Models by Jorzi (AR)

[CyclonatorZ]

What is out of date? The artrev repo looks like it needs to be assembled into a mod, our compile guide won't help you there.

Yep, and thanks for mentioning this, because it was just what I needed to hear. After redownloading the latest AR repo, I extracted the files and then put them in a Zip folder, and then put that folder in the autoload mod folder in my Warzone master directory. And what do you know, it worked fine then.

Anyway, Thanks for helping, guys. Now, onto some feedback:

Firstly, I'm loving the new shade of green you guys are using, as it's much more acurate to the source material and doesn't look nearly as cheesy. I'm also quite a fan of the new hardpoints, which look even better than Jorzi's screenshots indicated. And that new hut model... well, its nothing short of amazing.

However. there are some things that need to be fixed and/or improved. Most notably, the medium and light project bodies appear to be unable to correctly sync with the new wheel and track propultions. A few of the textures are also incomplete or mismatched - mainly the light wheels (which have a very basic texture) and the cannons (which have textures that don't match up with the main art style). What confuses me most is that there are some models that still seem to be missing - in particular, I'm curious why Jorzi's command turret hasn't been implemented yet, even though it's already modeled and textured. I'm sure you're already aware of all of these issues, but I'm just letting you know which ones stuck out the most to me.

Great work everyone, keep it up.

[MaNGusT]

*tangent space normal mapping* *specular maps*

[CyclonatorZ]

Ah, I see. Well, hope you guys get it finished soon. Anyway, I've taken the liberty of making a couple more comparisons between the old and new graphics, this time focusing on structures and wheeled tanks:

http://www.majhost.com/gallery/bk504/Co ... ison-2.png

http://www.majhost.com/gallery/bk504/Co ... ison-3.png

As you can see, it really is a difference between night and day. The only thing I feel like comenting on is the difference between the old and new Hellstorms - while the new model is much more detailed, it's also much longer, and when viewed directly from the side actually looks quite ridiculous. I think the barrels will definitely need to be shortened in the long run. Otherwise, everything looks great!

[aubergine]

Those look awesome - the only thing I might comment on is that they perhaps look a little too "clean"? I think one of the things that drew me to warzone was that everything looked quite dirty, as you'd expect in a post-collapse warzone.

[Jorzi]

@CyclonatorZ: thanks for making the comparisons, and you are right about the hellstorm. I originally made it as a direct lowpoly bake from cathuria's awesome model, but unfortunately, ingame models have quite different requirements.
@aubergine: thanks I guess you have a point in that our current models look a lot cleaner. The original textures seem to contain a lot of fairly high-intensity noise, which is partly amplified by the low texture resolution. However, I must point out that, while the environment should indeed look very rough, the things built by the project are fairly new and not subject to neasly as large amounts of rust and erosion.
That said, I do try to get a certain amount of scratches, dust etc on my textures and, once we get the models done, we will probably "remaster" the textures to give them a more unified look.

[aubergine]

Looking at the comparison screen shots above, I must say that the new models/textures make the old ones look medieval. I never really noticed before how much the old WZ textures look like the walls of castles in games like Stronghold or old boundary walls.

With regards to sensor towers, I've been wondering if trucks in 2100 would built something like that. To me the towers have always looked like they were built by humans, particularly the basic sensor / mg towers in original WZ. Would it be worth considering a radically different design for the towers?

For example, the basic towers (eg. mg tower) could just be a pole, something like this:



At most their width would be the width of the sensor turret that sits on top of them. I assume making them hexagonal instead of cylindrical would reduce number of triangles used.

The more advanced towers, eg. hardened sensor tower, wide spectrum sensor tower, could then just be bigger and bulkier, like this (perhaps adding some buttresses or whatever those reinforcing pillar things are in the middle of art-rev base walls):



In particular, anything that looks like "bricks" or masonry should be avoided, because these things are built by trucks using some sort of matter beam, they're not built by arranging chunks of wood or stone like humans currently do.

I like the art-rev base walls so much because they look like they were built from a template by construction droids using very advanced construction technology.

I always thought it odd that the initial WZ base materials were based on concrete - if mankind had reached a point where droids could build stuff with "matter beams" (or whatever the correct name is) concrete would not be the first choice of materials. IMHO in WZ the initial base material should start with something like hardcrete and end with something like "nanoplast".

Maybe the texture that's used for base walls could be applied to the towers and other buildings?

[aubergine]

The hardened towers could perhaps re-use the central column from base wall cross-sections:

[MaNGusT]

look here viewtopic.php?f=33&t=3992&start=135#p87971

[Jorzi]

@aubergine: As always, it's about the balance between realism and style. The problem with a realistic blank conrete/steel cylinder is that people will find it boring. However, I also have another logic behind my designs: Since the bases in warzone are frequently attacked by ground forces, there will be a need for quickly being able to repair damaged defences. Steel can be welded, of course, but when it comes to concrete, I think that having multiple small protective elements is a good design. That way, you can quickly replace any damaged part of the tower.

[CyclonatorZ]

A few more observations relating to the latest build:

- The wheel designs all look nice, but I can't help but think the heavy wheels would look better if their armor design was more flat and rounded like the armor for the other two wheel sizes.

- When looking over my own comparison, I realized for the first time that the new hardcrete defenses have their turrets set a lot lower than the old ones. That drove me to boot up my Warzone master again and test whether or not the lower height interfered with the weapon effects. Unfortunately, I can report that it does - in case of the Flamer, for example, the flame jet runs up against the hardcrete base and barely even appears. I believe the new model is going to need a higher turret base if this problem is to be avoided.

- The more I look at the new models, the more I realize there's quite a bit more grey than in the original ones, which isn't quite to my liking. Discounting the cannons (which to my understanding have preliminary textures), the heavy and light machine guns are probably the most notable instances of this. It's not a major fault, just a style choice running up against personal preference.

- Finally, this is more of a general Warzone comment than an Art revolution one, but only now just realized that the scavenger oil rigs are pale blue, but the scavenger flamer towers are purple.

[CyclonatorZ]

Yeah, so, I skipped foward in the campaign to get a better look at the scavengers and NP, and I have yet another round of observations.

- The new fire truck looks great, but for some reason the cannon attached to it and the schoolbus combines the new model with some odd extra geometry.

- I think the NP's color overlay is going to need to be reduced in saturation, just like you did for the Project. Right now, it's far too bright and clean compared to the old shade.

- The NP medium tanks are absolutely rockin' now. The combination of the unorthodox treads and the body just really clicks.

Alright, I think I've finally run out of things to comment on - at least until the next update.

[Jorzi]

Thanks for the feedback, I'm partly using it as a todo list of small stuff to fix
-Unfortunately the scavenger cannon and the repair turret currently use the same turret model, simply because of the creativity of the original artists. I guess that could be fixed by editing some stats files.
-I agree that the heavy wheels didn't turn out that good, I wasn't really inspired when making them, although I guess they will have to stay for now.
-I've edited the hellstorm model to have more balanced dimensions.

[Jorzi]

Started working on the heavy halftracks. I reused and upscaled elements from the medium halftracks and added some custom details.

[MaNGusT]

I really think that the main idea of half-tracks in wz was to separate 'em like on -> http://media.moddb.com/images/groups/1/ ... thtank.jpg

[Jorzi]

like this?