Type: 		
Unreal Tournament 2003 Multiplayer Pluggin Model


Name: 		
Angel Interceptor


Release Date: 	
1st Dec 2002


Author:		
Ian Waugh    


E-Mail:		
gundam@btinternet.com 


Homepage: 	
G-net
http://freespace.virgin.net/ian.waugh/index.htm  
(no longer updated)


Files:				
AngelInterceptor.ukx
AngelInterceptorT.utx
AngelInterceptorUPL.upl
AngelInterceptor.txt

Instructions:	

To install the model Unzip the listed files to you UT2003 directory:

/Animations/AngelInterceptor.ukx
/Textures/AngelInterceptorT.utx
/System/AngelInterceptorUPL.upl


If you wish for a bio for this character you manually have to edit some files. This is only recommend for people who know what they are doing.

Edit the UT2003/System/AngelInterceptorUPL.upl file in notepad and find the bit that reads
 Portrait=AngelInterceptorT.Portrait, Sex=Female,
and change it to read
 Portrait=AngelInterceptorT.Portrait, Text=Xplayers.AngelInterceptor, Sex=Female,

Then edit  the UT2003/System/XPlayers.int and add the following line to the bottom of it.

AngelInterceptor="Name: Angel Interceptor|Age: Immortal|Race: Angel|Data:|Heaven was basically getting on her tits, 6000 years sititng on cloud looking pretty, talking to the Gods and playing a harp had driven this once serene angel to drink. But after a couple of centuries, even her usual 12 pints of extra stong nectar just didn't help any more after a day trying to be saintly. Bored with heaven and desperate for stimulation her gaze fell upon the earth. Something down there did catch here eye, and it looked like it just might do the trick, sezing the moment, she raised a single digit to the heavenly host and jumped off her cloud. Upon reaching earth she quickly swapped her white robes for an outfit from Madam whiplass's house of pain, argumented her wings with a jet engine and entered the Unreal Tournement. 6000 years of pent up aggresion was just about to be unleashed on the poor unfortunates who dared to enter the arena with her.||"



This model can be freely distributed as long as this text file is included, unmodified.
         
I'm pretty sure pluggin player models can only be seen during play of UT2003 if they are present on the Server and and the players's PCs. This is a general limitation of UT2003, not specific to Angel Interceptor



Description: 
Angel Interceptor

Heaven was basically getting on her tits, 6000 years sititng on cloud looking pretty, talking to the Gods and playing a harp had driven this once serene angel to drink. But after a couple of centuries, even her usual 12 pints of extra stong nectar just didn't help any more after a day trying to be saintly. Bored with heaven and desperate for stimulation her gaze fell upon the earth. Something down there did catch here eye, and it looked like it just might do the trick, sezing the moment, she raised a single digit to the heavenly host and jumped off her cloud.  

Upon reaching earth she quickly swapped her white robes for an outfit from Madam whiplass's house of pain, argumented her wings with a jet engine and entered the Unreal Tournement. 6000 years of pent up aggresion was just about to be unleashed on the poor unfortunates who dared to enter the arena with her.
 

Influences:  
It's sort of orignal, but its still just an idealised woman with some armour and fetishistic clothing, so the basic theme is nothing that hasn't been done 100 times before. I took some influences from Masuamnue Shirow's and Kia Asamiya’s work, but its done in a non anime style. Its been pointed out that it looks a little like Philip Castles's work to, but sort of rustier. The name is from Captin Scarlet (just the name), I didn't know what she was called when I was doing the modeling, just that is was some kind of angel, the interceptor bit just sort of poped into my head when I was doing the skin. It is not ment to be any thing relgious or any thing like that and no offense to anyone of that nature is intended.
		
                            
Model Info:	

Vertices   	: 2329
Polygons      	: 4586 tris
Skins       	: 3 head  		512x512
                    bskin   	 	1024x1024
                    wing		512x256  With alplha map
                 Red/Blue team Colour version of bskin are included

Skeleton     	: Custom CS Biped plus additional bones for controlling the wings
Animation      	: Hand made from scratch (78 sequences)
Kamma           : Standard UT2003 Female kamma physics
Sounds          : Standard UT2003 Female Merc sounds
		
Model Notes:	

The model is polyon heavy. Some people seem to get upset about its polycount and complain I've wasted polies or and am disregarding its effect on frame rate. These people tell me UT20003 player models must be under 3k polies. Actually the player models supplied in UT2003 go up to 3419 polies and they designed to work with the minimum spec 733 processors with a TNT2 graphics card. But if you are one of these sort of people who are fanatical about low poly, or absolulty require every last frame per second from your game, please delete this model and go download something else. 

