Necrons: The Ancients

[N0Faceg]

2 Shuma
Yes, Overlord and miniord can take only one weapon choice, but any number of artifacts. About artifacts, can Tesseract Labirinth be made 500red-nuke? Something with long startup, but eating anything it caught?

[Gabriel Gorgutz]

I think tesseract should be kind of like the vortex of doom that Horus and I added to our mods. A t3 accessory that you can cast that sucks up the enemy army. There should be a new death effect instead of gibbing that causes infantry models to be "sucked in" and disappear, or perhaps a black hole type thing opens and when it closes the models are gone. If it doesn't do enough damage to kill the model, or if it's a model we can't have "gone" like a hero, then it just flings them like Vortex does and deals damage.

----------

Which brings up an interesting side question: since bloodravage figured out how to edit weapon tracers/fx, can we make new "extreme deaths" for gauss and particle weapons, or for the tesseract labyrinth?

[Chaos Godstone]

First i tried to just draw the lines on the texture with the line tool, that was horrible,
then i tried to do it free hand, that was worse,
then i tried doing them in Zbrush, it was even worse,
and finally i did them by making a polygrid with the shape i wanted in 3ds max and baking the shadows the grid gave on the occlusion map which i then used as a base for the texture and even then it looked kind of crappy so i had to fiddle around with it in Photoshop,
and even now it looks kind of crappy in some places if you look hard enough(don't).

I already see a lot of stuff i don't like.
Sigh sigh sigh, i can already tell that i'll have to revisit some normal and team color textures.

Well they do say the artist is the worst critic, ... ^Proof?

However, when you get better at your craft you start to notice parts where you know you can do better but if you do the game could suffer.
That might seem no problem but as Gorb mentions the levels of detail eating up more resources and the number of models on-screen at any one time do pressure the artist to lower their intentions, cruel and unusual punishment on the desired look but ultimately a necessary evil.

The one thing I could ask for, which would be greatly 'Heretekal', would be a Pariah Lord, made for unspecified purposes by some Overlord.

Your work is definitely better than mine, scaring Croaxleigh with a Space Marine Pariah.

[horusheretic]

Its possible to have damage states on models so nwcron warriors are going to look a bit more scuffed and worn as they loose health. It does mean 3 sets of textures though... I've recently put the warrior body ingame but i am going to have to do lots of texture tweak@ to get the most out of it.

[Shuma]

That might seem no problem but as Gorb mentions the levels of detail eating up more resources and the number of models on-screen at any one time do pressure the artist to lower their intentions, cruel and unusual punishment on the desired look but ultimately a necessary evil.

Yeah, i guess i should start blaming people with crappy computers.

Anyway, Pariah lord, only thing i can say is that after finishing whatever it is i have to finish for the necrons i have a few ideas for "skin pack" mods for the necrons, one of them certainly involves Pariahs. But considering i still have to finish at least the Overlord, Lychguard and Tryarch Praetorians that will take some time, and then i'm sure i'll have to make some other stuff, the newcrons have a lot of new toys after all.

Anyway, started animating this guy, and i did this because i wanted to:



You should try to picture an endless swarm of kill bots behind him, it'll probably help make it look better, or you can imagine he has gone senile and insane like so many lords have.

[mr_blob]

Don't suppose anyone wants to take on building a Tomb Stalker?

After modeling is said and done, here's a table-top description (PDF) I found to give insight into standard abilities/traits. For game balance, it would probably make sense to force the player to decide between a Monolith and this thing out at any given time.

Any willing modelers/animators? Not too hard, right? Only a couple of dozen or a hundred or so moving segments and parts

[Gorb]

I came, I saw, I pointed into the distance until my rustproof component parts turned to rust.

[Caeltos]

Just out of curiosiity, how difficult is to animate? Such as stringing stuff like Sync kills together and etc;

[Shuma]

Ever played with toys, as in action figures, making poses and stuff with them? Of course you have, well it's like that, you pose them and then set a keyframe there so that that pose is saved on that particular frame, then you do that again, over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again, and that's when you finish one animation. Then you just have 30 more animations to go, i wouldn't say it's hard but it's pretty tedious, the hard part would be the rigging which is pretty much just "connecting" the mesh to a skeleton that controls it's movement, and it's by posing this skeleton that you make animations, if there's an easier way i don't know it, then again, that's all i know about animating, but i doubt there's a more tedious way.

