How Far can I get with Milkshape Quality Wise?

#1 Yea you can easily* make models good enough in milkshape. It would take longer than using say XSI or 3D Max. Psionic3d.com has a nice tutorial on modeling a player model, I dont know of a good web tut on riggin and animating your model but the tutorial in the 3DGPAI1 book is a good one. If you want to save some time check out blender I find modeling in blender is far quicker than milkshape. And it has an exporter too.

#2 Thanks

I found the tutorial on the psionic website.
http://www.psionic3d.co.uk/tutorials.html

I'll go through it.

I also found the CS girl tutorial.
http://www.dosfx.com/tutorials/csgirl/csgirl002.asp

looks good.

I like the fact the CS girl tutorial seems to reference some sort of skeletal animation for mouth movement. because my characters will definitly need talking movement. blinking etc.


I'll work through these.

***If anyone knows more tutorials on making animation and especially getting the face animated for speech , i'd be glad to hear it.

***Additionally on that CS girl tutorial it mentions "First, you'll need to make a working directory. I play on using C:\My Documents\cs_chick. In that directory, make a new directory named "gsg9_decompiled". We'll want to copy our gsg9.mdl to that directory. If you have the mod version of Counter-Strike and you've installed everything to the default locations, you can find the gsg9.mdl in C:\SIERRA\Half-Life\cstrike\models\player\gsg9.

Next we'll open Milkshape 3D to decompile the model. You'll do this by selecting in the menu Tools > Half-Life > Decompile normal HL MDL File... Once the dialog appears, locate your cs_girl\gsg9_decompiled directory and select the gsg9.mdl. Another dialog will appear labeled "MDL Decompile". "



I don't want to buy Counter-Strike so could someone tell me if a copy of gsg9.mdl is available somewhere on the net or if someone could email it to me that would be great

#3 Quick question about shortcuts.

I am looking for some male , female models that may be floating around the internet with skeletons already attached that i could possibly download and use in milkshape.

and ideally the skeleton would have a bone for mouth movement.

if anyone has a spare model that would be great - for milkshape

#4 A lot of indies use wings3d for modeling exported to milkshape for finishing off and rigging. I havent looked at Milkshape in quite a while and only out of curiosity the last time. Not sure if it does vertex weighting, something pretty important if your trying to do convincing character animation.

#5 What is vertex weighting?

And how does that influence the animation?

so you are saying that a person would use wings3d to set up the initial shape and then finish it off in milkshape right ?

#6 Vertex weighting allows a vertex to be weighted between mutiple bones. It is very nice to have certin vertexes shared between 2 bones so that the blend the animation throughout the body instead of giving a harsh spotwhere say his elbow is.

#7 Since you mentioned wings3d, I'm guessing you believe that wings3d has a couple extra features that makes model development easier and better than in milkshape.

I was looking through the wings doc. I noticed bevel. I Also noticed Smooth.

could you please explain the features in wings3d that make you feel it is easier to work with and gets results faster. ?

Assumming i'm correct of course


Thanks in advance

#8 By the way i didn't see vertex weighting in wings.

#9 I use wings myself, it really doesnt have extra features (actually it has less)

but the interface is extremely intuitive, so the learning curve is next to nothing. almost anyone could download and install wings3d, and start creating right away.

there are some talks and some things out there for adding rigging and animation to wings, but still far from anything that would be useful right now.

#10 Cool thanks that's the answer I was looking for.

So I'll just stick with mastering milkshape.

but i like those xtremely cool models i see in the wings3d Tutorial. I was wondering if they had some special secrets to getting those circular polygons around areas like the 'female chest' (to avoid censor) and and around the head and eyes. that looks real cool.

but i'm guessing there must be a way to do it in milkshape. Just have to figure out how somehow

#11 Correction - i have tried out wings and i'm definitly converted.

Special thanks to Adrian Tysoe for taking a moment to put me on the wings3d.

I noticed it doesn't use a bunch of triangles like milkshape. so i'm guessing it would take a bit more time to render right?

does anyone know where i can find some really great tutorials on how to use wings to make player characters?

#12 Have you looked at Blender? it's free and really powerfull, plus the dts exporter is fully functional.