Creamy's Quake 2 PPMs

Dib - Build Log

> Dib can be thought of as a pre-teen Fox Moulder from Jhonen Vasquez's Invader Zim. He has an obsession for the paranormal, and is a member of a secret club of fellow paranormal investigators called the the Swollen Eyeball. He has no friends whatsoever, and noone takes him or his work seriously, not even his father, Professor Membrane, or his sister, Gaz. Dib is the mortal enemy of Zim, a hostile alien of the Irken race, who has come to Earth to enslave its people, and is disguised as a human boy. Dib is the only person to know Zim's true identity and his mission, but is unable to convince anyone else of the truth.

> Invader Zim is one of my favorite shows on TV, and is a very popular show amongst teens and young adults. Frankly, I'm surprised noone has ever released a Quake model of one of the show's characters before now. (I've seen two Gir models, one of Gaz, and one incompleted model of Zim, but none of them were made into gaming models.) This model is my way of paying homage to the show, and I hope other models from the show will eventually follow. Some time ago, I did a poll on CW's front page of what cartoon character the people would want to see as a Quake 2 PPM, and Dib won. I may make a Quake 3 version of this model if I find the time. When Dib is completed, he will use my universal one-handed VWEP, the same one Chuckie Finster uses.

7/1/2007 - Nearly three years ago, I completed the first release version of my Dib Quake 2 PPM. The model was choc full of errors, and I was never completely happy with it, so I promised myself that someday I would improve it. Over the past month or so, I've replaced Dib's right hand with a permanent fist, and this improved the model in three ways.

1 - The right hand had what looked like an extra polygon. Removing the poly resulted in a hole in the hand that appeared in certain frames, because in those frames, the poly appeared legit. With the hand now a permanent fist, this anomaly is now gone.

2 - Dib's polycount has been reduced by 64 polygons, bringing the polycount down from 968 to 904. I was shooting for something under 900, but I'll take what I can get.

3 - The fist's simplicity allowed me to add a full VWEP that that doesn't distort too badly. The blaster that was Dib's lone weapon barely fit in the old hand, but the new fist allows the weapons to not only distort less, but be larger without unnaturally clipping outside the hand.

10/22/2004 - After over a year and a half of on and off work, Version 1.1 of my Dib PPM is finally complete! However, I'm not completely satisfied with how it turned out. I couldn't apply the VWEP to Dib without the weapon distorting as it animated, so I decided to leave it out of this particular build. However, the model does include a full soundpack, and two capture the flag skins.

> The soundpack gave me an incredibly hard time. I thought I could use the Invader Zim episodes I downloaded with KaZaA Lite to make wave files, but Adobe Premiere rejected the DivX codec, so that option was out. I then thought about using the episodes of IZ I had recorded on videotape, but my sister was borrowing it at the time. She finally returned the tape yestedrday, so I was able to work on the soundpack today. However, the tape didn't provide enough samples to make a complete soundpack, but then I thought of an option I couldn't think of earlier in the week when I found the Sound Recorder wouldn't record sounds for locally played AVI / MPG files. I brought my laptop Glamdring into my bedroom, and hooked up its audio out port to my main computer Candybox's line in port. I then transfered some episodes of IZ from Candybox to Glamdring to avoid lag. Then, as I played the IZ episodes on Glamdring, I was able to record the audio samples on Candybox. I managed to find all of the sounds I needed to complete Dib's soundpack, except the gurp and drown sounds. The volume of the samples varied from too soft to too loud. In order to correct this, I opened the Male model's Jump1 sound, and used it for comparison as I adjusted the volume of Dib's samples.

> For the next version of the Dib, I plan to replace the right hand with a permanent fist. This will solve a lot of problems I've been having with the model. The replacement wound lower Dib's poly count, hopefully below 900. Also, there is a seemingly wasted polygon within the hand that only shows up during certain frames; something I've never seen before in any of my other models. And most importantly, a solid fist may be kinder to the VWEPs than a normal hand, and may reduce the distorting of the weapon models. Since Dib holds a weapon in his right hand for most of the 198 frames, the replacement won't make much of a difference to anyone who sees the model in action. Of course, I will have to redo the skinmap for that part of the model.

12/23/2003 - For the past two months, I've had all 20 of Dib's animations completed, except for Crouch Walk. I wanted to have Dib crawl on his belly like an Army private crawling under a low wire, but I couldn't find the right animation reference to follow. I finally found a few potential references while looking over some old tapes of Hey Arnold episodes a week ago. Using one of these references, I found a crawl which was almost as good as the belly crawl I originally wanted, and decided to settle for it. The resulting animation is the reference's crawl with my own personal touch to it. The short clip below shows the completed Crouch Walk, but the actual CW is far less choppy than the clip suggests.

> With the completion of Crouch Walk, I was finally able to compile all of Dib's animations into a choreography. I found an extra frame with the Flipoff and Crouch Death animations, but other than that the compiling went smoothly. This puts me at the start of the optimization phase of this project, which I will start soon. As I do Dib's optimizations, I will turn to some ancient notes I wrote for my Quake 2 PPM modeling tutorial years ago, and will re-write these notes into a new section of my tutorial page.

10/2/2003 - I finished Dib's first Death animation, and I used a UFC promotional clip as the reference. This is a seven frame animation, stretched out to 30 frames to make it easier to view.