As for Sync Kills, well it's the same except with two guys instead of one, as for stringing animations together, well, i believe but i'm not sure on this that DoW II(and i'm not sure if this goes for all videogames) makes transitional animations automatically between animations to string them together, just like what happens in max as you animate, if you set two keyframes and they're 20 frames apart, the model doesn't just freeze in those 20 frames, it slowly moves so that it ends on the same pose as one the next frame, i think the same happens in DoW II so animations between say just standing still and running transition naturally, but in short, i have no clue, i did the Emperor's Champion's animations as a "test" and i hoped that someone would put him in game and i'd be able to check out the animations in-game by myself but that hasn't happened, so i guess we'll experiment with the Necrons.

@Blob:

If Ravage wants it in, it shall be done. If it was up to me all the necron units would get into DoW II.

@TesseractLabyrinth stuff:

I would assume that's just code stuff, at least i don't think it'd need any new models/textures to make it, maybe fx, either way, not my department. At least, not until i figure out how anything fx related work, i know nothing on that front.

Same with new death animations from Gauss deaths, no clue how it'd be done.

@Horus:

How do damage_states work? Are they hardcoded? Say the model will always use damage_state x when he drops to y health? Or can it be changed? Because it'd be pretty cool if we could have necrons lose body parts as they suffer damage, and pretty easy too right?

Hmmm, can animations be tied to damage_states or to how many health a unit has? Like can it be coded so that when a necron unit loses a certain ammount of health he starts using certain animations? I mean, Wraithguard have different walking animations depending of if there's a seer close to them or not.

[horusheretic]

It's done via certain modifiers in the model code, though disabling weapons etc would rely on atyribute coding more than anything else. It looks like most of that is possible though.

[Shuma]

Well i ask because the Necron Lord only uses one weapon at a time, so in theory i could make "damaged" animations and "damaged" models for him where he's missing an arm for example, he would still have his weapons and abilities but he would look and move as if he had his ass kicked, i can do that if you or someone else is willing to code it.

[Bloodravage]

The Tomb Stalker seems like it would be a great addition to me. Again, i think once we get most of the basic unit structure done, we can start adding in more advanced units. The more units the better of course

[shadowninja0069]

great work team kick ass,as for the emperors champion he is in my mod shuma im just trying to figure out how to code his duel weild swords with him.any ideahs pm me when you get a chance.

[Promythyus]

Shuma, I just want to point out that that image of the lord posing is amazing.

[Mika999]

Excellent progress.

[Shuma]

Just a small update, all the idle, melee, and sync kill animations for the lord's hyperphase sword are done and i'm making his run and sprint animations right now, which means he only has a few animations to go since i'm not making him as many animations as Space marines have, at least not now, why? Because animating is hell, after i finish the hyperphase sword animations i'll make the models for the Lychguard and their shields, then they'll use edited animations from the lord's hyperphase sword for their sword and shield combo, after that i'll make the warscythe and the Lychguard and Lord will share animations, with that the Lychguard will be completely done, after that i'll make the staff of light and it's animations for the lord which will probably be edited animations of the warscythe, then i'll make the Tryarch Praetorians and they will use edited animations of the staff of light for their Rod of the Covenant.

After that it's just making the gauntlet of fire and the voidblade+caster animations and the Lord, Lychguards and Praetorians will be done, and after that i think i'll get working on the Cryptek(lord?), i think i have a pretty cool idea for him.

P.S: Animation is hell.

[ImPEREZ]

Shuma, can you post some videos? ^_^

[Shuma]

Sure why not, if you're going to see me fail at animation might as well do it now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7yYrtpXLQ4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhSlLNYpllM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2_ivRH_Cxo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjlh15bfRZA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDdzsC_GJnE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgPEaD0r8T4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1o3-ApgU-s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBYBHr5JocA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ASLrSfxYHY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ajak_gVkx0c

I might redo the idle animations.

