So I rolled an Ogre

[gLitterbug]

Hi,

I have been dabbling around with 3d Studio since Version 4 for DOS and kept myself mostly updated on game related things, but never got myself to actually make any end product.
I decided to stop fooling around and get serious, bought me a copy of XSI Foundation(which I prefer and which is actually affordable) and thought it's about time I followed through with something from concept to finished model and get familiar with the software as well as the production pipeline. Since my plans are to someday have my own small game development company I used to browse around for all kinds of gaming related matters and stuff like free 3d engines etc. which is how I ended up here. Ogre seems like a damn good choice as a free 3d engine and the Roll your own Ogre thread caught my eye.

The quality of art content, or rather the lack thereof always struck me as something that really miscredits the hard work the coders of an engine like this put in it. Which in turn makes a lot of people think that open source engines are inferior to anything that costs tons of money to license. Not to say that I can remedy that overnight, but I might be able to help. So without further ado I present my first finished creation, the Bloodthorn Ogre.

Concept Drawing


high res version


high res version

Turnaround Videos (Xvid, about 3mb each):
body

head

Ok now that you've seen it I have to comment some more I guess. I am aware that his design might not what you are looking for. He's not green and doesn't look much like an orc. Hopefully this doesn't sound arrogant, but usually I try to come up with at least halfway original and creative designs and ideas rather than just copy the usual stuff 1:1 and I don't like to work after someone else's dictations especially when there is no money involved.
That is also one of the reasons I didn't post any work in progress shots or the concept before getting started. To me as an artist the roll your own ogre thread was pretty much a horrible accumulation of suggestions from people who fought over how the ogre needs to look like. It is hard enough to cater to a paying clients wishes when it comes to art, but expecting an artist to handle a whole community's wishes on his free time isn't something you can expect. After all I doubt ogre's programmers would appreciate me demanding they put in certain features or change the way the engine is made.

On to the ogre models facts. All the objects together(body, eyeballs, teeth, loincloth) clock in at 4165 triangles. That does not count the loincloths backside triangles, since a flat object in XSI can not be doublesided, as every object needs to be a possible subdivision surfaces object(that is what XSI help says). Textures are comprised out of a diffuse, specular, normal, transparency and reflection map each authored at 2048x2048 for the body and the same in 1024x1024 for the loincloth(which uses only a quarter of that, since the texture is meant to be shared with the weapon once that is done) . I roughly oriented myself at the low end of the Unreal Engine 3 specs given on their engine tech site. I also made a skeleton and simple rig already, but haven't skinned the model yet. After all I don't know much if anything about the limits and requirements of the ogre engine(being interested in tech, but an artist after all).

All that said I have to admit that while I am pretty satisfied with how he turned out, the small things that went wrong or which I know how to improve on now start to bother me(btw. ignore the polygons shining through on some parts of the ogre like his chin, XSI decided to weird up my tangents along the way of modelling him for some reason. I exported the model with recreate tangents on and checked him out in one of the prebuilt demos by replacing the athene mesh and it works out just fine).
While thinking about it all I came to the conclusion that while having a model is nice, I wonder if the coders responsible for ogre would actually want to have a full techdemo showing off it's ability just like in a real game or something like the 3dmark demo run.

So in the end that means I give this ogre to you as a gift to be used exclusively by the ogre3d engine, if you like him enough. In which case I'll of course finish his weapon too and try to make at least a walk animation and some facial expressions.

Additionally I offer my help in creating a full blown tech demo in case something like that is actually wanted and there is a coder willing to work together with me on it.

Sorry for the lenghty post, but I felt like all that had to be said and also I'm rather bad at stopping once I started to put down my thoughts. Hopefully I didn't come off as an ass and maybe the ogre or my offer will be of use to you. Thank you for your time Ladies and Gentlemen.

[jacmoe]

I give this ogre to you as a gift to be used exclusively by the ogre3d engine, if you like him enough.

Wow! Awesome!

Amazing! An artist who actually rolled an Ogre - and a great-looking one too! I thought I would never see that happen!

What a generous offer!

Yes, we would be fools not to welcome the Bloodthorn Ogre!

In which case I'll of course finish his weapon too and try to make at least a walk animation and some facial expressions.

That would be very, very nice!
We could use a model with several animations, like walk, run, sit, etc.
And with props.

I like him! And I am pretty sure our green Ogre does too!

[gramulho]

I liked it a lot too. Just wish it was more detailed, but thats asking too much for whats already done. Looking good! Exceptionaly good.

About the model animations, I could give it a try too. I have a somewhat animation background using maya.

