Well look who's behind her, ffs.
Halforums Academy 2 Story Commentary Thread
- Thread starter GasBandit
- Start date
GasBandit
Staff member
Fun fact - Shego has more meshes comprising her hair than Petra, despite Petra having ankle-length long hair.[DOUBLEPOST=1457835057,1457834918][/DOUBLEPOST]Less fun fact - for some reason, Petra's pantyhose is not simply a different texture, but an entire separate set of leg meshes with the different texture applied. Who needs efficiency, with today's processors?
This is really just an issue in the Japanese PC industry... because personal computers and PC games still haven't taken off there, devs really don't know how to develop it. The kind of need to... they could have made this in Unreal Engine on the cheap instead of making their own and having problems like this.
GasBandit
Staff member
Actually, I think I read somewhere, somebody is in the process of trying to port the game to unity.
GasBandit
Staff member
Welp, tonight I noticed that the models have clearly defined kneecaps that I've just missed up until now because I'm an idiot, apparently, and it makes the knees look approximately 9 times less retarded if you use them when you rig.
[DOUBLEPOST=1457853184,1457852979][/DOUBLEPOST]For reference - Amy's knee, which I didn't use the kneecap properly and thus looks all derpy.
GasBandit
Staff member
Yeahhhh, so, Petra's hair is giving me no end of trouble. Who knew that ankle-length hair could cause such horrendous physics problems?
Anyway, here's something else. I'm hosting it myself to avoid the inevitable copyright ding on my youtube account. I recommend you right click -> save as, because chrome will just try to play it right in the browser window if you normal-click it, and I don't know if my hosting can really keep up streaming 720p/60fps in real time, even if it is H.264 compressed.
Shego's Bad Romance
Anyway, here's something else. I'm hosting it myself to avoid the inevitable copyright ding on my youtube account. I recommend you right click -> save as, because chrome will just try to play it right in the browser window if you normal-click it, and I don't know if my hosting can really keep up streaming 720p/60fps in real time, even if it is H.264 compressed.
Shego's Bad Romance
While there are still clipping issues, I think you're doing a great job. I used to hate having to build this stuff in college (and I doubt I'd be of any help, since we used an entirely different program).
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Do you have/use Handbrake? I was able to compress the video to 112 megs (more than 50%) and I didn't notice any quality problems.
Videos are looking awesome, btw.
GasBandit
Staff member
Thanks. That's probably gonna be as good as it gets there, as I've got 30 of these things to do, and really I'm still impressed it can be done at all
I'm pretty satisfied with the results I'm getting with 3 weeks of learning by (mostly unguided) trial and error. HFA is never gonna be pixar quality, heh.[DOUBLEPOST=1458051879,1458051778][/DOUBLEPOST]
Thanks to you as well. I don't have/haven't been using handbrake, just been using premiere to convert the output from MMD (which is raw AVI).
Well, to be fair, he's probably been letting Youtube do any conversions/compression. I got heavily into handbrake when I needed to scale down the byte size of my video collection and also put the videos on a format that my Plex/Roku combination could render without transcoding, since my media server was on an old rebuilt PoS. It's probably less important for me to do it now, since I upgraded the machine, but the habit is there, and I do like the fact that I can now fit 3-4 times as many videos on the server without upgrading the hard drives.
GasBandit
Staff member
File size wasn't ever really a big concern for me before! Premiere's H.264 was "good enough" for most things.
Dude, you not having Handbrake is like when I say I haven't seen movies like Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, Office Space, The Godfather, Inglourious Basterds, Top Gun, Pulp Fiction, etc.
*I* have Handbrake, and I don't even use it to copy movies! (obviously, see above)
--Patrick
GasBandit
Staff member
Alright, Petra's hair is still pretty problematic but I can't stand to mess with her any more. In the future I can just try to keep her head still >_<
This video is why I wanted to finish the 3 teachers first. Now to start working on students. Thank god most of them have reasonable hair. Except Raven. THAT'S gonna be just as fun, probably.
This video is why I wanted to finish the 3 teachers first.
Now to start working on students. Thank god most of them have reasonable hair. Except Raven. THAT'S gonna be just as fun, probably.I'm sorry... I see Miss Petra and all I see is this.
Her ability to have constricting eyes just gives her so much more visual presence, especially as compared to Miss Go and Miss Crone. She just completely steals the show.
Her ability to have constricting eyes just gives her so much more visual presence, especially as compared to Miss Go and Miss Crone. She just completely steals the show.
GasBandit
Staff member
Well, I can make it so the others can do the same thing, but small pupils was kind of Petra's thing, in the game. No other character - not even the other teachers - had the wide-eyed tiny-pupil unhinged look down so well.[DOUBLEPOST=1458108809,1458108438][/DOUBLEPOST]It does do a good job of demonstrating how much even one more facial morph can add to a character's expressiveness. If I did all 55 expressions on each character, maybe I could accomplish something like this :
Note none of the actual full body movements are that fancy, it's the facial expressions that steal the show.
I meant the bangs... Wasn't it just straight down her face before?Nope, it's just mostly off-camera and/or clipping through her shoulder
GasBandit
Staff member
GasBandit
Staff member
They did all their stabbing in the front, though!
GasBandit
Staff member
Hrm, unexpected wrinkle, the rip/blender/pmx conversion seems to treat all the models as the same size - short people and tall people are the same height. Well, that could work to my advantage, it'll let me reuse the basic bone structure I've been using to save time, then when everything's done, I can resize the whole model down appropriately.
GasBandit
Staff member
SON of a bitch.
While editing the next model, I noted "huh, I thought her hair was longer than this..." So I brought up a headshot, and sure enough, the hair was shorter.
Which reminded me of what Dei had said above about a haircut.
APPARENTLY lengthened hair is not saved inherently to the mesh, it's like a morph/facial expression that just never changes. SOOOO the hair doesn't load up the same length as it was in game - it loads to the default length. Petra's bangs are SUPPOSED to extend down below her chin. GAGH. Well, hopefully I can fix that just with regular stretching tools.
Fortunately I didn't lengthen Shego or Amy's hair during character creation.
GAGH.
GasBandit
Staff member
Aaaand today I learn the skirt plugin only works once per model! If you try to use it on two things - say, the skirt and then the hair, the second use deletes ALL the physics joints previously on the model, even ones not affiliated with the skirt! Soooo that's gonna make doing long hair on female students "fun." I was tempted for half a second to just have Raven, Celt Z and Pez run around in their gym shorts all the time, instead...
I was afraid you were going to do this even without the glitch.
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GasBandit
Staff member
I know where this leads... and I approve.