November, 2001 ================================================================ Model Name : Marvin The Martian installation directory : quake3/baseq3/players/Marvin Author : Carl Kidwell Email Address : Melkior@studio-erebus.com Web Site : http://www.studio-erebus.com http://www.studio-erebus.com/marvin Model description : Marvin the Martian from the Looney Toons cartoon series. Sound info : Sounds were taken mostly from the websites that had Marvin sound clips. Several of them were from the Quake 2 Marvin and are used with the permission of their author fafner_@hotmail.com. Additional Credits to : First and foremost to my wife for supporting me in all my efforts. Secondly to Mike McMillen for taking the time to help me learn to model and finally to all the great people on Polycount, Quake3World and Milkshape message boards like Rat, LDAsh, NoSERider and others .. this would have quite possibly been an insurmountable task without the support of all these people. ================================================================ * Authors Notes * Marvin is my first player model ever. I had particular design goals for this model and the first was to create Marvin the Martian with as low a polycount as possible. I learned a lot, I made a lot of mistakes. Most of the mistakes I found and corrected to the point where there is no single aspect of this model that wasn't redone or touched up at least 3 times. Yes the mappings, the model itself, the animations, the skins.. its all been gone over with a fine tooth comb. I humbly present this as my personal best at this time. Before you email me asking why didn't I color Marvin this way, or model him that way please see the following message board thread It should answer most of those questions: http://dynamic.gamespy.com/~polycount/ubb/Forum2/HTML/003049.html?00006 The animations in particular were challenging I'm aware of a few small clipping problems but they are usually either isolated to one frame such as the 'fire weapon' frame and very minor and thusly probably never be seen in action, or due to the size of the Q3 weapons some of them with larger back ends or tops may clip through part of his helmet or chinguard on occaison but I tried to make it so that wouldn't happen in general. .. his feet are very large and presented problems getting a natural looking walk and backpeddle type of animations .. never mind the crouch! I feel I captured his trademark run very well by making a very non-traditional run animation and then upping the speed at which it plays. It came off really well on my computer and I hope it looks as good on yours. I was mildly dissapointed that his taunt animation I could not give him his trademark fists at his side and run back and forth little angry sequence, however the Q3A animation system doesn't allow me to animate the lower body for a taunt animation and therefore I opted for a less character fullfilling taunt but one that worked reasonably well for me. Also I was unable to give him his 'chest forward' type of stance much of the time .. partially due to the low polygon choices I had made and partially due to the times I would most have liked to do it were whenthe animation was keyed to the lower half of the body. I wanted this to be a model that could grace almost anyones hard drive - thus the low poly count. And then secondly I gave him the best skinpak I could imagine, a wide variety of fun and unique characters that have the marvin physique to make them very stylized, funny, and most of all fun to play and play against. I've been doing skins for a few years now so theres no excuses there - the mappings were done by me and every skin in this pak is my work as well. I did find I made one mistake late into the game after having already redoing his mappings twice (for a total of 3 times) and that was a minor problem of an area near his thumb was backwards .. I lived with it by making that area non-detailed on most of the skins. Other than the default Marvin skins the rest of them were done last and this problem didnt present itself until late in the game. Other than the thumb the rest of the mapping layout.. I feel like I did a good job, I got the coverage I wanted in the areas that needed it with little warping. I do have to say this was my first major effort on shaders and in particular I had a really hard time with the Darth Marvin shader. The first 4 hours I spent trying to use Q3ASE and create his shader were disastrous and caused Q3A to do very wacky things like turn the main menu all white and loose all the shader effects on all of the models! Once I stopped using Q3ASE I got it up and running I had some tough choices to make between natural skin being more detailed or shader sections to darth shiny plastic look - very darth-like, but less detailed. I think I struck a good balance in the end but I was pretty unhappy with his cape - my personal lowpoint of the skinpack, to have done it right I'd really have needed a modeled cape and thats not in the cards for him in this implementation. This readme is a little bit long, but I figure theres two types of people - those who love readme's and those who don't read them at all. :) Enjoy! ================================================================ * Play Information * New Sounds : YES CTF Skins : Yes Bot Support : No * Construction * Poly Count : 713 Vert Count : 522 Skin Count : 10 Base : modeled from scratch Editor used : built in 3DSMax, boned and animated in Milkshape Known Bugs : Marginal joint clipping in some extreme poses due to rigidity of the physique system in Milkshape. Build Time : Original model done in about 5 hours, modifications for better deformation were done after my first run through adding another 2 hours. Animation Time : My first animation for this model took about 8 hours or so, the second run through took about 5 hours and the final tweaking took about 3 hours. (This does not include time learning about keyframing, the animation.cfg files etc. ) ================================================== * How to use this model * Unzip the file, put the marvin.pk3 into your /quake3/baseq3/ directory, select Marvin or one of his variants as your model and enjoy! * Copyright / Permissions * QUAKE III(R) is a registered trademark of id Software, Inc. Marvin the Martian is a registered trademark of Warner Brothers. Distibute as you wish, but don't change the readme file or anything else and call it your own, play nice.