GH2 Arena Design and Mechanics

[Francisco Munoz]

I did some stuff with pov before and IMHO creating good looking faces will involve modeling them in another tool and importing the meshes afterwards.

 A good idea will be to create a some sets of generic portraits based on one type (female, male x good looking, normal, ugly) with a some variations (not the same variations per type)...
 You could end with something like:
- normal female with eyes 1, hair 1
- normal female with eyes 1, hair 2
...
- ugly male with mustache
- ugly male with eyes 3, hair 4

No need to use programming tools just the images.

You dont need a lot of them maybe 5 or 6 per type... and this could be changed later to make them mode different.

This will lower the portrait standard a bit (or not if we remove some of the old ugly ones) but add a lot of variations.

[Joseph Hewitt]

Speaking of such things- does anyone know of a program by which I could create 3D models for the character sprites? Something like poser but preferably free... What I need is something that has generic male and female forms that I can dress up, then edit the clothing. I want to replace all the character sprites for GH2. I think I'll be increasing the resolution used (at 64x64, the sprites appear too pixely) as well.

Alternatively, I could use some low-polygon-count FF7-style meshes for characters. Of course if I did that I'd want to get rid of the flat sprites altogether, and that would mean meshes for the mecha, and items, and everything else... I'm not sure GH2 could support that with its inefficient rendering procedures. Plus there's the current problem with mesh textures wrapping around in the back. For whatever reason, the meshes never look the same in GH2 as they did in Art of Illusion.

[SharkD]

I'm not sure about the modeling software. I've never used anything other than POV-Ray. It's too bad that rendering 3D objects is slow in GH2. Is this a problem with the game or SDL?

Here is a cool Photoshop tuturial to convert photographs or drawings (color or B&W) to look like comic book art. It's a bit laborious, but would work well with how GH does palette-swapping.

Here is another face generator. This creates images that look more like police sketches. The thing I don't like about this one is that you have to manually move the bits around to get them to line up.

[SharkD]

I followed one of the tutorials half-way and got this:



The other half of the tutorial will take a couple of hours. Not sure if I will go through with it.

Here's what the images is supposed to look like after following both halves of the tutorial.

Make sure that Ladi checks out this site.

[SharkD]

Quoting: Joseph Hewitt

Speaking of such things- does anyone know of a program by which I could create 3D models for the character sprites? Something like poser but preferably free...

I just found this program:

http://www.geocities.com/evilsnack/lionsnake.htm
 

It is a free modeler that exports to POV-Ray. It features a skeletal system, so you could create character models as well as equipment that all share the same skeleton.