hehehe, well I bought a secondhand max 3.5 licence back when I was in art school, cost me a few hundred, $AUD from a friend. Well worth it and cheap enough for a serious hobbiest and good enough for a professional. I'm sure there are better modelers out there, my brother uses xsi, maya seems popular and my cousin was forced to buy that as it was compulsory for the course he entered recently. But as mentioned above, great results are possible with any modeller capable of point(vertex) manipulation, which means I could have done this in milkshape just as easily. I textured it with a mixture of photoshop and 3D.Texturizer which I wrote and is free and you can download it on the program announcements board.
Like I said I'll redo the textures though.
More interesting to people should not be "what program do you use"
But "what method do you use"
Answer: I wrote this game years ago, and so I've got all the 2d sprites from that in 32x32 pixel format. I made a 32x32 plain in max, texturesd it with the front view of lester, cloned that plane and rotated it around the y(z in max) axis 90degrees and textured this clone with the side view of lester.
Then I made a box primative, gave it a few subdivisions which matched roughly to points on lester, which were already very obvious due to the pixelation of a 32x32 image.
I collapsed the box to an editable mesh, something you probably don't need to do in milkshape, then started moving vertex points around in first the side view then the front view. I destroyed all of the faces on one side of his head in the front view.
Later, when he was close to the right shape, I mirrored the model to give him the other side of his face, welded coincident vertices, removed unnessecary faces and assigned smoothing groups to define his ears, nose and mouth, then put a planar UV map on him in the front view. Same process for his body and legs/feet. He currently totals 656 poly's.
I used textporter to make a template image of his face front on.
I exported him as a .3ds, though you could use .x and then opened him in 3D.Texturizer, and opened the 2d textported image into 3D.Texturizer also. I drew his face on roughly, then saved this new skin, and opened that in photoshop. I worked on it a bit, then back in max applied this skin, then reworked the vertx points, and did one more lot of the above process. Before I'm happy with him, I may do that 10 or more times, but I've got the feel I want from his expression, and the fidgety kind of hands in pockets look I wanted from this dirty old man
The next stage is to UV map him properly, and get the skin to fit the stretched and flattened 3d mapping. Like I said, he's only mapped planar right now, so if you were to turn him round, you'd see eyes in the back of his head
Surely that's more help than knowing what program I used?
Thanks for the comments too
[edit]
Actarus:
Yeah raven watched this develop 'cos I was instant messaging him from start to finish, and sort of used his lol's and rotfl's to guage how dirty I was makin' him, and at the moment, he doesn't even have a body under that coat, 'cos when he flashes, you'll see him from behind anyhow. Ther's more pics on raven's forum 'cos I was uploading him there, also a pic of the original sprites from an earlier 2d version there in the gallery section
ZX Spectrum 48k Issue 3, Radio shack Tape drive, Rank arena 12" T.V. set.
