Sneak Peek - KORAX!!!

[Slyrr]

You may be wondering what exactly I've been up to lately. Since the Unreal contest is essentially over for modellers (and I am now a 4th place prize winner) I've returned to doing more DOOMSDAY models.

Since finishing off D'sparil for Jheretic, I've wanted to bring the last 2D serpent rider into the 3D world - Korax. Perhaps the wussiest of the Serpent Riders, a boss monster so pathetic he loses three falls out of three so his own Heirsarch minions, was still perhaps the coolest looking of the three. Eidolon was just a big red cross between a maulotaur and a devil and D'sparil, while the toughest of the three, was still just a guy in a red robe. Korax at least has some originality to his look.

I've been laboring hard to get him to look just right without going TOO crazy on the polys. I don't know if anyone has noted this besides myself, but Korax' face when you confront him looks totally different from the face that pops up at the beginning of each hub to sneer at you.

Hopefully, this model has fixed all that.

http://home.comcast.net/~gregfisk/shot01.jpg

I still hope that somehow, someone can alter Korax with the doomsday DED files and such, to make your confrontation with him more challenging. Some ideas for the enterprising coder might be:

1) Increase his frequency of teleports - make him harder to hit.
2) He's so butt SLOW! He needs to move like three times as fast. Seriously, it takes him fifteen seconds to make a single step. By then you can empty two kraters of might into him.
3) Give him the Heirsarch's REFLECTION shield so he can randomly put it up like the Heirsarch does. The reason the Heirsarch can always beat Korax in a fight is because of that shield. I can't believe for one minute that Korax would let one of his minions have a power that he doesn't have - particularly one that allows said minion to mop the floor with him.
4) Replace his lame attack. Yes, it can get you nearly dead in one shot, but that's only if you're dumb enough to stand still. Even a pithed frog on narcotics could sidestep Korax' lame slow-moving shots.
I propose changing his attack thusly: Instead of the six-way spread that anyone can dodge, replace it so that he randomly fires the same super-attacks as are used by the Heroes. Either a spread of QUIETUS blades, a burst of WRAITHVERGE ghosts, or a volley of BLOODSCOURGE shots.

That would make him a LOT more fun to fight!

But any thoughts on the model itself, feel free to express them. I'm mostly done with the skin except for the legs and tail. Then I'll set up a skeleton and start animating. That shouldn't take too long - after all, in game he only has a few motions to go through....

Slyrr

[Chilvence]

Now thats damn evil. Even a pint size version of that bugger running through my house would make me scream and dance on a chair. Youv'e outdone yourself ;)

For the face, I think the chin is a bit big, and his nose definately needs to come out a bit. Everything else is perfect.

Its intresting what you say about Korax vs Heresiarch. I've always held the opinion that the Heresiarch was the original serpent rider, and Korax was just a model they made to be his ride. Heresiarch is much more innovative and challenging than Korax, which shows they spent a lot more time on him. But along the line something happened, they either ran out of time to make new monsters or liked the korax model enough to promote it. Whatever way, I'd love to see a 'special edition' that has the roles reversed.

[Vermil]

You’ve outdone yourself ;).

Couldn't agree more. It looks brilliant!

For the face, I think the chin is a bit big, and his nose definitely needs to come out a .

Unfortunately if I was nitpicking, I would probably have to say these as well.

[Harry]

Cool :D:D can't wait to see it in-game!

[Wicked Anime Kid]

That looks brilliant!

[Slyrr]

Can't bring the nose 'out' - he doesn't HAVE a nose - he has a skeletal cavity where the nose should be.....

[Chilvence]

Maybe, but I think the upper mouth area in general could do with being pulled out just a tiny bit. Nothing major, just a nip and tuck :)

[DaniJ]

That looks very well made Slyrr, good work.

Unfortunetly I don't own a copy of Hexen so I haven't even seen this guy before, so I can't offer any real crit on him.