[Mallec]

Looking good Shuma, but is it just me or does his left footfall look "heavier" than the right? To me it gives him an almost crippled looking gait. For all I know this could have been intentional, but I thought I'd throw in my 2 cents anyway.

[Mika999]

Is actually very good animations, great work.

[titlams]

I love the animations, but I agree with Mallec about his left foot in the walking animations. Also major Loin cloth clipping. Apart from that 1 animation they all look awesome.Edit: I don't mean it don'tlook good but that is the only one can I really find fault.

[ajk22]

I'll admit when this was first announced I was a bit skeptical about the quality of the project, but things are turning out great, and so quickly too!

[Shuma]

Huh, had not noticed the foot thing but you're right, definitively not intentional, i just suck. I'll check it out.

@titlams:

Where do you see the loin cloth clipping? I don't notice it anywhere, anyway any fault you guys find with this, anything that you think looks bad or you don't like just say it, can't really do anything better if i don't know what part sucks

@ajk:

Well that's definitively good to know.

Anyway, on somethign completely unrelated, while i figure out what's this particular problem i'm having with exporting animations and how to fix it(this one) i decided to do some more modeling:



Heads for the lychguards, common, rare and epic, the rare one i got from a particular image from the codex(page 25) that i really liked, the third one is just something i came up with, the first one is pretty much the same as one the lord has but with less polys, the headcrests like with the lord will be separate and they will have several. Tomorrow i will probably try to figure out what this animation issue is, i however predict that in the worst case scenario i'd have to redo the animations, but even if it comes to that i already have some ideas of what to do to speed up the process, hopefully it wont get to that though.

Either way i'll find a work around.

[Akranadas]

I think they look scarier without mouths.

[titlams]

First link the walk animation as his left leg goes back and loin cloth moves forward they go through each other.

[Mika999]

I like the third necron head. Btw, Necron Lord Crouch Idle Anim 01 somehow doesn't fit to him, what do you think about changeing to this one , just a bit lower. Or make some idle like this

[Shuma]

@Akranads:

Glad someone thinks so too, makes them look more alien, i found the picture i mentioned in which that model was based:



They do look creepier with no mouths.

@Titlams:

Ah good eye, my bad i'll fix it.

@Mika:

Well if i made that pose but lower it'd look pretty much the same, i'll think about it.

Anyway, fixed my problem with the animations not exporting, apparently my havok content tools installation had been messed up somehow, reinstalling them fixed it, however i now have a second problem, which Horus had encountered before:

http://forums.relicnews.com/showthre...post1045276945

Stupid me forgot about it until today when i was trying to figure out why the animations were not exporting, so now i have to go through all the animations(and meshes i guess) that i've done for the lord and i have to rename every single bone, in every single one of them to be entirely lower case. Oh god this is horrifying, maybe it can be done with a script? I guess i'll do some "research". More news at 11.

[shadowninja0069]

great animations shuma i know animations are a bitch to work with ,i did my own for the storm raven and it was hard to get it work.
but i love your animations they are top notch budy.

[Akranadas]

@Shuma, never understood why Necrons had them to be frank. They serve zero purpose and just make them look a little silly :P

Kind of like how Eldar look way scarier with their helmets on than they do off.

[Shuma]

Well iirc the reasoning was "because skulls inspire fear" which is pretty stupid, if a 8 feet tall killbot with an atomizing laser gun was running at me i'm pretty sure the mouth wouldn't make me shit my pants any more. And now, Trazyn looks even stupider since his mouth is permanently open, and that makes even less sense.

And yes, Eldar helmets are pretty cool, well, the "faceless" ones, i don't like the ones banshee and hawks have, or the ones the dark reapers have their skull helmets always looked goofy to me, Maugan's ra helmet does look neat though.

Anyway, animations, couldn't find a way to do it quick and easy with a script but i finished renaming bones to be lower case, that said, i did end up destroying the shitty overlord cape(didn't like it, didn't feel like it was worth to go through the torture of renaming the bones in that file too and didn't feel like rigging it all over again), idle animations(wasn't happy with them) and the crouch animation(faster to re-do it than rename the bones in the scene), so those will be redone.



