morthon

This is great stuff, mate! I weep for the poor, under-equipped Gendarmerie in vanilla APEX xD

Hey, about those sounds. Why not collaborate with Lord Jarhead from JSRS? I understand he does commissions for smaller projects. Maybe something to look into!

What is a warrior without his armor? Obviously work in progress, blocking stage.

It was followed up with the sequel, Feat of Arms. https://forums.bistudio.com/topic/189040-aiss-feat-of-arms-v200/

Silly question, but are there any servers that run this mod or are planning to? :0

Yeah that's very nice, but the whole point of this project is to have lore-accurate (thus, large) Brutes.... Not really willing to give that up. I'm already compromising by having them be 2.6m instead of 2.8m. I totally agree, that's why I said its interesting to think about, but its also waaaaaay ahead xD

It's interesting to think about, but it's also waaaay ahead of where we are now.

You do realize that if the buildings were rescaled just to accomodate large characters like the Brutes or the Elites that every single map that uses those buildings would have to be redone, right? Just like that one halo 3 dev said "It wouldn't make for very good gameplay" if the humans could just hole up inside a building and the Brutes would have no way of getting to them. Granted, the AI isn't very good at manuevering inside buildings anyway though it has greatly improved over the years. It would be unfair if the Brutes wouldn't be able to fortify themselves inside buildings. And it lessens the experience of engaging them if all they can ever do is stand out in the open. Maybe I'm crazy, but it feels like something that might feel boring after a while. Unless wraiths end up being very good at bringing down buildings...

As it stands now, they probably won't be able to enter any buildings at all, which sounds like exploiting waiting to happen. In the halo games everything is just huge to compensate for their size. Even hunters, which are 3.6m tall, can enter most buildings in halo odst. If this ends up working out, there would have to be changes to many of the mod's buildings, which doesn't sound realistic. A point of concern, I guess. In terms of vehicles I think its possible to have the covenant vehicles change shape to accomodate for the driver. I think that's how they do it in the halo games. It's why a grunt and a brute can somehow both fit perfectly in tje same Ghost. And it would make sense lore-wise given all the different alien species in the Covenant.

It would be cool to have lore-sized Sangheili for my Brutes to crush, but so far I don't see the need. I also don't want to get ahead of myself. Let's first focus on the brutes and see how far FC is then, alright? xD Together with how much time I have to spend on school, realistically speaking this project will probably take a year or two to complete, and that's just our dear Jiralhanae. So we'll see then! I think Drake's elites and the stuff he showed thats wip is already really good, so like I said. I don't see the need. Yeah, apart from the amount of work (though for me most of it is theoretical right now), it all actually seems possible! I found my old halo 3 collectors edition bestiarum while cleaning out my room! Should I go for the canon size? As in 2.8m. I defaulted to 2.6m because 2.8 seemed too big to me to be fun in ArmA xD What do you guys think? Am I crazy? There's still room to change it now.

So does that mean this mod is fully compatible with Alive???

You'd be pretty surprised. Brutes are actually quite intelligent and very capable of executing advanced tactics. I would rather compare them to the Uruk-Hai in the LOTR films. Brutish and savage, but clever and disciplined. And they value each other as brothers, something the Orcs from WH40K definately do not. Realistically speaking, I don't think it would be practical for Brutes to use human weapons. They are tiny compared to them. In Halo 3 they are apparently 2.8 meters tall but conveniently have human-sized fingers. I don't buy it lore-wise and I think it was done purely for gameplay reasons (So the brute weapons would fit in the player's hands). In a perfect world, I would restrict Brutes from using human weapons but allow humans to use Brute weapons with the obvious disadvantage that they would be way too heavy for humans to wield effectively. I can't imagine that it would be easy to aim a brute shot without being blown away by the sheer recoil. I mean, did you see the size of those barrels?? In the end, I want to go for realism. Once again, I am not planning to "rescale" anything. I have succesfully done some tests with the rig I prepared and exported into O2 from Maya as a .p3d and the animations as .rtms. Everything seems to be working so far, safe for a few weird glitches in the fingers that won't deform correctly. But all in all, its looking good. I looked at the CfgMoves definitions a while back and I think I understand how it all works. But yeah, I'll probably run into more bumps as I go along. My first priority right now is to get the brute ingame (albeit static) and call different animations through console commands. To see if I can successfully make the skeleton work in-game and not just in O2. After/If I get that done, I will prepare simple static placeholder poses to portray the different movement states and start working them into a complete moveset. I'll probably make one actual walking animation just to see if I can make a full looping animation work correctly in the moveset. If I manage that, I will start replacing the animations one by one with actual (high-quality?) animations. I'm thinking of making use of the mo-cap studio at my college to do some of it, but I don't know yet. My experience with Mo-capping is pretty sparse. I don't want the animations to look or feel unnatural or cartoony, so I might rotoscope some of it to get it to feel alive. This part will obviously be the most time-consuming part xD As for how I want to approach that. As far as I understand, for the basic movement set I will at least need animations for every movement state (running/walking/idle) for each stance (prone/kneeling/standing) and weapon state (gun raised/gun lowered/unarmed) and for each weapon type (rifle/pistol/launcher). So theoretically, that amounts to at least 3^4= 81 animations for a full moveset, I guess. I may be wrong as my knowledge is limited. Also, that's not including things like throwing grenades(simple throw), placing explosives(putting it down, getting back up), opening your inventory (opening, closing), entering a vehicle (entering, exiting), reloading weapons (rifle, pistol, launcher), vaulting (simple vault), being injured (screaming in pain lying on the floor, recovering), healing (going down, healing loop, getting up). I may or may not have missed a few. I estimate all those would up the amount to about 99 animations. I'm purposely leaving out things like stance adjustments, limping and weapon deploying as I would only do them later and I fear they are complicated. I had some further concerns, but I can't remember them right now xD