[Jerky]

That is also one of the reasons I didn't post any work in progress shots or the concept before getting started. To me as an artist the roll your own ogre thread was pretty much a horrible accumulation of suggestions from people who fought over how the ogre needs to look like. It is hard enough to cater to a paying clients wishes when it comes to art, but expecting an artist to handle a whole community's wishes on his free time isn't something you can expect.

Hehe, you got that right. I have always been meaning to finish mine, but have been working on my project a lot. I am glad someone finally did what I wanted to, which was to give something great to the Ogre community. Just his last week, I purchased Hexagon (thanks for the heads up Falagard) to take the place of Blender in my modeling pipeline, so I may just finish up mine some day. I am not saying this to compete, because yours looks great and has its own style.

Great work! I really like him.

[Wretched_Wyx]

That's a quality ogre right there. I like it.

[scroogie]

Absolutely awesome! Great work! It is a major step forward to have some nice looking models in the demos. Thanks!

[Kezzer]

Wowza, that's amazing work *thumbs up*. We'll 'av it!

[lf3thn4d]

really cool. Now my ogre looks so puny in comparison. That's a real artist talking there. This is good work

Note: I'm not a real proffesional artist. I'm just a programmer who so happen is fond of 3d digital graphics.

[edit]How many poly for this one?[/edit]

[jacmoe]

[edit]How many poly for this one?[/edit]

4165.

[lf3thn4d]

ah hehe ok. thanks. Too much text. my eyes skipped on that line. Sorry about that.

[gLitterbug]

Thank you everyone for the kind words. I'm really glad the Ogre is this well received even though he isn't green

@gramulho - yeah I have to say that after looking at it as often as I did I also thought that he maybe could use more detail, but on the other side I really don't want to revisit him and it wouldn't really be easily doable without redoing most of the work already done on him. Before doing that I'd really rather start something fresh. Since this was my first finished model I've learned several things, especially about the quirks of making normalmaps and how to possibly avoid those. About the animation, I'd like to try my hand at it first, since I planned on learning about it anyways, but if I fail I'll get back to your offer, thanks.

@lf3thn4d - Don't worry, your ogre looks already better than stuff from some "real" starting out artists does. Also I find it pretty cool that a coder looks into the graphics asset creation side of things too, so he knows what's going on there. It sure helps the understanding between artist and programmer in a team.

It'd be nice if someone from the coding side of things would get in more direct contact with me (email, pm, icq,msn,aim) so I can ask questions about stuff. Like how to get those double sided polygons in the end and what my limitations for rigging/animating are etc. Thanks.

[lonewolff]

Excellent stuff! This is really great.

[Bontakun]

Very nice

[lf3thn4d]

gLitterbug: Thanks for that comment I was trying to find a production pipeline that uses as little commercial tools as possible. Since here in my country, piracy is the king. Getting commercial product is not the cut and I can't afford it That was the main reason I went ahead and did this. Mainly to learn blender and get away from Max. That way, I can teach my fellow artist how to use this nifty software without violating software copyrights.

[sinbad]

gLitterBug: Wow, thanks!! We all really appreciate this. Sure, the 'look' is a little different from our logo, but when offered something of this quality, I'm sure not going to turn it down on that basis. It's a truly great model.

I'm also glad to hear you did it in XSI too - would you provide the original .scn file too?

As for the skinning requirement, the main thing to bear in mind is that we support a maximum 4 weighted bone assignments per vertex, and since we always like to hardware skin, there's a limit on the number of bones in a skeleton, so the fewer you can get away with the better. We could always require vs_2_0 for hardware skinning this puppy though, since the material effects are likely going to justify that level of card anyway. In which case the bone limit (per submesh, and it's better to stick to as few submeshes as possible) is pretty high (70+) - but still, better to be as frugal as posible since they do each have a cost.

Once again, thanks for this. I'm also very interested in your offer of providing some new demo content. I'm sure we can find someone (coder) to help out with this, do you have any ideas of the sort of thing you'd like to do?

[edit]PS - if you're willing, I'd love to try getting this into a .mesh before I leave for Siggraph on Saturday, whatever stage of development it is at that time[/edit]

[gLitterbug]

Thanks again everyone, sinbad I'm glad you like it too.

About the original .scn file, well I have literally a ton of those scn files. I save out new files all the time so I can go back to uncorrupted ones in case something happens and also when cutting up the mesh for normalmapping etc. I'll put just the stuff I rendered out on the images above into a scn and upload it along with the textures as soon as you tell me what format you want those in(I was kind of suprised to see a .jpg and a .png used as textures in the ogre demos)

Concerning the skinning I still have questions open. I read about the 4 weighted bones before I think, but in XSI I can use pretty much everything as a "bone", so for a jiggling belly for example I could use a NULL object and just soft-link it to some other bone. But when it comes to ogre I have no clue of how it works in there and what the exporter actually exports and stuff.

