so different and so broken I got tired of trying to edit or delete bone after bone after bone one by one to not break the thing. I did delete 4 redundant bones. but thats not alot of the size sadly.

I must admit, how ever, that when I put my tauren chieftain along with 15,900 KBs of imports into a pretty big 23 megabit map with alot of terraining, triggers, and unit data for a total of 15,900 Kilobits plus 23 megabits in more data and used Vexorians optimizer the map became 4 kbs. not sure what that means. im not the expert there.

il delete some more if I find out I can--other wise there isn't much I can do. surely you feel sympathy for me now =D?

if not, then il tell you what-- il edit it more if I can find more then 4 more bones that can be deleted. fair? if still unfair, and you think I should delete the hands and start them from scratch, il take the approach I did to remaking the horns weapon and totem by making the hands more real and 3d with fingers and a thumb.

to proxy, im sorry to hear yours was deleted, thats harsh man. i wish it wasn't other wise I would have never made this.

thanks for youre comments yall.


EDIT: Im not sure exactly how to do all of that whitedeath, perhaps a pm helping me out?
and a portrait camera in the model would not be able to have portrait talking and portrait animations to do with being selected.

EDIT: also some of the smaller parts used by materials using the same texture have team color and are not shaded or ''unshaded'' while others are larger and use bigger portions but are not tagged as unshaded.

once i figure out how to merge geosets il be able to update it--but i haven't figured that out yet--sorry--and if it dos cut the space down by 100 kbs then i will most certanly do that once I learn how--been working at it all day today gona need more time I geuss.

 

[InfernalTater]

You don't need to make individual fingers and a thumb for the hands; that sort of detail isn't noticeable and would add extra file-size. But you could delete the part of the hand with snapped vertices in the UV wrap, and then add a newly wrapped part to replace it, attached to the same bone, connected to the vertices of the rest of the hand, and such; replacing the old two unwrapped polygons on the bottom of the hand.

It's not urgent, but it would improve it with quality that would separate it from the original.

Also, you'll probably need the help of a skilled animator (not me) to work on removing bones and fixing animations to work with the few, necessary, bones.

 

[kellym0]

I meant in that, if I was gona edit the hands any more I was gona make it have WoW style hands as a joke -so fingers can splay out wards during spell animations perhaps, or to make the weapon not care as much about the uv hand wrap--chances are il just make the hands more spherical then they are now as boxes

if I really work on parts I make them 3d like the weapon is now instead of 2 one way rectangles--instead of 2 one way rectangles for the totem boards I made it a multi surfaced shape. the hands were just my laziness after all that.

I dont know how much success an animator would have animating it-considering the enormous amount of time i spent on it--but if somebody's willing to try im more then down with accepting their help im not a bigot I know im not the greatest one around here--

as for you're solution Inferno (unless you prefer TLI-Inferno)-- you're right I can un weld them, its just a pain in the butt compared to just altering the original blizzard hand uv wrap a tiny bit as I had done already--but if you feel the model is that badly downgraded by the hand uv wrap--I now feel obligated to do it =/

as for whitedeaths solution--that is alot of space that could be saved with the geosets being merged that do use the same material, excluding the team color sections, dam how come mine isn't working when I do it blah. I was never aware that a model broken into more geosets made it bigger--fascinating

lol--let me see what I can do yall =D still learnin! and sorry for uploading it before I had done these things

 

[InfernalTater]

Multiple geosets increase file size slightly because the model has to store the properties of the extra geosets and the materials that they use. However, combining geosets on an animated model won't usually work very well, and you would need to make slight changes for the animations using the previous geoset to use the one base geoset that you merge into. Merging all of the geosets won't make a big difference, though; only a few KB's. On attachments that is a big deal, but on an animated model, that's just a small difference.

However, removing the unnecessary bones and making the animations linear will reduce the file size by 50-150 kb. You can do this automatically using Mdlvis in the optimization menu. Doing these things manually will usually decrease the file size slightly more, but I'm assuming you either don't know how to, or don't feel like it. Which I don't blame you for -- I don't do that sort of animating, either, so I just use mdlvis to do it automatically, and then I touch it up afterwards to make sure everything works.

The hands aren't really important at all, and I advise against changing their mesh, that would add file size. If you're going to improve them, just delete the unwrapped polygons, and copy a couple of wrapped polygons to place there and connect to the previous bone and vertices of the hand. I know it might sound annoying, but it can really be done in about 5 minutes.

 

[kellym0]

thanks TLI-INFERNO! il start right away--I didnt know what the optimize function even did in mdlvis editor.

EDIT: how would I linearize animations manually without using the optimize function? each time I use the function it really messes up the animations every time. id like to make this model smaller but not at the price of making him look like he has Parkinson's

and thanks whitedeath im now working on those points as I speak.

 

[InfernalTater]

thanks TLI-INFERNO! il start right away--I didnt know what the optimize function even did in mdlvis editor.

EDIT: how would I linearize animations manually without using the optimize function? each time I use the function it really messes up the animations every time. id like to make this model smaller but not at the price of making him look like he has Parkinson's

and thanks whitedeath im now working on those points as I speak.