And that's a picture from the sprinting animation.

Edit:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zezZ0HGXOU

New animation.

[Mika999]

It is a little better now. Shuma, what happened to his crown?

[Godlike_Power]

Oh can Necrons sprint now? Or is that a charging ability?

@Mika999: Thats a lychguard not an overlord.

[horusheretic]

Stupid me forgot about it until today when i was trying to figure out why the animations were not exporting, so now i have to go through all the animations(and meshes i guess) that i've done for the lord and i have to rename every single bone, in every single one of them to be entirely lower case. Oh god this is horrifying, maybe it can be done with a script? I guess i'll do some "research". More news at 11.

I figured that would be a problem, i asked santos to fix this in his script but at the moment my internet connection is pretty sucky (Currently using mobile lol) and i have lots more work on this christmas, so i can't really get much done other than the tad bit of coding for Woa. I do have a lot of the monolith uv mapped- ish... just need to puzzle it all together. For a minor update on my end.

And shuma, try to get onto santos about the script if you havent already, will save lots of people hassles later.

[Master Flagg]

So in the Necron army, what are the priraiahs (spelling)

[Shuma]

@Mika:

Just hidden, you already saw it plenty anyway might as well see how he looks without it.

@Godlike:

No idea, Tryarch Praetorians appear to sprint in their artwork but they're the super duper necrons, but i figured he'd have to do something besides walking when retreating, assuming necrons retreat by walking and not teleporting.

@Horus:

Yeah sent him an E-mail, it would be nice just to have him around since we're probably going to end up facing more walls as we go on.

@Flagg:

Pariahs don't exist anymore, in fact, they never existed to begin with, no sir they did not. In other words, they went the way of the squats, the new "Pariahs" are the Lychguard(see post 127 above) but they don't have any of the anti-psyker stuff, they're just big, bad necrons with warscythes.

Anyway, here's another animation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm9kLacoes0

I figured that if Triarch Praetorians can float/fly then the lord could do it too, besides, it looks badass.

Edit:

Was bored(even though i really should be working on these animations) so i made some doodles on what i have in mind for the Cryptek and an alternate necron overlord:




The alternate overlord guy would probably end up working as a skin pack, he's just an idea right now though, i wouldn't expect him to be done anytime soon if i were you, after all i still have plenty to do to finish the vanilla overlord.

[ImPEREZ]

Daaaaaauuuummmmnnnnn.... O___O

[Master Flagg]

Is there anyway you will make him into a Destoryer Lord when he reaches T3?

[.:Zack Fair:.]

I didn't say my opinion...Necrons mouthless are just stunning...They seem so Xenos...So far away from our little civilization..

[Shuma]

@Flagg:

I'll make a Destroyer Lord, but how he will be used is not up to me and i honestly don't have any idea how he'd work, maybe he'll be a separate commander, or he'll be a T3 upgrade like terminator armor, i don't know.

@Zack:

Aye, and then you read the Tryarch Praetorian fluff and realize that they're ancient aliens and built the Pyramids. Whoops! But yes, they look awesome with no mouths.

Anyway, here's another animation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLncU...ature=youtu.be

Actually this one is 3 animations together, it will be cut up in pieces, but this is the motion you'll(probably) see when something like a Dreadnought smashes him and he goes flying back one mile away, he flies, drops down, slides, gets up.

Edit:

Good news everyone, animations for the hyperphase lord are done... Kinda, like i said before i didn't make as many animations for him as some units have, for example he doesn't have as many animations as the space marines or as the chaos lord, but he's functional, some animations that i haven't done for him are the sync death animations, so like the Autarch he can't be sync killed, well, he has the sync killed idle animation which i believe is used when sync killed by a dreadnought grab animation for example, but he doesn't have sync death animations for the common sync kills units do, he also doesn't have any casting animations or the animation for the resurrection orb. Yet. They will be done, but for now what's important is that he's functional.

