Rmvsallen

That's why we never found it, it was dang-o on the LOD's not the main model.

oopsie, I'll have to update the file

11 minutes ago, Circa said:

@Rmvsallen amazing work! Would you mind if I used the model to update my Prequel Conversion at some point? Replacing that old model would be epic.

@Circa

@ZeroRaven
By all means. I want to throw zero shade at whoever made the battle droid model in 2002, it was a different time, but it's well past time we have a new droid to fill all the places it did. As long as credit is given then people can do as they will with the droid!

 

@Lancelot Thank you so much!

The image about says it all, I did about every droid-y thing I could think of doing aside from making a rig for it or something!
I hope it gets through mods okay and everyone can enjoy the droid-ness like I have been!

It's above 50 MB (342 MB) so I submtted a link to the file instead of direct upload on JKhub, I don't know if I can post that here or anything so I'll just let JKhub handle it.

8 hours ago, Noodle said:

There it is, this is the best B1 model that has ever been done and I think its very unlikelly it'll ever be topped. 

It's definitely not the best, or even the most most accurate, but nobody's made a battle droid since (if I am correct) 2002. So it will simply be the only one because nobody cares XD

So I've pretty much finished all of the skins in the pack. Open the spoiler to see all of the other skins (I didn't want to make the thread 2 miles tall)
Not shown are the customization options for the creator, which has every mesh shown here.


 

Update: about 90% of skins finished. Need to touch up a few for final passes, fix up a few sound clips. We're close.
In anticipation I wanted to share the dumb things I found while looking up battle droid references that I found entertaining. Some of these you may already know, but I never paid that deep of attention!

1. The commander droid from the movies are different from that of battlefront 2 and clone wars where they sport a yellow arm and sometimes a yellow back.
I think this is for visibility purposes so you can tell it's a commander from the side or back for gameplay readability.

2. These regular coloured battle droids don't have backpacks, but in the previous shot they totally do. So either battle droids can take those off or a shift change happened between obi-wan going ham on them.
now there are OOM series battle droids that are more of a prototype which show up in galactic battlegrounds (the RTS age of empire star wars game) so it could be them.
or it could just be the animators had a hard time slicing through meshes back on 1999 computers so they said screw the backpacks.

3. I don't understand battle droid serial numbers. Sometimes there's just a big black rectangle in them which isn't in the trade federation alphabet/numeric system. Is it a placeholder? Is it a dash? I have no idea. It's worth it to note that only in the movies do these droids have serial numbers. In all the cartoons their backpacks are usually blank, probably to save on budget. Once in awhile they'll say their number or somebody elses.
Bonus weirdness, I can't tell if there's any consistency to any of the numbers? Like the important commander droids have random numbers just like the rest of them. They aren't marked "OOM-9" on them or anything.

4. Qui-Gon does not honor melee duel.

5. This gungan punches this battle droid in the face for a solid 21 seconds. I can't tell if this shows us how weak gungans are or how hard it is to punch a robot to death.

6. The low-polygon battle droids in phantom menace are way too close to the camera and look so round!

7. This is another 1138 reference in episode 2, but it's not on screen for very long. Makes me wonder how often these droids show up in the background but are just too quick to make out.

Soon

Ditto.

 

I'd also like to point out that there is also the Droid Engineer and Assassin from the classic SWBFII.

 

Also not to mention the new Heavy Droid from the newer Battlefront II.

I thought the engineer and assassin were just pilot and security respectively?

I never noticed the one from the new game was more than just red, that's a cool paint scheme I'll throw in

Decided to do some googling and look up skin variants I can get. Once I have the regular texture down on it, different paint jobs will be easy cake sauce so I can literally do hundreds of them. But here's my initial skin list of things I want to see:

If you guys have any skin requests I'll throw them in there too because the more the merrier right? There's no limit on skin files as far as I know

Another update!

So my friend booted up republic commando today and it reminded me that I definitely want to make a skin of the rustic gray battle droid in that game, and up until this point I thought it was just that- a regular battle droid with a different paint job. I looked for myself and dang is it quite different! Some of it can be chocked up to low-poly modeling, but there are some things that are very different shapes.

So I did my best to try and interpret the polygons there and made an actual republic commando variant of the droid. Along the way I also found better ways to optimize the arms/legs of the regular droid, so it helped out anyway. All of the republic commando limbs are fewer polygons than the regular one too.

(I'm not sure the policy on double posting if I have a second update, should I just edit my last one?)

In the last post I asked if anyone wanted the clone wars style backpack, I made it anyway.

It looks different because of course in the show they have way less detail so I kind of gave it some extra edges so it looks more "movie-ish" I think it's a fun alternative backpack, even if it's not quite canon.

I finished up the rocket pack, gave it a different harness than what it had in the show because it looked uber flimsy like that. I instead gave it an over-the shoulder attachment like the regular droid backpack has.
I'm not sure if I want to model the little welder gun he has attached to his wrist unless anyone really wants that as an additional piece.

Also something interesting I learned about the Clone Wars show is that they stylized their battledroid backpacks to only have one antenna, and it looks more like a brick. At first I thought the design changed after Episode 2, but in Episode 3 they have 2 antennas again. So I was wondering if anyone would want me to make a Clone Wars type backpack with just one antenna, or should we chock that up to the style of the show?

I did some optimizations per everyone's request, the full droid (with all the add ons at the same time) is 8,534 tris, 4,721 polygons and just the lone battledroid without anything but himself is 6,002 tris, 3,293 polygons

This model won't deform very well, rigged against the standard player _humanoid skeleton.