9/29/2003 - Since I last updated this page, I finished Dib's Crouch Stand, Crouch Attack and Crouch Pain animations. This means that only Crouch Walk and the four Deaths stand between me and compiling the animations into their choreography. All I need now is to find a reference movie of someone crawling on their belly so I can finish Dib's Crouch Walk.

> When I was doing the Crouch Attack, it dawned on me that since Dib fires his weapon with one hand while crouching, there would be more of a recoil from this attack than in his standard standing attack, where he holds the weapon with two hands. I took another look at Dib's Attack animation, and noticed a violent recoil that almost caused Dib to fall backwards. Then I realized that the recoil in Dib's Crouch Attack couldn't exceed the explosive recoil in his standing attack. So I thought it would make sense to redo the standing attack, significantly reducing its recoil so that it was less than that of Crouch Attack. Besides, I thought it might be a good idea to show that Dib is comfortable in firing his weapon.

> The movie on the left shows the original Attack animation, while the one on the right shows the new and less spectatular version.

8/1/2003 - This is an update that should have been made yesterday when I first announced it on the front page, but somehow I just forgot to put it up here; don't ask. Anyways, since the last update, I completed three new animations for Dib; Taunt, Point, and Wave. This brings the total number of completed animation to twelve out of twenty. While Taunt and Point were only moderately difficult, the Wave was an absolute bitch.

> Like I did with my Chuckie and Tony models, I'm dedicating Dib's wave to his grenade toss. At first, I planned on having the toss take the form of a baseball pitch, but after I finished the first keyframe, I decided to change it to what Brandy Oteigh was going to use for her own grenade toss. Dib's Hand Grenade model is Brandy's ballflinger, a throwing device I saw on an episode of Disney's_The Weekenders. I used a clip from the show as a reference, and it was tough to work with, since it only gave me two dimensions to study instead of three, so I had to resort a lot of guesswork. Below is the reference clip from The Weekenders next to Dib's finished Grenade Toss animation.

> I realized something important when I was putting together the clip of Dib's Grenade Toss. I noticed the flinger was upside-down while he was holding it in his default Stand frame. At first I thought it was a problem with the constraints that bind the flinger model to Dib, but then I noticed the Dib's right hand was turned the wrong way, so that the back of his hand faces the front. This could mean that I have to adjust all the animations I've made so far to correct this problem. So what I'll do for CW's next update is make a choreography with all of Dib's animations, where he holds the flinger in his right hand. Needless to say, this will hold me back quite a bit, but I'm still making my final preparations for this year's QuakeCon, so it might take me a while to make it happen.

7/10/2003 - The past month has given me the chance to do some major upgrades to Dib. Some were relatively easy, while others were a real pain in the ass. Dib now stands at 588 patches, and when I did a test conversion of the model into gmax, the polycount came out to be 1029 polygons. Here's the result of all my hard work on the model...

> I reworked Dib's torso in order to make it more SmartSkin friendly. At the middle of the torso, the mesh now branches off into two parts; the belly, and the shirt. This upgrade allows Dib to raise his legs without them clipping through the shirt. Trust me, this was more of a bitch than you think. The top four pics show what the torso was like before the upgrade, the bottom is after.

> I've applied Dib's eye movement to his existing animations, and will apply them to all of his future animations as well. The eyes came out far better than I initially expected, and I think they're very true to Dib. I've described in detail how I created these eye movements in the Mesh & Bones section of my Quake 2 PPM modeling tutorial. I only finished one new animation since my last update, the Salute. Killing two birds with one stone, here's a short animation demonstrating Dib's Salute complete with the eye movements.

> The Jump animation has been fixed, so that the second frame shows the peak of the jump instead of the third.

6/3/2003 - I finished Dib's mesh and skeleton four days ago. I spent about 13 solid hours over a two day period on the body (everything except the head) and skeleton, forsaking sleep, food, and bodily hygene to do so. The model sheet I used as my rotoscope cheated a bit, so I had to make a few comprimises. My version of Dib isn't exactly "on model", but I'm happy with it anyway. The model's final patch count came out to be 587 patches, which I hope will translate to less than 900 polygons when I export it to 3DS Max.

> I've included two avi files with this update; one is the standard idle spin, while the other is a sample of what Dib's Run looks like so far. The run is one of the seven animations I've completed so far. I held off animating the eyes, because I had forgotten that my current version of Animation Master (AM2000, v8.0) supported SmartSkin. Now that it's come back to me, I'll do the eyes as soon as I get a chance.

4/6/2003 - Four days ago, I finished all the features on Dib's head as the result of two back-to-back sleepless night cramathons. The hair was by far the toughest feature to model, and I had to spend at least three solid hours studying his complex hairstyle on several screenshots of IZ before laying down the first spline. When this model is finished, the giant lock of hair, the eyes, and the mouth will be animated. So far, the head weighs in at 210 patches. I've included a small avi of Dib's head spinning, as well as a shot of the top of his head.

3/20/2003 - Here is the first sign of life from my Dib Quake 2 PPM. This is accually the second time I've modelled the head. The original head model was lost when BOTH of Candybox's hard drives terminally failed within hours of each other late last December. As a result, I've had to rebuild the head by tracing screenshots I took of the model and pimped at Polycount. I plan on modeling the hair next, followed by the rest of the features of the head.

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