Tomorrow i'll start modeling the Lychguard and their shields, and i'll make their animations for the hyperphase sword and shield combo, then the warscythe animations are next for both the Lychguard and the lord, and like i said before, after that it's Staff of Light animations, Tryarch Praetorian models, Rod of the Covenant animations, voidblade animations, gauntlet of fire animations and then the Cryptek.

Tomorrow i might also post some of the other animations i did for the lord.

[Mika999]

Team, are you planing to add this one to Necrons? To function like marine tanks, just hover a little, it have side guns and one big main gun like predator tanks. It looks awesome It be cool Necrons to have some smaller vehicles like this, not only monolith.

[Bloodravage]

Yes. Demertius already has this moddled for DOW1, and has offered to let us use it. Its very nicely done. All it would need is animations and textures. Ill provide an update on this soon.

[Mika999]

Wow, this is great!

[demetrius]

http://www.moddb.com/mods/ultimate-a...yone1#imagebox

http://www.moddb.com/mods/ultimate-a...nyone#imagebox

[Copernicus]

@Shuma:
Very cool. I like the floating necron lord, and your 'quick doodles' are beyond anything I could ever draw .

[Mika999]

Sh*t! Grate work demetrius and the team!

[Shuma]

@Demetrius & Blood Ravage:

Those are some sweet looking vehicles, i love them.

@Cope:

Thanks, and i'm glad you like the floating lord because at least one more animation has him floating, no video yet since i've been busy, but i do have an update:



Hats! I know they look really shitty like this but i didn't want to have to take individual pictures with each of them on a head, i'll do that once they're textured and all. Anyway, Lychguards are the ones with the hats, this ones like the one i made before will also be separate models, so it's up to other people to decide to use them or not, some of them are from the miniatures, others are from artwork and some i just came up with, for example, the one with 3 holes is the one that crazed senile necron lord who thinks everyone is a necrontyr has on his artwork, the one above it is one the Lychguards have on the miniatures, the one on the right is Imotekh's, the one on the top right i just came up with, the 3 below that are from artwork in the codex, the one on the bottom right is from the lychguard minis, the one on the middle bottom is the one that huge overlord miniature has, and the remaining 3 are also stuff i came up with, with the one below Imotekh's being the one that alternate overlord doodle has.

Later today i'll probably texture the lychguard heads, or the crests, or both. And i probably should stop refering to them as lychguard heads and lychguard crests, at the very least, the Overlord, Lychguard and Praetorians will share the same skeleton(mostly) so all this heads and crests are not exclusive, the lord can use all this crests, and all this heads, same for the lychguard, in fact, the only ones who wont have the exact same skeleton are the Praetorians since they need some extra bones for their tails, but their heads and stuff should also be usable by the other 2, in theory at least.

Edit:

By the way, anyone knows if it's better to have all this crests use one big texture or have each one with a small texture? I'd assume people who end up using them will make it so that different units in a squad have different crests, so would the engine call the big texture once, or would it call it for each unit? Because if it does it for each unit it obviously would be better to have it just call 6 256x256 textures than 6 1024x1024 textures right?

[Gorb]

The texture would probably only be loaded into memory once - that's the entire point behind certain models sharing texture assets, I think. Thus, a single large texture would be better than numerous smaller textures.

[horusheretic]

General position for games these days is that model/scenery environment textures are preloaded. They'd have to be other wise it takes up far to much memory, Where as ground decals such as foot prints or craters will get drawn on the fly in game. Loads of those are memory intensive.

Smaller textures will get loaded faster obviously but a 1024* is the same space texture wise as four 256* textures. It's more kind to preference really but the more you can get out of the texture space the better. Lots of little ones will accumulate a lot more wasted space all together eventually.

[Promythyus]

A single 1024^2 texture actually takes the same space (memory and pixel) as 16 256^2 textures.

If I remember correctly loading a single larger texture is more efficient then loading many smaller textures, but only by a small margin. I wouldn't worry about it too much, do whatever is easiest.

But as mentioned the amount of times the texture is onscreen is mostly unimportant, the texture being loaded into memory is the biggest problem, which only occurs once.

[horusheretic]

i meant 4 512* >.<