 

That aside, you need to decrease the quality a fair bit to get it to work in JKA and possibly OpenJK (not sure on this). 4k polys can easily be like 8k tris. I'd concentrate on getting a model that is optimized enough to work in-game and deforms the best it can, long before worrying about UV mapping or texturing.

The game won't instantly crash on loading the model, the crash is related to the collision detection, you have to shoot or attack the model by other means to verify wether the error will occur. The error is also effected by the vertex count of the equipped weapon.

 

Also keep in mind that the base JKA Transform space limit is half that of the multiplayer limit.

 

Your droid also seems to have far more shading breaks/hard edges than his Scout model.

 

For your UV Unwrapping you could try to align as many of your seams along hard edges as possible, that way you van further reduce the amount of edgesplits your mesh will recieve on export.

I haven't gotten past the modeling phase just yet thankfully. I'll do my best to cut verts where I can though. And also about the collision stuff, we're testing our models in MB2, so there's plenty of collisions to be had!

@@Rmvsallen are you aware of the transform space limit in JKA?

 

On Export all of your hard edges will be split, creating duplicates of the vertices around them. The same goes for the UV seams. This may catapult your models vert count to a level that will definitely trigger a transform error.

 

I ran into this same problem with my clone trooper model, which forced me to practically rape it and reduce the detail a lot after it was allready rigged for the game.

Yeah, I've been working with KhorneSyrup on this model while he's making his scout trooper here: https://jkhub.org/topic/3378-wip-look-out-for-that-tree/

He's managed to get it in-game without crashing, so as long as my droid is less detailed than his scout it'll work out fine. I haven't UV'd it yet, but I'll do my best to break it into as few pieces as possible like a pelt map

fantastic, if you right click the small [+] in the viewport and go to customize view, you should find the "Statistics" Tab.

Enable the Tri count in there.

 

anyway - is this mesh supposed to be gonig straight into the game as is, or is this the basis for a highpoly soiurce mesh that you plan to bake some additional maps from?

I'd get rid of some of the smaller details and only texture them on, if this is your game mesh.

I have 9,600 tris, but that's with everything at once like both backpacks and the new hat I just made. I know that JKA has a limit of 1000 per mesh part, so I should be within that and I'll chop some polygons where I need it to fit

Speaking of which, I made the hat for the space/rocket guy mentioned earlier:

I think I'm going to have the hat without the light be a secondary add on because it looks like a construction or a baseball cap XD could be fun to paint in silly ways.

which program do you use?

3DS max. I know 7 brings up those counts

As a SP modder I'd find that very useful!

I remember that there was a mod with R2 and R5 units rigged to the _humanoid skeleton, so one could play as an astromech. So I guess it could be done that way, even though it would only be limited to a pose.

So maybe I'll tackle that next. It's not that hard of a model, I mean it is just a cylinder XD

Also update, I think I'll add a rocket droid pack as mentioned above. I think it was in one of the early episodes of the Clone Wars show where Plo Koon was in space and pods were getting cracked.  However, since that show was very stylized, I'm going to redesign it for realism to fit with the battledroid I have. Thinking about connecting it on the shoulders the same way as the regular droid backpack works.

The eye for detail is just incredible. Simply fantastic.

 

If you need some more inspiration, I have a simple suggestion: Initially, it was planned to give the Battle Droids a black and white color, just like the Stormtroopers. Maybe this could be added as a color variant.

Adding in alternate non-canon colour schemes might me awesome!

Nice, there has been a lot of new models lately , about variations, a simple one just occured to me, battledroid with 3po's head, so we can taunt "Die jedi dog!"

But then I'd have to make a whole new 3PO Head! And then we'd clearly need the 3PO body with a droid head

I have been wanting a new version of this character for years! So glad that he is getting such a long-needed updated.

 

As far as other parts go, there are a couple of Clone Wars variations you could consider.

 

Those being the Rocket Droid:

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/8/8a/Rocket_battle_droid.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20090310052309

 

and the Fire Fighter Droid:

http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/theclonewiki/images/b/bb/Firefighting_battle_droids.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20140310180512

 

Regardless if you decided to pick these up or not, this will be a model that will eagerly wait for!

Rocket droid might be something awesome to add, firefighting droid is.. hilarious at best XD can't imagine anyone needing that as a model ever

Looking good @rmvsullen

What are your tri and vertex counts for this?

As of this moment: 4,399 Polys, 4,382 Verts. Not sure how to get a tri reading?

Speaking of 3PO, I think we need a new model of him. And for R2-D2.

I'd agree. I was honestly going to make a new R2 and add in R3's, 4's, 5's, etc but those would only be useful as SP mods or NPCs sadly

    For the longest time I've been dissatisfied with the battle droid model that is currently in-game. I believe we've had the same one that was made for Jedi Outcast, and although it works, there are a lot of issues with it like the shading groups and overall detail. I've been tinkering around and made this up in spare time over two weeks and I think I've about finished with the model portion. It has no textures as of yet, but that will come later.

    Surprisingly a lot of the battle droid models I find online have inconsistencies or parts that are wrong, so I mainly used footage from The Phantom Menace as my quality check for the whole thing. From what I saw in the movie there are three types of droids. The security / pilot droid on the control ship which has a special shoulder pad, the regular battle droid used for combat with the bulky backpack, and finally the commander droid that has his own little backpack and shoulder style. I don't know when I'll finish it up, but I thought I'd throw it up on here for people to see and comment on

    Also, if any of you know of any other variants of droids that aren't too different to make, I'd be open to adding on extra parts an pieces. I know there is that famous "Mr. Bones" battle droid, but he seems to have a lot of different parts, so I won't do him as an add on piece like a backpack. I might make a battle damaged or modified droid, but beyond that I'm not sure of other variants to make besides those three.