The reason Angel uses so many polies is that I wanted to get the smoothing to work just right and I wanted to have a fully detailed face, I did not stick to a specifc polygon count this time, and just added polies where I thought they where needed. It was not orginaly designed for UT2003, it was a modeling exercise, UT2003 came along and I just though it would be interesting to try it in game as I understood (and subseqeuntly have confirmed ) that on mid range hardware, the engine can cope. Also I found that player models in UT are shaded by in level lighting more than any other FPS I've seen, so good smoothing is essential (and smoothing groups won't help you). 

I've done extensive testing with the angel, comparing it to the standard models and the biggest effect I've seen is a drop of 1 FPS. I've also ran bot matches with 9 angels in there, and it all remained perfectly playable. As far as the UT engine is concered, If there is a limit to the size of player models, it certainly ain't 3k. UT2003 is often rendereing 100k polies plus per frame, so and extra 1300 isn't actualy that much more of a burden. I tested on a 1.4 Athlon with a geforce 3 (latest drivers) under windows ME. 

UT2003 models get 3 extra LOD's automatically, so it isn't rendering all of those polies all the time anyway.
 
In the end its only a pluggin model, if you don't like it, don't use it.



Skin Notes:

The supplied models in UT2003 use 2 1024x1024 skins, some with alpha maps, So my 3 (1024x1024,512x152 and 512x256 with a mask ) actually end up using less memory. That's unusal. 

But they are not wonderfull. The skins is a mixture a hand painting, photo sourcing and graphics package trickery as is usual for me. The face was origianly a photo of Carmen Electra, but mapped onto my model it doesn't look anything like her. The wing originaly came from a photo of a Merlin, but was touched up and processed. On the body the straps on the legs did not turn out very well and the flesh on is noticeably lacking in any reall texture. The team skins are unfortunatly just recolours, nothing original, I was tired by then and ran out of inspiration. 

If you want to do a skin for this model a skin development kit is available at  http://www.btinternet.com/~gundam/AngelInterceptorSDK.zip
	


Anim and Rig notes:

The Max files of the UT2003 models, skeletons and animations that have supplied to the comunity from Epic/Digital Extremes are great. For most of the comunity anyway, but not me, as they are all Max 4 files, as I have Max 3, so I cannot load them :(  My fault, its time to upgrade. 

So I had to do things the hard way and do it all from scratch. 

I rigged the model with a custom CS Biped with lots of bones for the hands and pony tails, and I added a skeleton to allow me to fold up the wings (they have to fold, as UT does support telescopic bones ). The engine limitation of rigid blending for bones and vertices make getting good deformation hard. Most joints woked out OK, the hips are not great though and the shoulders don't deform very well at all, this is due to a lack of planning on my part when I made the mesh and skeleton.

The stock female animations didn't suit my model, the proportions are different and I wanted pony tail and wing animation, so in a moment of madness I decided to animate it all myself (I always need more animation practice). The 78 sequences took a month to do ! The end result is a mixed bag, some seem to work well (the L/R/F double jumps and the specific taunt are my faves), others not so good (the whole standing jump) and some do not seem to used in game at all (idle_chat, jump_land, idle_character01), but on the standard models, these don't play either. Overall the animation works well enough, but is nothing spectacular, or even professional. Note on the wings, they pop out during jumps, but if you fire they fold back in again, this is becuase UT is blending the fire anims with the jump, and the fire anims don't have wings extended, this is not ideal, but I don' think it cannot be helpd with standard UT.

Kamma physics are enabled on this model, but it uses the standard UT2003 Female kamma physics object. This means the wings will clip into objects and not bounce during the death animations, but everything else works OK. I tried to build a custom skeleton, but the KAT editor was did not seem to fully work and the UT pluggins did not appear, it did say when I first started it that it did not support windows ME, so I guess this is the problem. 


Tools used:  	

Mesh			: Inspire 3d for eary rough work, and Max for the rest
Mapping and rigging 	: 3D Studio Max R3.1 and Character Studio 2.2
Skins			: Corel Photopaint 8.0 ( I've just got photoshop and am going to start using it soon)
Animation               : 3D Studio Max R3.1 and Character Studio 2.2
Exporting		: ActorX	
Compiling and Tweaking  : UbrealEd 3.0 



Thanks to :
Many thanks to the posters (Skullbox esp) who frequent the Polycount message board( www.polycount.com) who provided answers to UT2003 modeling questions and usefull feed back. Also thanks to the Unreal developer network (http://udn.epicgames.com/).

Other:  	
I sometimes can be found as "Seburo", late at night playing UT2003 on various UK servers. 
I play rough, but use one of my models I might go easy on you ;)
	