One thing that would help to make him "pop out" a bit would be some underlighting in the skin.

[Mikael Lax]

He looks great, but isn't he supposed to have six hands? Also, the hands he does have seem to be a tad on the tiny side. (not trying to put you down or anything, he still looks frickin' awesome)

edit: I've been looking at this picture for a while http://www.korax-heritage.com/images/main/koraxside_large.jpg. Looks like his hands are supposed to be kinda smallish, but I still stand by the six hands remark.

[Jaquboss]

http://www.freewebs.com/jaquboss/korax.png -- model looks similar

[edorien]

Unreal contest 4th place prize winner *jawdrop*

Well done, good model.
I always thought the 4 spikes around the head were part of a helmet worn by a heresiarch though

[Slyrr]

Yep - he should have six hands. Alas, his polycount is already over 2000 - far above any other model in a doomsday engine game to date. To conserve polys I put sharp claws on his remaining arms instead of hands. This was also the reason why the arms don't have those little tendrils at the forearms. If I added ALL the detail in the sprite, he'd be 3000 polys or more - as much as a UT2004 model. And while I'd love to do it, I don't know if doomsday can handle that much. It was creative license, but I stand by it :)

[Chilvence]

Slyrr, if you want to make any changes, you have plenty of breathing room. The md2 format isnt perfect, but it is quite large; these are the specs:

Quake2 has some pre-defined limits, so that dynamic memory does not need to be used. You can use these to your advantage to speed up loading if you want.

# Triangles: 4096
# Vertices: 2048
# Texture Coordinates: 2048
# Frames: 512
# Skins: 32

[Slyrr]

With the model this done, making major changes means going back to the drawing board (something I'm too lazy to do). I could chop the claws and clone the hands to give him six if everyone wants it.....

[Chilvence]

Nah, we wouldn't make you do that ;)

Just saying, if you've got room for 4 more hands, why not.

[Slyrr]

If anything, I'd love to add more animation frames to ALL my model instead of the standard 8 frames for each sequence. You can do them in multiples of 4 if I understand, but it always comes across choppy in game.
I had an odd number of frames for the death of the UNDEAD WARRIOR, and Skyjake had to rewrite his defs to use them all - but I think the effect is much more pleasing in game for it. Still, I'd hate to make a coder have to resequence all the monsters just to use more dynamic animations.

And Korax just doesn't 'move' all that much - a step here, a step there, he raises his arms, then he dies. (See my above suggestion as to how Korax could be changed to make him a better end boss).

PS - Cheapalert has expressed dissatisfaction with the skin, saying it's too busy and would look messy in game. Would anyone like to take a crack at skinning him....?

[Chilvence]

You can have as many frames as you want to put in, the defs can interpolate between them correctly. Unfortunately the def structure is a bit clunky, so its desirable to keep it as a multiple of the original animation length, eg 8, 16, 24 frames so that you can divide them equally. BTW, its not a uniform 8 frames for each sequence, thats very important to remember - the number of frames in an attack or death sequence can vary greatly. You should look through objects.ded to get an exact picture of how many frames you need. This one I'll do for you ;)


Base sequence lengths:
Walk: 16 frames x 3 tics each
Pain: 2 x 5 tics
Decide attack: 2 frames, first = 2 tics, second = 5
Fireball throwing: 3 x 8 tics
Lightning bolt: 5 frames; 5, 10, 15, 10 and 5 tics
Death: Actual animation is 14 frames long, but only 9 are needed for the falling animation. Use as many frames as you want for the chest explosion, I'll sort it out


Thats the base numbers, so basically double or triple it if you like for more animation fidelity.

As for the skin, I dont think it would be fair to throw it out completely. Probably the best thing would be to have much fewer "rib" lines on his chest and stomach area, or paint him a more smooth chest, with thin, spaced apart ribs. I wouldnt be able to create a whole skin for it (well, not very quickly anyway), but I wouldnt mind making some small tweaks to it.

