SS2 list of broken and lowpoly objects that need fixing

[673f99819e1favoodoo47]

uhh... no.

[673f99819e33dRocketMan_Remote]

Not sure which assassins he's talking about but you have to admit the rebirth assassins are about as far removed from the design intent as you could imagine.  I've never used them once.

[673f99819e696RocketMan]

Sigh... this shotgun hybrid doesn't look good no matter what you do with him.  His wrist is bent at some impossible angle upon death.  Here is the best compromise I could manage.  It looks worse shooting now (but barely noticeable) and slightly better in death.  I think the gain in death exceeds the cost in shooting so that's why I consider it an improvement.  I blame the animation

[673f99819e986Olfred]

Well, the animations can be edited

[673f99819eb02voodoo47]

only small difference when compared to the previous upload - but it would still be worth using it just because of the working headtracking and proper muzzle flash. if it can't be tweaked any further, it will go into production - it works well enough. I'm not going to stop potential attempts to fix the animation of course, if Olfred thinks it's worth a try.

and in case someone actually notices the bent shotgun, we can always use the magic phrase "worm ate it gnawed on it".

[673f99819ec09RocketMan]

Yeah I don't know if it can look much better.  If you use either one bear in mind the last rev will have a more precise muzzle flash.  I did a bit of a tradeoff.

[673f99819ed00RocketMan]

What was wrong with the last pipe grunt btw?  I'm re-reading my posts and it looks like I fixed it?

[673f99819edf8voodoo47]

I think he had crushed knees (making the model shorter). apart from that, he was ok. can't check anymore as the attach has expired, but the last model I've got still has the issue.

[673f99819eee0RocketMan]

Right.. ok gimme a sec

[673f99819efc4RocketMan]

Fixed

[673f99819f0f6RocketMan]

...slight titty adjustment while I was at it.

[673f99819f2a8RocketMan]

The grenade grunt is a  bit... fucked.  I can't see any easy way to get the head tracking working because he's all hunched over so that there is no "neck" to divide with planes.  The chin and most of the head is sort of overlapping the same z location as the torso and this makes a mess of the planes.  If I straighten him up he'll look quite a bit different and that's probably not a good thing.  His gimpy arm is another story.  Again it totally violates all the rules for where stuff is supposed to be.  I could just leave him alone and re-position the v-hot for grenade throwing but beyond that, I'm kinda afraid to touch this one.

The assassin is balls so I don't even see the need to fix it lol.

[673f99819f486voodoo47]

well, just do whatever you can - the priority are proper joints. headtracking would be nice, but if it can't be made to work properly, then he will just have to live with a stiff neck. again, pretty sure that whatever you'll come up with will be better than the orig model.

assassin is not causing any direct issues at the moment, but still, it'd be nice for him to have proper joints to get headtracking to work, and for future modders to not having to take the missing joints into consideration when modding (for example, should someone make a melee assassin that has a laser rapier attached to the finger joint, the AI will be broken with Rebirth, unless he also makes a special Rebirth version that will use  the wrist joint with a proper offset).

basically, any replacement resource that is not a direct 1:1 replacement, and requires special handling should be fixed up, if possible.

[673f99819f5ecRocketMan_Remote]

BTW can you do something with the zip file 2 pages up that contains all of PinkDot's fixed models?  I don't want it to get lost or anything.  I leave it to your good judgement but may I suggest putting it with the Mother's modding resources?  This is the only copy in existence where everything is properly converted with no errors and with vhots, to my knowledge, so it's a somewhat valuable commodity.

[673f99819f75avoodoo47]

I'll ask K to maybe drop them directly onto the server, but I think they should be pretty safe here.

anyway, midwife will need tweaking, the model is shorter (crushed knees again, most probably), and there is some bad thing going on with the tip of the toes (and the soles of her feet as well). new model on the left, old on the right. same thing going on with the pipe hybrid. double checked on the shotgun guy, and surely enough, his toes are not completely ok either.

[673f99819f898Olfred]

And here you see why I hate working with rebirth 

[673f99819fa74RocketMan_Remote]

I can explain all of that.  It's my fault (kinda).  The height thing goes back to my earlier woes about using the same skeleton on different models of different proportions.  I could preserve the height and move the planes around but in the past that has tended to cause me more grief with the animations than vice-versa.

The toes are inherently messed up in vanilla.  You will notice that every AI walks on the outside edge and tip of their toes and ONLY looks right when in the T-Pose and sometimes when idling.  Whenever they are actually doing anything like running, attacking, etc., the feet contort into some stupid scrunched up shape.  I've been compensating for this by bending the model back the opposite way... that is to raise the toes and put all the pressure on the inside edge.  The planes will invariably bend them back straight when you animate the AI.  The pics you posted show an unrealistic scenario that the player will rarely ever be subjected to.  If you capture the AI in motion you'll notice the feet are perfect.  Lemme know your thoughts on this though.

