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"Beluga" Model for Unreal Tournament 2003 ver. 2225

Modeled, Textured, Animated, & everything else by Michael Stearns
email: rvr67michael@charterremovethis.net (remove "removethis")

Descripton: A silly-looking (but apparently angry!) whale wearing pants and boots.

1022 Vertices
2044 Faces
1 1024x1024 Texture Map + Portrait
Original Skeleton + Animations

Tools used: 3DStudio Max 5, Karma Tools, Paint Shop Pro 7, Painter Classic

This archive may be freely distributed by anyone anywhere as long as its contents remain unchanged.

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11/10/03
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I finally finished up a little extra polish I felt "essential" and am now making my first Unreal Model available for download.  I actually finished a little while ago, but got sucked into another project and pretty much lost interest in this model, so what polish is there isn't as much as there could be.  Some of the animations could use some work and, well, heck, everything could always use a bit more work.  Anyway, slap a fresh portrait illustration on there and we're good to go.

You should be able to simply unzip this file into your UT2003 directory and be in good shape, but here's a list of contents anyway in case you want to install it by hand.  :)

textures/BelugaTextures.utx
system/MDS_BelugaUT2k3.upl
Karmadata/BelugaUT2k3.ka
Animations/BelugaUT2k3.utx

If you enjoy this model (or even if you hate it) please drop me an email, I'd be glad to hear what you think.


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If you would like a Bio for this character (and why wouldn't you?) simply copy and paste the following line (and make sure it stays one single line) onto a new line in the XPlayer.int file.  Be careful not to change any of the existing entries!

Beluga=Name: Beluga|Age: 84|Race: Cetacean||Data:|No one is certain exactly what lead Beluga to enter the tournament, but when asked for comment other whales typically remark that spending so much time out of water has probably effected his brain.  This sort of skirts around the question of why he was out of water in the first place, but whatever has effected his brain has also made him one of the tournament's most vicious competitors.  In his spare time Beluga likes to collect antique weapons, and the hand pistol he keeps with him (rumored to be a family heirloom) is one of his most prized pocessions.||


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Release Notes / Self Critique:

* This model seems to require the 2225 (or higher) patch for UT2k3.  I don't know what's causing it, but it crashes when he dies.  The karma works fine so I have no idea what is causing this.  There's no skeleton for fire deaths so the original model is specified instead.  You want the patch anyway.  Believe me.

* I built the skeleton with capabilty for more facial expression than really showed through in the end, a lot of bones are hardly used at all or are pretty ineffective when they are.  I don't think this will effect many systems (it runs fine on mine) but I feel like I should mention it.

* I don't know where I lost the animations for backwards and right crouching movement, so I just replaced them with the forward movement.  You'll just have to bear it, I didn't want to recreate them and you won't see them in-game much.  It is too bad, I think the crouching animations were pretty funny.  :)

* I learned a thing or two about modeling legs and why you need more vertices on the posterior than I provided.  :)  It looks as if he's got cigarette cartons jammed into his pants.  Better luck next time. 

* Texture map is 1024x1024.  This is dreadfully wasteful but apparently the UT23k standard, so I don't see any reason not to go ahead and do it--at least there's only one map!  In lower resolutions it looks pretty nice and a little touching up in the baleen would make it virtually indistinguishable, but since I don't think there's a file size problem here I'll just leave it bloated.  There's no team colors either.  Sorry.

* Speaking of the baleen, boy did I ever learn a lesson about always checking out your texture layout before you start coloring it in!  I appologize for the glaring distortion on the left side, but it's really hardly noticeable in gameplay so we'll just have to let it be.  I tried to fix it but only ended up making things worse.  Next time I'll be more weary. The rest of the texture is not especially efficiently laid out either, so this is an area I definitly want to improve on next time.

* Beluga is his name.  He is not a Beluga whale.  Sorry for the confusion.


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Special Thanks

While I used a number of tutorials and resources to help make this guy, I have to say it would not have been possible at all without all the fellows at Polycount forums who answered my inane questions, and the author of this extremely helpful tutorial:

http://www.sunny-d.com/ut2003tut_intro.html


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Links

Polycount Progress Thread: http://dynamic.gamespy.com/~polycount/ubb/Forum2/HTML/007541.html
My LiveJournal: http://www.livejournal.com/users/helldray