How exactly do you define submesh? Is it every mesh that is contained inside a Model node?

Again about the two-sided polygon thing, I can't make a closed 2-sided flat thing in XSI, so either I need to give it some thickness, or is there some way that you can just define the backside of certain polies being rendered in ogre too?

Ok on we go to explain the offer for new demo content. Ideally I'd already work with a coder on a small game or at least some prototype, but as life goes things hardly are ideal and so I'm not. I'm not someone to join one of the many mod-teams out there to work on yet another WW2 mod which goes nowhere either. So when I saw that you were looking for better artistic content I thought since I would choose ogre as engine myself too, I might as well create the stuff I do for getting my skills up with ogre in mind too. Maybe I can even find a coder this way who would team up with me to seriously work on a game one day.
I have a lot of things in mind, but it depends a bit on what you want too. If it was my engine I'd probably want a demo that shows off as much cool technical stuff as possible to impress people and make them choose ogre over other engines. Of course I can't promise that I can create artistic content of such quality that makes the demo look so sweet that epic abandons their own engine and starts using ogre too.

But really I'm thinking of a short real-time movie like a cut-scene from a game would be or something along those lines. Maybe with text and pointing arrows blended in explaining what effect is going on right now. Things like a swamp scenery at night being faded in with the focus on a big beetle sitting on a tree, background being blurred (no clue if Ogre supports DOF but I am just giving a random example here). Then the focus goes into the background and you see the Ogre wading through the murky water with a lamp containing glowing bugs in his hand casting shadows all around and reflecting in the swamp water. Weird plants waving as he walks through, flies buzzing around, etc. Once again I can't make any promises that I am capable of delivering this all right away, after all I'm still learning stuff myself, especially in animation I haven't done any actual work yet, but I'm mostly positive that I can get there in time.

So what I'd like to know is what kind of techdemo you had in mind and what your intentions for it are. The only thing I "demand" is that I have artistic freedom about things. I want to design stuff as I like it and have my own style going on rather than being urged to create a realistic recreation of a real WW2 battle or something(yes WW2 is my special friend, every 2nd game being one these days). Knowledge I need before delving into the design of such a demo would be everything that ogre is capable of and which should be shown off in the demo. Do we want Normal Mapping on everything? Parallax Mapping? Can I make tons of grass waving in the wind? How do I define where it grows in my scene? Is there the possibility of simple cloth realtime calculation? What about particle systems, effects like DOF, motion blur. How do materials work, what is possible in that area? Many questions to be cleared up, sorry for not digging into all the ogre documentation myself, but I really don't want to spread myself too thin getting into the programming side of things myself but would rather concentrate on the artistic content and have that coder support me with his wisdom.

[sinbad]

I'll put just the stuff I rendered out on the images above into a scn and upload it along with the textures as soon as you tell me what format you want those in(I was kind of suprised to see a .jpg and a .png used as textures in the ogre demos)

It's really up to you - png or jpg is the same thing really in Ogre, since they both expand to the same size on the GPU (uncompressed), the JPG just saves space on disk. It would probably be worth DXT compressing the large textures for speed (not the normal map though, that will look bad) but I could always play with that later if you've never done this.

Concerning the skinning I still have questions open. I read about the 4 weighted bones before I think, but in XSI I can use pretty much everything as a "bone", so for a jiggling belly for example I could use a NULL object and just soft-link it to some other bone. But when it comes to ogre I have no clue of how it works in there and what the exporter actually exports and stuff.

I wrote that exporter, and it supports anything acting as a 'bone', including NULLs (I tested this using some of the XSI samples so I hope this works for you). It basically just needs a transform anyway, so it follows the envelopes back to whatever you bind them to.

How exactly do you define submesh? Is it every mesh that is contained inside a Model node?

You only really need submeshes for material changes. The XSI exporter by default merges all objects using the same material into a single submesh, since batching is good. You can however turn this feature off in the exporter (its a check box) at which point every separate PolygonMesh object will be a separate submesh in the export.

Again about the two-sided polygon thing, I can't make a closed 2-sided flat thing in XSI, so either I need to give it some thickness, or is there some way that you can just define the backside of certain polies being rendered in ogre too?

All you need to do is to set the culling mode of material used by this submesh to 'none', which means the triangles are not backface culled. I assume the loincloth has a separate material so this can be done in Ogre.

I have a lot of things in mind, but it depends a bit on what you want too. If it was my engine I'd probably want a demo that shows off as much cool technical stuff as possible to impress people and make them choose ogre over other engines. Of course I can't promise that I can create artistic content of such quality that makes the demo look so sweet that epic abandons their own engine and starts using ogre too.