[Slyrr]

The easiest way for you to edit would be to take the .PSD file - but the PSD is 7 megs and 1024x1024 size - what best way to transfer?

[Chilvence]

Rar it? If not, can you export it to Corel .cpt format? Photoshop should use the compression that cpt's use; I exported 2.7 meg corel image to a psd file for someone the other day and jumped when the file size was 18 megs O_O

[Slyrr]

Do you have windows messenger? It would take a while, but I could transfer it directly that way. Do a search for my email (gregfisk@comast.net) and you should see me as "Slyrr". Just alert me and I can send the file right to you............

[Chilvence]

Ok, I added you, I'll hang around for a bit

[Slyrr]

You're gonna have to contact me - I can't 'find' you without YOUR email address :)

Hurry, because I only stay on line from around 5pm to 11:30pm MST...

[Chilvence]

Wierd, I thought that msn asked for confirmation as soon as someone adds you? Try chilvence@hotmail.com anyway

[Slyrr]

It says you're 'offline' -

[Chilvence]

Sorry, something strange happened to my connection. If I dont catch up with you I'll try and find out that phoenix orb problem we talked about

[Jaquboss]

Yep - he should have six hands. Alas, his polycount is already over 2000 - far above any other model in a doomsday engine game to date. To conserve polys I put sharp claws on his remaining arms instead of hands. This was also the reason why the arms don't have those little tendrils at the forearms. If I added ALL the detail in the sprite, he'd be 3000 polys or more - as much as a UT2004 model. And while I'd love to do it, I don't know if doomsday can handle that much. It was creative license, but I stand by it :)
Keep much polys!!

[Slyrr]

post bump to hawk the update pic - skin being updated too, starting to animate :)

Skyjake - do you know the animations defs for Korax? He doesn't actually seem to do much in game............

[Chilvence]

Hooah very nice! Captured the violent xenomorph look there.

On my side, I got Doom 3 saturday morning so its going a little bit slow...

[Chilvence]

Slyrr, sorry but its going to take me a while to do what I want with the skin, because I've got too many other things that I should be doing right now. Rather than wait for me to finish, I think it will probably be better if you finish the tail an the inner legs so that you can get the model out there. Then when I'm finished with what I'm doing, you can decide whether you prefer it or not. If you want me to write the ded for it though, I'll do that, because it should only take half an hour maximum.

[Slyrr]

Gotcha - I understand that. I've got real life issues myself to deal with.

But in the future, if anyone out there looks at the skins I make and says: "I could do better than that", I'll point them to this thread, and say: "Why didn't you when I gave you the chance?"

[Chilvence]

LOL, actually, I dont know that I could do better, but I'm certainly up for trying. What I really want to to is repaint the skin completely, not nescesarily because I dont like it, but because I know I'll get more experience from it. The few minor tweaks I've made to it so far I dont think warrant anyone's attention.

[Droyd]

I would consider doing six hands really. The only reason why things should be kept low polly is for performance, but the thing is, there is only one Korax at the time, so I doesn't matter that much. I don't think anyone is planning on creating maps where the player is supposed to fight more than one Korax at the time.

Anyways...the skin is not bad at all, but in the sprite you can actually count his ribs...it would be nice if the skin had the same mount of ribs, since it is a bit overdone at the moment.

[Slyrr]

Too late - whether you will or nil, I've already started animating the mesh.
As to the sprite, the number of ribs are like eight or something. They had to keep things simple because all their sprites are super-low res VGA. I'm just kicking it up a notch by adding the higher amount of detail allowed by the Doomsday engine.

I'm posting the SDK of his skin here, since there seem to be so many who have thier own ideas of how his skin 'should' look. Try it out - tinker around.....

Slyrr

http://home.comcast.net/~gregfisk/KoraxSKIN.jpg

[)))000(((]

Wow, that model is so cool...