Jump to content

Home

[TSL] HK-51 as he appears in SWTOR


Sith Holocron

Recommended Posts

OK, a new request. Those that despise SWTOR may wish to avert their eyes.

 

I'd like to get a skin for HK-51 that resembles his appearance in the teaser trailer. They do show his whole front -excluding the arms - in a slow upward pan. I attempted to stitch them together so folks would have a reference to compare against. (Due to the way the scene is lighted, the stitches in the picture compilation are very noticeable.)

 

Note the lights that are not only on his eyes, face, and chest but also the blue lights coming out of the top of hip joints.

 

HK-51_zpsd941eb72.png

 

Clicking on the picture should bring you to the Photobucket page where you should see the picture in its full size after you click on the magnifying glass. (It's large, I tells ya.)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 84
  • Created
  • Last Reply

I'm not sure how practical a straight reskin is, at least not with the level of detail you want. The texture layout is not super conducive to straying from simple blocks of colour. Ideally you'd remap the HK model, but unfortunately, like most of the KOTOR models, it's a mess. It's made up of about 35 individual meshes, many of which themselves comprise multiple separate poly groups.

 

sNx6eBL.jpg

 

I have to wonder if you wouldn't be better off just making a new model from scratch.

 

Leaving that aside, simulating the emissive would be difficult. You can't get that sort of effect even with an engine that supports emissive textures (the actual TOR in-game model is nothing like that). You could maybe try and bake some lighting into the texture, but I can't see it being possible with the mapping of the vanilla HK model, as there would be too much bleed/overrun onto other parts of the model.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If someone wants to make a new model for HK-51, I am also open to that as well. :)

 

Leaving that aside, simulating the emissive would be difficult. You can't get that sort of effect even with an engine that supports emissive textures (the actual TOR in-game model is nothing like that). You could maybe try and bake some lighting into the texture, but I can't see it being possible with the mapping of the vanilla HK model, as there would be too much bleed/overrun onto other parts of the model.

 

Also . . . if someone wishes to base the skin for-51 as he appears in the actual SWTOR game -with less lighting - I am also open to that as well.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So I took a crack at a new model. Went for a body that more or less imitates the SWTOR version (although added some gubbins to the forearms and reused the original HK hands because I'm lazy). I don't like the look of the head of the TOR version though, so I took the original HK head and gave it a a bit of a facelift, adding some edge loops to smooth out the bumps, adding in some geometry for the vocabulator, and generally cleaning up the typical horribleness of Bioware meshes. My model actually ended up more detailed than the TOR version, as they use normal maps to fake everything and keep the models low poly, whereas I used actual geometry seeing as KOTOR lacks any normal mapping ability.

 

HK_SWTOR_Style_01_TH.jpg

 

I've done a brief test in-game and it seems to work ok, flashing eyes included (going to see if I can co-opt the effect for the chest light as well). I did notice when running through his animset in Max that he gets a bit of hip dysplasia in certain extreme animations though. I'll have to see what I can do about that (might have to move the hip socket geometry over to the pelvis trimesh, or perhaps add them in as meshes weighted to both the pelvis and upper legs).

 

HK_SWTOR_Style_02_TH.jpg

 

No texture as yet, as that's not really my thing. I might have to do something basic and leave the proper job to one of the skinning pros.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hang on... was that from scratch?
Yes, aside from the head and the hands, which are from the original HK model, as I mentioned. Although the head had some extensive reworking:

 

HK_SWTOR_Style_Reworked_Head_TH.jpg

 

If you crack open HK's head and peer inside, you'll see some typical early Bioware half-assery in action. You could argue that the internal intersections are out of sight, so it was probably done to keep things light for the Xbox, except doing it properly takes less polys. I just put it down to laziness.

 

Would melee animations be included?
It uses HK's existing animations. There are a couple of simple melee ones in there, but there's nothing new. This is just a simple model swap. When I mentioned animations, it was only in the context of fixing the model to work properly with the animations without distortion/breaking, not adding new ones.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ugh. Now I remember why I stopped modding KOTOR last time. Damn MDLOps. Bane of my freaking existence. Anyway, after about 20 or 30 attempts, I finally managed to get a model in-game without a mangled UV map (if you look at my earlier posts, you'll see grey "stripes" on various parts on his body - that's where MDLOps screwed up the UVs).

 

Also got the chest lights hooked up:

 

HK_SWTOR_Style_03_TH.jpg

 

Now I just need to figure out some textures....

Link to comment
Share on other sites

DP, this model of yours is so nice that perhaps I should expand the scope to adding skins for HK-47 and HK-50. What do you think?

 

Maybe it could be an HK model replacement?

 

And DP, this is absolutely stunning. Keep it up!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Got a first pass on 47's texture done:

 

HK_SWTOR_Style_04_TH.jpg

 

Still need to fix a few spots, maybe tweak the colour a bit.

 

In lieu of any provision for spec maps (man, you really notice it coming back to KOTOR after working with modern engines), I was hoping I could mix in a bit of envmap to shine up a few spots, but it ignored my alpha channel for some reason.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.


×
×
  • Create New...