[673f9981a02ddvoodoo47]

The height thing goes back to my earlier woes about using the same skeleton on different models of different proportions.  I could preserve the height and move the planes around but in the past that has tended to cause me more grief with the animations than vice-versa.

no idea what to say - if the problem with the crushed knees is fixed, then go for whatever feels right, I suppose.

The toes are inherently messed up in vanilla.  You will notice that every AI walks on the outside edge and tip of their toes and ONLY looks right when in the T-Pose and sometimes when idling.  Whenever they are actually doing anything like running, attacking, etc., the feet contort into some stupid scrunched up shape.

again, not quite sure what to say, but I did a little dance with the two ladies from the last picture and I have to say that the old feet looked better (read: less weird). I guess my recommendation would be to leave the toes alone/closer to the orig models. I hope I'm not going to regret recommending this sometime later.

And here you see why I hate working with rebirth 

well, it's the best we've got at the moment - trust me, I'd love to get it off the recommended list and replace it with something proper, but no luck so far.

[673f9981a059cRocketMan_Remote]

Let me provide a run-down of the issues that may need some discussion going forward with regards to re-rigging the AI:

1) Toe angles are generally screwed up on most models and need to be bent on the static pose to make the dynamic position look good.

2) Model proportions are all different on rebirth with no particular regard to plane or vhot placement.  While Cyberblutch was able to make the models function in-game without any catastrophic failures, they really aren't set up properly and attempting to do so requires a broad spectrum of difficulty in modifying the model and/or planes.  In some cases, this is near impossible.

3) The vanilla animations aren't great and the biggest problem I've come across is extreme bending and rotation angles when performing certain animations, like melee swings, shooting and death.  These animations CAN sometimes take a cylinder of polygons and rotate them more than 360 degrees about its axis, causing pinch points and visual artifacts that look terrible (like the bent shotgun in the death pose).  These cannot be fixed properly without editing the animation because fixing these problems only does so for a certain pose.  All other poses are necessarily broken so you have to live with either 1 being totally broken or all of being mostly broken.

4) Head tracking is disabled on all rebirth models because there are no neck planes defined.  Since they were never there, the models weren't designed to accommodate them so it's shear luck if you can fit them in there without butchering the mesh.

5) Vhots for melee contact points or muzzle points are off but I consider this to be a minor problem.  They can always be moved or the arms can be rotated slightly into place.


When it comes to Rebirth, I suggest shooting for a minimal baseline of Fit, Form and Function.  Trying to fix everything to look nice is likely impossible without more significant repair of more than 1 resource.

[673f9981a06f5RocketMan_Remote]

Hmm.. I'm not sure if you're able to get a screenshot of the foot phenomenon that you say is weird.  I totally could be missing something so I'm not going to jump the gun and say everything is ok but when I did go into game mode after bending the feet, they were straight as an arrow when she dashed at me all around the room.  Same with the hybrids.  Literally the only time the feet looked bad was on the hybrid during 1 idle animation when he was sort of leaning on 1 leg, as people tend to do when tired.  Every other time the feet were straight and flat.

[673f9981a084fvoodoo47]

understood and agreed - unless someone else wants to add something, I'd say let's go with whatever you feel is right/is the path of least resistance. it's not about making the models perfect, just about making them NOT screw up other mods.


//nope, the  new midwife feet were bending weirdly every once in a while when I was dancing around them, while the old ones were fine (sometimes clipping into the ground a bit more than they should, but still ok). could make a video if you want. //nope, this hunk of junk is not able to capture in an usable resolution with decent framerates.

[673f9981a0a1bOlfred]

Mhh.... I would say it would be a wise idea to just wait out for PinkDot to release his AI Tools.
As far as I understood his plans there will be proper importing of the skeleton with already assigned vertex groups connected to the bones. And, you can edit the vertex groups and bones and just export it.
No need for stupid restricting planes, no need for boxes somewhere on the model to kinda do the impressions of proper bones.

Many biped models use the same set of animations. And as we all know by know, the animations itself are pretty buggy/unclean. So what have been done to compensate for it, was creating different skeletons for each model to kinda get it look right, instead of using one skeleton for all models and just clean the animation mess up.
So what cyberblutch did for the rebirth models is to kinda screw and mess around with the skeletons. Now each models does have a different skeleton. Using one skeleton for all models is bound to get you fucked.

As there is something in the make to get the job done in 15 minutes instead of 15 hours, I really deeply suggest to wait it out.

[673f9981a0b01RocketMan]

Luckily I haven't spent quite that much time cuz I just said fuck it

[673f9981a0c37voodoo47]

so, fuck it for today, fuck it 'till PinkDot releases his tool (a pre-release version is available on demand, I believe), or fuck it fuck it? if it is the last, then I'd like to ask for two final tweaks to the pipe hybrid (toes slightly closer to the original, legs slightly longer, he really looks short at the moment) and the midwife (same thing), and that should be good enough to put together a new Rebirth release (I can work around the grenade hybrid with relative ease).