Daggerfall Workshop Forums

Hello there!

I've been a big fan of Elder Scrolls series since I've got my first PC. I keeped an eye on Daggerfall Unity for a long time, and enjoyed playing it. And I also read these forums for some time. But this is my first topic.
I've been fooling around with Blender in my spare time and this is a result:
https://youtu.be/2D0-0tPanCk

This model has its drawbacks. I'm still learning. And the particle effects look awful. Not my cup of tea. And there is no use of them in game engines anyway.

Frankly speaking, I don't know, what to do with this, as I've seen some topics where people also posted some of their 3d models. I'm at the very beginning of learning Unity, so I won't manage to do a complete mod. At least not in the near future.

Wow, if we managed to get these models ingame...

Not my area at all though, all I can do is hope someone figures out how

Welcome to the forums, Hrafni!

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I'm impress by the fidelity of this model, it's really nice, Clothes are still a bit too static, but that's minor.
Just out of curiosity, how long did it take to get this result?
I remember Mark Jones writing he could only afford 2 days per model because of Daggerfall schedule, wow.

Somebody posting a 3d model swap for commoners on Reddit, so I suspect a replacement of other models is not so far fetched: https://www.reddit.com/r/daggerfallunit ... ately_but/

Beautiful. A number of scripts would need reworked to work with the 3d models. Currently, scripts files for the enemy manage when the cif animations are played. I imagine these would need replaced in some form, so the code triggers the 3d animations. Thats on top of getting the model in, detecting the generated world via Enemysensor Script, and hooked up to the Enemymotor script to get it to move and collide with the generated world.

Someone probably needs to also do some research on bringing animations into unity, as the base engine and its subsequent script files will have to tell unity when and what 3d animations to play for the models.

Your work is beautiful. Now, if some one can dump the time into rewriting/modding scripts to run these 3d models and animations. To much on my plate to even take a look myself.

Love to see it in game.

Just out of curiosity, how long did it take to get this result?

Well, it's hard to calculate the whole time taken for this model, as I didn't work every day on it. There were several weeks when I didn't work on it at all. Besides there is a big amount of basic features that I've been learning about 3d modelling during making this model. Without all that I would say it took me 2 weeks all in all. But I've sent the first WIP screenshot to my girlfriend at February 10th.
The good thing is that most of the human like characters (including common citizens, vampires and daedra lord) share the same elements of clothes, weapons and animations. To make a mage out of this model I will need just to delete gloves, boots and bag, model a staff and make 1 new animation. It will take no more than only one day.
But this character is pretty high poly for the engine. I assume that LODs should be made for every such model to use them for the game. And there are some other technical issues, that need to be solved.

I remember Mark Jones writing he could only afford 2 days per model because of Daggerfall schedule, wow.

Well if a high poly version, a mesh, textures and materials, animations were made by separate artists it's real but very hard even with modern tools. And in 1996... well you see all these glitches in the original model with body parts constantly poking out of the clothes. And as written in the same article they bought some models. But they did a great job.

Welcome

Very nice model, animations and a interesting thread to read.

Id really like to see a image of this exact model where it has like 100x less polygons, but Im not sure its so easy to do in blender.
It might actually still look good and it would get rid of the need of LODs, to ease up the 3d model implementation to the game a bit.
I can be completely wrong tho

pango wrote: ↑Sun Apr 12, 2020 7:54 am Welcome to the forums, Hrafni!

You can embed YT videos using [youtube] markup:


I'm impress by the fidelity of this model, it's really nice, Clothes are still a bit too static, but that's minor.
Just out of curiosity, how long did it take to get this result?
I remember Mark Jones writing he could only afford 2 days per model because of Daggerfall schedule, wow.

Somebody posting a 3d model swap for commoners on Reddit, so I suspect a replacement of other models is not so far fetched: https://www.reddit.com/r/daggerfallunit ... ately_but/

Wow, that model is very well animated and faithful to DF's sprite. I would love for this to be in-game!

Id really like to see a image of this exact model where it has like 100x less polygons, but Im not sure its so easy to do in blender.

Blender is an all around. I even edited the video for Youtube using internal video editor.
Every 3d editing software has its tools to automatically reduce the poly count, but unfortunately it never works well and you have to always reduce the poly count manually. I think you didn't mean 100x less polygons though. This model 18 178 tris or 9 246 faces (mostly quads). Reduce it to 182 tris? Well, it would be tricky. Even mobile games have more. The low poly model for the body is considered to be about 2 000 tris. My body model (without clothes and stuff) is 7 676 tris. So I assume it is quite mid poly model.

I'm seriously impressed! I think you did a great job capturing all the elements of the original asset, especially the animations.

As of now, we don't have a way to mod in 3D enemies (MOBs), but we are free to implement 3D models for static NPCs (such as quest givers) and mobile NPCs (commoners and guards). As a matter of fact, I'm currently in the process of picking up the work started by that Reddit post you mentioned, starting with the commoners. The twist is that I'm using UMA to generate the humanoid mesh at runtime so they could potentially have unlimited variation. Additionally, I'm using my SpriteWrite utility to (optionally) make the 3D character appear as a 2D sprite.

You can see what little I have so far here. During the video, I toggle on the SpriteWrite effect and vary the sprite resolution.

Anyhow, I really don't mean for this post to detract attention from you incredible work. But, if you would like to collaborate, I could really use your help with clothing/accessories and animations. I can handle the coding, packaging, and implementation details, and UMA can handle the humanoid mesh generation.

And feel free to say no. I understand completely about time constraints and real world obligations and such. This is something that I'm also just sort of chipping away at as I have time. No pressure.

Edit: I just watched the video for a 3rd time, and man... you really knocked it out of the park. Well done!

That is truly amazing job, excellent work! You sure put a lot of effort into making it as close to the original as possible.

BTW guys, I'm still unsure if Mark Jones made the original models (and the sprites out of them) with adjustments for the DOS VGA aspect ratio or not. The female Nightblade here looks rather proportional without aspect ratio correction, or?

Perhaps high-res sprites could be created from this model for DFU? I know it's possible because there's a guy who makes some cool stuff for Duke Nukem 3D.