(Fallout 2) What do I do after the village is destroyed by the Enclave?

[naossano]

It is more a matter of workflow.
When working on 3D, you make a skelleton and make it move. No matter the texture you put on the skelleton, the skelleton movements are already done.
On sprites, every posture, every moment, requires a work for each individual image of a single movement, then work the same for the same movements from the back and the sides, then do that work again for each item used, each wound suffered etc... The sprites is the main cause of lack of variety. IMO, the sprite render well, sometime even better than 3D, but it is too nightmarish to work on to allow variety. Even if you want to change the color of an helmet, be ready to weeks/months of work.

About unique models, those are only an handfull in the first two games. Those are The Master, The Lieutenant, The overseer (two unique models), Gizmo (a variation of Vic), Frank Horrigan, the Wannamingo queen, maybe the US president, the chosen one as a tribal (has different hair than other tribals), and First Citizen Lynette. Some models are very rare, but not unique, like Vic, Orville Wright, Robodogs, Albinos talking molerats, Mordino henchmen, men in suits, or helmet-less BOS members.

 

[Gizmojunk]

It is more a matter of workflow.
When working on 3D, you make a skelleton and make it move. No matter the texture you put on the skelleton, the skelleton movements are already done.
On sprites, every posture, every moment, requires a work for each individual image of a single movement, then work the same for the same movements from the back and the sides, then do that work again for each item used, each wound suffered etc...

All of the Fallout sprites are rendered 3D models afaik. I'd be very surprised if they weren't; they used Lightwave3D for the heads, and I would assume for the tiles. Have they said that the character models were each were drawn out by hand?

 

[Walpknut]

Well they are all prerendered imagesof 3D models, rendering takesa long time nowadays and if you want it fast you gotta pay a rendering farm to do it for you, I believe they just didn't have the funds to render every art asset to use as a sprite or they ran out of money and had to but down on some of the models.

 

[.Pixote.]

BlackIsle were restricted to what could fit on a CD at the time. They expanded the art quite a lot from F1 to F2, but even then they removed a lot of tiles to allow more space for newer tiles. Each fully animated critter - all weapons and death sequences - is about 50,000 frames, give or take. Who ever possesses the original 3D files should make them public - its would be easy enough to retexture them and make dozens of new critters.

The manually changed critters you see in the RP took years to make in Photoshop, one frame at a time...

PS: Note how there were less talking heads in F2 thane F1, but more scenery, critters, etc. They obviously compromised for space.