You know, one thing I've learned is that good art doesn't need all the latest high-end features to look good. They can certainly help, but the features shouldn't drive it. Our demos surely do start with features, because we often write them to test or explain particular features. But for this project, I think we need to think more holistically. I don't care what features are used, so long as the result looks good, and that's just as much if not more about good choice of setting, lighting setup, ambience etc as it is about technical features.

I'm terrible at coming up with good demo ideas, precisely because I see it from a technical perspective. So I'm really interested in what you would like to do - thinking about it purely from from an art / design perspective, and then just pulling in the features that make that happen, rather than the other way around. For the purposes of this demo, I really wouldn't mind if the only features you used were those from a couple of versions ago, if the result looked great. I'm sure you will end up using a number of features that could be tagged, but I'd rather that wasn't the focus since I think it distracts from the creative process. I'd rather give you a blank sheet.

Do we want Normal Mapping on everything? Parallax Mapping?

I'm sure not everything, but it can certainly help the definition on many things. Again, this should be driven by the demo requirement for it.

Can I make tons of grass waving in the wind? How do I define where it grows in my scene?

The main limiter here is fillrate, as you can see from Demo_Grass which is pretty heavy just on it's own. So probably not 'loads', but certainly 'some'. How you define where it is is a good question - we start getting into scene format toolchains (options include Collada and DotScene right now). This will depend on the coder.

Is there the possibility of simple cloth realtime calculation?

We don't have this right now, but it's mostly a spring system. If it was supposed to collide with things then this will require some extra code, something like OgreNewt would come in handy. But oerhaps safer to assume not, at least initially.

What about particle systems, effects like DOF, motion blur.

Particle systems are no problem. DOF & motion blur are doable via compositor effects, but can get expensive. We demo a simple blur in Demo_Compositor and DWORD has demoed DOF.

How do materials work, what is possible in that area?

This is a pretty huge question This is probably best answered by saying that it's quite a bit different to the way you define materials in XSI, unless you use the RealTime hook (the GL and D3D shader objects), with the emphasis on combining textures as much as possible rather than splitting channels etc. Shaders are the key to most things, and if you can see the effect in a realtime demo or game these days, we can almost certainly do it. There's a lot more detail in the manual, it would be worth skimming to see what kind of stuff is in there.

We're definitely looking for a coder now - I'd love to be that coder but most of the time I'm rather heavily oversubscribed, and I think this deserves a level of focus I can't possibly give at this time. Is there anyone out there willing to step up to the challenge?

[xavier]

I'd be happy to do the technical side of the iteration with gLitterbug.

[stodge]

Some parts of the face look a little like Iron Maiden's Eddie. The face looks a bit feminine to me, or am I just getting in touch with my feminine side?

Still damn impressive!

[SunSailor]

That's the combination between the earing and the lips I think, but you're right. I really like that heavy fellow, can't wait to see something of him within ogre. If you're advancing to create the animations, I would be very curiouse to see some progress samples here, I can imagine that model will rock!

Edit: Btw, could you upload your videos to youtube? It's much more convenient, as it doesn't create traffic on your side and the videos don't have to be downloaded by us. Nice side effect, I'm able to watch them on my linux machine here at work .

[gLitterbug]

Hehe, maybe I should've put him into a skirt instead then. SunSailor is probably right about it though, the earrings and his full luscious lips maybe coupled with his bitch tits make him look a bit feminine. I didn't think about that or get any comments into that direction before now though

@SunSailor - I'll look at the youtube thing, I never uploaded anything before there. Once I start animating the beast and have results to show I will post them here too, might take a while though.

[Nauk]

Very nice work mate!

[Falagard]

I've been looking for a free model to use in tech demos for Ogre and I'd love to use this one. Is it possible to use this model for that purpose?

I'm willing to animate it myself, and may end up bringing it into 3ds Max to do so. This is an amazing job, very good work!

Clay

[gLitterbug]

Thanks Nauk, Falagard.

@Falagard - I'm not sure about passing the source file around yet, as I want it to stay exclusive to ogre3d itself and not end up modified a bit in things that maybe aren't even connected to ogre and with no connection to me either.(Not to say you'd leak it or claim it as your own work etc, I'm just careful for now thats all, hope you don't take offense)

Sorry, but right now things have to wait until I tried animating him myself and also until I cleared up things with the ogre3d crew on how we handle the usage rights and all. I'll tell you once it all is decided though, hope you aren't in a rush.

[Falagard]

No problemo, let me know if you're willing to license use of your ogre mesh for limited use within Ogre3D based technical demos (technical demonstrations which use Ogre3D as the rendering engine). You can grant a limited license that will restrict usage to specific purposes.

I don't need the source file to get the geometry into 3ds Max, just the .mesh file.