Van Buren vehicles

Those renders look almost as good as the ones in Fallout Enforcer. Of course, it was the same artists that did both, wasn't it?

Honestly, I really want to know.. How come every character model and vehicle in the game looks like blow up dolls?

Just for comparason:

vb_vaultdude.jpg
blowupguy.jpg


By the way, you left out two of the vehicles in Van Buren. Here's the the render of the plane and the render of the jetski.
 
Saint_Proverbius said:
Those renders look almost as good as the ones in Fallout Enforcer. Of course, it was the same artists that did both, wasn't it?
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No, not at all. The vehicles in VB were modeled by Aaron Brown. What are you complaining about, the low-res textures? Those vehicles were rendered with textures for viewing at a longer camera distance (i.e., an in-game camera).

Aaron started by making a high-resolution ~1,000,000 poly version of each vehicle. He then built a decimated game model of the vehicle and rendered a texture for it from the high poly normal map. The textures he generated for terrain objects that weren't viewed up close were relatively low-res because they would not, in game, be close enough to the character to result in stretching.

The characters were modeled by another artist -- Eric Campanella, I believe. And the thing is, "they" don't look like blow-up dolls. The front character does, and the rear character (the black guy in power armor, which you excluded) does not. The reason for this is simple: many characters need to share the same skeleton for animation. At the time when our skeletons were being created and animated, it would have been ideal to have two male skeletons: one for broad-shouldered males and one for narrow-shouldered males. Using one skeleton results in shoulder/arm/chest spacing problems. Arm distances that look normal and proper for a narrow-shouldered guy in clothing clip horribly for a muscular guy in power armor. Push the arms away from the chest and you'll avoid clipping, but the smaller characters have artifically wide arm stances.

Outside of the inventory screen, it didn't look strange. It would have been nice to have a small male and large male skeleton, but we could not get any additional animators on our team. For most of the project, Chris Marleau was the only animator working on VB. Since it looked unlikely that we would get additional resources any time in the future, we decided to go with one male skeleton and accept that the smaller male characters would look strange on the inventory screen and front end.
 
J.E. Sawyer said:
No, not at all. The vehicles in VB were modeled by Aaron Brown. What are you complaining about, the low-res textures? Those vehicles were rendered with textures for viewing at a longer camera distance (i.e., an in-game camera).
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No, not the textures. I'm talking about the models themselves. They look like balloons. They're POOFY. The cars are poofy, the people are poofy, it's all poofy. Except the buildings. The buildings look fine.

Keyword: POOFY

And the thing is, "they" don't look like blow-up dolls. The front character does, and the rear character (the black guy in power armor, which you excluded) does not.
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The hell he doesn't. He looks like he's wearing that old 1970s inflatable The Hulk chest toy, painted metallic blue. In fact, the only reason I didn't use him as my example was because it was hard enough to find a male blow up doll that didn't have a large, erect penis. I wasn't about to look for one that was wearing armor.
 
Saint_Proverbius said:
No, not the textures. I'm talking about the models themselves. They look like balloons. They're POOFY.
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Well, I've seen both the untextured models and the textured models in 3D. I can see the "poofiness" you're talking about in the textured models -- I thought the same thing when they were initially created -- but I didn't in the untextured models. The models themselves are relatively low poly and just comprised of, well, regular ol' triangles. We didn't have a special renderer that added curves to edges or anything.

Textures generated from normal maps often look "decent" but do feel blown out/up.

EDIT: I don't think any of the models Aaron made for the other games he worked on felt/looked "poofy".
 
It's the textures being stretched. The artist rendered out the textures for an optimal game camera distance. These renders are closer than that distance.
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Ok this makes sense.
 
Bradylama said:
I think the trouble with brahmin carts is they are incredibly slow. Most traders use them to haul around large amounts of not particularly valuable cargo that has to be bulk traded, grains for example. The Vault dweller/Chosen one wouldn't have much use for them, since it would be much faster to just walk on foot, besides being easier to croos rough terrain, and avoiding having to feed the brahmin.
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We had talked about allowing you to get a trained dog with a dog sled from the Blackfoots, but eventually abandoned it because it did weird things to how the dog had to move in combat (it couldn't do a 180 with the cart on there) and the hassle of hooking and unhooking the dog to the cart.


Humans pulling carts sounds funny and all, but it does bring up a potentially important gameplay aspect: can the player eventually acquire his own slaves?
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Yes and no.
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Well, most of the people you'd be able to acquire as a slave aren't worth anything in combat and wouldn't have any special skills (like combat-poor Myron in FO2), so you wouldn't want to drag around a bunch of crap-for-nothing people in your party (especially as they'd take up CNPC slots or something like them). So slaving became a matter of going on raids (something you could do if you got in good with the Blackfoots) or working with the Reservation, but in game terms it's impractical to start up a brahmin ranch or mutant fruit farm with a bunch of slaves doing the menial work.

Not that we didn't have a "PC-Town" area where you could build and develop certain businesses....
 
Frog said:
Oh yeah, slaves working on my dinosaur ranch ...... ;)
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HELL YEA!

Then you could sell your Dinosaurs on your "Dinosaurs-for-less Lot" for those who needed some transportation.

Cool idea.
 
"If there's one thing that we've learned from the Flintstone's...It's that pelicans are great for mixing cement"

Homer J. Simpson
 
PsychoSniper said:
Rosh, you froget the FO bible.
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I didn't forget it, parts of it are pure on-the-fly ass-mining for material. With both hands.

The car/human ratio was approc 1/200.

NCR even had it's own motor division in its army.
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One of the better aspects of fiction is being able to quietly write-out mistakes of that nature, as well as New Reno, the easter eggs, Mormons, etc. ;)
 
Roshambo said:
...One of the better aspects of fiction is being able to quietly write-out mistakes of that nature, as well as New Reno...
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I didn't know New Reno was considered one of the "bad" parts of Fallout 2... I can undestand Broken hills, the overabundance of Monty python joke (tough i quite like MP), NCR.... But New Reno? I can see how some of the "more erotic" elements are a llittle bit... "overdone"... but i always tought the city was pretty good overall. Care to explain?
 
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