The Usages of Models?

[Neros Urameshi]

Alright well I'm not exactly one for explanations and such , but I'll try my best.

For the most part, a lot of these models are pretty much ready to use from the start. Depending on if it was possible or not to extract a model with rigging, it may or may not have it.

However notice how I only said the MODELS will be usable from the start. As I stated before, it may be necessary to rig them yourself. The materials may need fixing. Heck the models may even use some kind of weird texture tiling that isn't possible in the average 3d program requiring you to change the UVW mapping around to get it to work.

This isn't even including other things that you'd have to do for yourself anyway to a scene like creating the lighting, cameras, animations, or whatever else you might do with it. Of course what you might do with the models obviously varies for what you want to do with them and so you may not have to mess with any of the above at all really.

For example, I haven't personally done much with Garry's mod, but with say Halo, all you'd need is a rigged model and add in a few node markers for effects and sometimes for animation purposes (weapon placement in relation to the character model etc.) although this obviously varies from game to game. As for whether these would be ragdolls or model replacements it would really be your choice. There's no real limitations on that kind of stuff. If you really wanted to you could use a level model for a player model which would lead to something predictably stupid looking aesthetically, but not really problematic other than maybe taking up more power from your computer to render.

If your doing animations, you may or may not just do a simple backdrop with some fitting lighting, import the model, animate it (if its rigged anyways), and render it. If you wanted to do this for say a Machinima, you'd just not do a backdrop, animate, render, and add the animation in through your favorite video editing software.

The thing is there's a whole lot you can do with models, but most of the time these things WILL require more user input and be more difficult to use than something like sprites right off the bat. There's an undeniably larger learning curve for this stuff. However in the end just like the Spriters Resource, it makes a lot of high quality media readily available for anyone who wants to do a project like a fangame or a game mod or to make a cool signature, avatar or whatever and easier for the general public to use. In the end, the way sprites and models end up being used isn't all that different.

Hope that helps you understand the purpose of this.

Thanks for the tip.