I think they would have a hard time doing literally anything! To be honest, it is a matter of concern to me. Would it be possible to restrict actions based on being of a different 'Man' class? Would it be possible to restrict weapon usage?? Too many questions! I am planning to make a completely new skeleton with all new animations. This seems to be the best option and would avoid many potential problems. Luckily I am a third-year student 3D animator at the dutch College of Arts in Utrecht, so I have a lot of experience with animating. This is the sole reason why I dare to attempt this :P I am having some problems with figuring out how this system works. Right now I am focused on setting the skeleton up correctly. I have a model.cfg that is correctly set up (at least I think) and a weighted mesh in O2. Looking at the example files I noticed two things that were interesting to me. If anyone knows more, please help! Otherwise, I'll just keep experimenting. 1. Definitions of what looks to be the skeleton in the memory LOD. How do you set this up? It's not just points. I understand that its a combination of single points and dual-points representing axes. Do I have to place all of them manually and hope I perfectly align the points to the bones or is there some way to convert the existing skeleton? And where do I place a single point and where a dual-point? Does it even matter? 2. Something called a pivots model referenced in the example model.cfg. Again, where does this come from? How do I set it up? How essential is it exactly? I understand its at least used for the ragdolling effect, but the example model.cfg notes that its used for hierarchical animation. Any clarification would be great. I'll probably keep bombarding this thread with more questions as time goes on xD

Basic proxy model to begin basic tests. I'm super excited! Here's a scale comparison. Brutes will be 2.60m tall compared to the vanilla soldier's 1.80m.

They do so in Halo Reach.http://halo.bungie.net/images/games/Reach/images/cutouts/e32010ff/full/Reach_E310_BruteMinor.jpg I'm not sure which look I wanna go for in the end but I think the one-handed grip for the brutes would fit their arrogant and savage nature better. I also think its possible for humans (and elites) to hold them two-handed while the brutes hold them one-handed, but I can't be sure until i start to experiment.

Update: It turns out Spikers are friggin huuge (81.7m) xD Kind of makes sense though, considering the Brutes are like 2.6-2.8m tall.... I kind of ran aground when trying to figure out how to do the custom hand animations for the weapon. If anyone could help with that, that would be great! I also think the textures could use a little more work, something feels off. Any feedback would be appreciated.

Update: Early substance painter pass. The blood was for trying out how it would look. And to remind you what will happen to you troopers out there when I'm done >: D

That is the plan, yeah. I prefer these kinds of mods to be unified so donation is still my preference. But to be honest, at this point I'm not entirely sure. Then again, it might also take another year before I manage to finish the brutes, so yeah who knows.

"Well, they must looove the smell of BVLGARI."

Update: Zbrush pass. I'm not gonna go too crazy with this, so I'm almost ready to call the high-poly done and start converting it for game-use. Some of the details will be added in with the textures.

Hello, forum dwellers, I have been super busy with school since forever (barely got to enjoy summer vacation at all), but that doesn't mean I have forgotten about the Brutes. It may be later rather than sooner, but this may be a thing soon! Very early WIP of brute spiker that I'm doing for a school assignment (yay loopholes) Will probably be able to sneak the brutes themselves in as a school assignment too, who knows! Cheers!

Hi, I have a question and this seems the right place to ask. I would like to make a custom tracer effect but I don't understand how it works. Looking at BI's configs, I can understand that tracer visuals are defined in a .p3d, which seems weird to me. I obviously can't get into the BI .p3d to take a look to see how its set-up. I figured someone here would know. Are there sample tracer files that I could look into? Or is it secretly really simple? Help would be hyper-appreciated, thanks in advance.

Hi, what do the following commands in character configs do? uniformAccessories[]={}; accuracy=2.3; minFireTime=7; Is 'accuracy' really as obvious as it seems? If so, on what scale or calculations does it work (Is 2.3 high or low?) and how much will it affect ai behaviour. I assume this has no effect on players? Thanks in advance

HI, so I'm working on this soldier dude as one of my first ever addons for A3. I have followed the available tutorials closely and produced a model that I've successfully exported into the engine, after some struggles. However, the mesh refuses to deform when in-game, but works fine in 3ds max and in O2 with imported .RTMs. Did I do anything wrong in the config? Does anybody have a clue on what causes this and how I could resolve this problem? I feel like I'm missing something, a named selection or something but I wouldn't know what. Model and deformation work fine in 3ds max and O2, but... ... the mesh refuses to deform at all when in-game. Also, the name selections that are supposed to swap the skin texture don't seem to work either (observe the hands). Please help me, I'm so close to being able to throw this out there, you're my only hope.

Thank you very much, it was indeed the model.cfg. I've been able to get it to work now and I'm a very happy man!