Jarhead Character Model for Unreal Tournament
---------------------------------
      Release Date: August 8, 2k
            Artist: Dov Sherman
                    dsherman@otakuworld.com
                    http://otakuworld.com/
           Version: 1.20

   Number of Faces: 4
Team Color Support: Yes!
     Polygon Count: 693
      Vertex Count: 385
       Editor Used: 3D Studio Max R3 (without Character Studio)
        Build Time: 3 weeks
   Source Material: Nothing. This character is 100% original
 Music Listened to
While Making Model: Anime soundtracks from Excel Saga, El Hazard, Taiho
                    Shichauzo, Kodomo no Omocha, Haunted Junction, and
                    Akazukin Chacha

Thank you for trying out my Jarhead character model! If you haven't seen
the model yet, the name might be a little misleading. Rest assured, it
is neither a military model nor a refugee from a sci-fi prequel movie.

This model is a partially mechanized human female. Well, I say "partly"
but really she's about 90% mechanized. Okay, she's a human head in a jar
on a spidermech frame. When I first talked about doing this model, one
question people asked was "Why a female head? With a head in jar,
shouldn't it be a mad scientist?" I chose the female head for several
reasons. First, the cute female head creates a really nice contrast to
the creepy spidermech. Second, the longer hair allows for a lot of good
secondary movements (and a robot frame won't normally have many places
for secondary movement otherwise). Third, who says a woman can't be a
mad scientist??? True, science is still an old boy's club to many people
but isn't that just another reason to make a woman scientist really mad?
And if there truly are things "With Which Man Was Not Meant To Tamper",
we'd better make sure some qualified female mad scientists are around to
take up the slack.

I'm fairly pleased with the way this model turned out. While I did
re-use a lot of animations, I have still included enough animations to
keep it interesting. It may be hard to see in-game but I made the face
fully articulated and many animations include changes in facial
expression. Fully half of the polygons in the model are in the head and
hair alone.

Incidentally, I didn't avoid using Character Studio because I think it's
bad or that it's too easy. I'm just one of those people who likes to
work on every single little detail personally so I built the skeleton
from scratch and did it the hard way.

Here are some key elements I was really happy with:

* The legs have two knees each! You've got to have two knees in each leg
  to have amount of movement necessary to make up for not actually
  having a torso. My first design only had one knee each and I couldn't
  get the legs to go to all the places I wanted.
* The basic taunt has the head pop up out of the jar and make a face.
  Take a close look and you'll see that she closes her eyes, puffs out
  her cheeks, and sticks out her tongue. There's even a little splash
  sound when the head lands back in the jar. This is one of the
  animations I had in mind from the very beginning, before I even made
  the first character sketches.
* The secondary taunt (thrust) is a little curtsey with a wink. It's
  really cute! This was really hard to pull off. I probably spent more
  time trying to get *this* one animation to look right than I did with
  any of the other animations. I mean, a four-legged robot curtseying
  recognizably....?
* You won't see it on a player but, when this model is used by a bot,
  the Look animation will occasionally run. The bot will stand still and
  look both ways, then the head will spin around to the back and look
  both ways from that side as well.
* The swimming animation is modelled after tentacled aquatic movement
  like an octopus.
* There's a customized StatusDoll (the icon that shows your armor
  status)!


INSTALLATION
------------
The UMOD should install the files in the necessary locations and make
the appropriate changes to your INI files. If it doesn't, this model can
be installed the hard way but it's risky so I'm not going to provide any
details here. If the UMOD didn't work, you may need to upgrade to the
latest version of Unreal Tournament (one of the early updates caused the
UMOD support to malfunction).


DISTRIBUTION
------------
You may freely distribute this UMOD in a completely unmodified form. Do
not charge any money for this software without consulting me first. Any
magazine or other publisher choosing to distribute this in a freebie CD,
please consult me first. I can be contacted at dsherman@otakuworld.com


THANK YOU
---------
There are several people I want to thank for their support in creating
this model:
- Roger 666 Bacon whose Rumiko and Abbey UT models inspired me to try
  creating models of my own and who helped me fix some of the bugs I ran
  into while learning this craft,
- James Green whose Epic Knights messageboard provided me with the
  feedback and help I needed along the way,
- The wonderful people at Digital Extremes who created Unreal and had
  the wisdom to help Unreal become not only a great game but an
  open-ended medium for 3rd party creative expansion, and
- Jennifer Diane Reitz who has been my mentor, guru, and friend. She is
  a genius-level game designer and animator and, in my heart, she will
  always be one of the True Goddesses of Video Games.


COMING SOON
-----------
Working with a mechanical character was good while I was learning how to
create a 3D model but I intend my next model to be something more
organic. I think my next model will be female as well but I'm going to
try for a more feminine feel than the existing models. Is it just me or
are all the UT female characters a bit on the butch side? I'd like to
see a female character that's a little more girlish. (Not that "butch"
is bad; I just think that "girly" has its charms as well.) So, no
promises as to when but keep an eye out for my next model "Girly Girl".
As of this release, I'm about 1/3 of the way done with GG.

After that, I'm thinking about a model called "Baby Gonnagetcha" but I
won't be able to pull it off unless I can find a way to change the
bounding boxes and movement distances.