You would have to do part of it manually no matter what. After the animations are made linear, you would need to touch them up a bit until they look normal. Using the automatic "optimize" function just saves you a bit of time, so that all you have to do is edit the new animations, rather than entirely build them. You'll still need the help of an animator.

 

[kellym0]

oh, ok--so there is no way to linearize them without using the optimize function, and that the Parkinson's effect is just my need to manually alter a few bones? ok. that may be easy to fix them then being this shaky problem seems to only happen to the hands and shoulders.

I dont really personally know an animator I am kinda solo in all this. if an animator is willing to help--other wise il just do this manually now--I know how to make it alot smaller so I am going to start this process now.

EDIT: ok iv edited all the helpers using the converter to make them all bones, working on the bugy anmins now

 

[InfernalTater]

oh, ok--so there is no way to linearize them without using the optimize function, and that the Parkinson's effect is just my need to manually alter a few bones? ok. that may be easy to fix them then being this shaky problem seems to only happen to the hands and shoulders.

I dont really personally know an animator I am kinda solo in all this. if an animator is willing to help--other wise il just do this manually now--I know how to make it alot smaller so I am going to start this process now.

EDIT: ok iv edited all the helpers using the converter to make them all bones, working on the bugy anmins now

You can linearize animations without the optimize process, but you'd still have to do the same work of changing them to actually look properly. This just saves the time of linearizing, and then you only have to edit to make them look properly.

 

[kellym0]

its just super hard to edit them to look properly because it changes the animations only a tiny bit per bone and its hard to take the quick shifts and jumps out--in currently working on it.

 

[InfernalTater]

its just super hard to edit them to look properly because it changes the animations only a tiny bit per bone and its hard to take the quick shifts and jumps out--in currently working on it.

I know it's a lot of work, but it's worth it, good luck.

 

[Rainbow_Dash]

Very nice. 5/5 +rep

 

[kellym0]

ok it randomly got accepted when I wasn't looking, not that I dont appreciate that, ok, Il tell you all my current progress.

its now 200 kbs instead of 400 and iv removed the need for the portrait file. most the animations are ok but im having problems fixing the ones involving arm movement. theres some kind of homo problem I dont under stand. so its taking alot longer then I had thought,

il come back and update this soon.

 

[WhiteDeath]

It is probably because the bones of the arms are attached to helpers, make those helpers in to bones.

 

[kellym0]

all of the helpers have been modified into bones, its because they used to be Hermite controllers and not linear, the shoulders elbows and wrists are what are causing the problems for me.


EDIT: im debating on turning the 2 bones causing me most problems back into hermite just to save there animations. not sure what to do at this point, il keep you all posted.

 

[InfernalTater]

all of the helpers have been modified into bones, its because they used to be Hermite controllers and not linear, the shoulders elbows and wrists are what are causing the problems for me.


EDIT: im debating on turning the 2 bones causing me most problems back into hermite just to save there animations. not sure what to do at this point, il keep you all posted.

You might as well; you'll still be saving a massive amount of file size from the rest of the bones, and just switching two bones back won't increase the file size too much.

You can always just switch the troublemakers back to the way they used to be, update the model with the new file size which will still be much lower than it is right now, and then continue working on trying to fix those for another update in the future.

 

[kellym0]

ok then, its settled, 6 bones are going back, the elbows and shoulders and wrists.

i modified alot of other bones into linear so that should be chill. as for portraits that talk the animations are going well and i should be updating it soon.

EDIT: ok the bones are all bones and not helpers, again, had to restart back a bit, back up and try again, doing my best for ya guys! the animations for all the plane bones and hero glows are linearized, and I left alone others that bugged when I tried.

currently re building in-model portrait animations all over again and the portrait camera, shouldn't be too much longer. sorry for crazy long update.

edit2: ok il be uploading the model with animated in game portrait animations, some small bug I have left to fix. should be fixed tomorrow. hope people like it.

EDIT: ok hes finished, the bug was just me wanting 2 portrait talks so i rigged it into 1 and it became all better.

 

[InfernalTater]

The file size is a bit closer to reasonable now; you've cut the file size by 90 KB, that's great. But it's still pretty high, at 378.88 KB.

I opened it up to take a look around, and I noticed there was one unused material. Removing that will chop off 0.10 KB. Not much, but little things like that add up if you find enough of them.

Anyway, you've reduced the file size enough for it to be usable, and it definitely looks a lot better than the original tauren chieftain. It even looks hi-def.

You should consider re-wrapping the regular tauren, I'm interested in seeing how it turns out. I really like the way this one has turned out.

 

[doomhammer99]

Not Bad. 3/5

 

[kellym0]

The normal tauren hey, hmmm. Hadn't planned on it, But I could give that a Try, once I make 1 other thing first. An un used material hey? dam! tried hard to not have that happening, my bad. Il update it, if I can make it alot smaller. such as learning more about animating and what not to linearize all bones. thanks TLI-Inferno!

the model had originally had been 355 kb, but the portrait animations added some. no way around that. then I added a particle emitter

thanks doomhammer99

 

[Manuval]

Nice edit. 4/5.

 

[kellym0]

thanks earthshaker!

 

[Auildere]

Love the model simple but epic!

 

[kellym0]

thank you Auildere! glad you like it!