What goes into designing an EQ character?

[Zaela]

Bit interesting looking at it historically too: nowadays having 6 or 7 separate textures for such a simple model would look like insanity.

One of the first mantras you'll come across if you look into any kind of graphics programming is to limit them amount of textures you use as much as possible. Modern graphics cards can draw tens of thousands of polygons using one texture really fast, but it takes an eternity for the CPU to queue up a different texture for another batch of polygons. So these days most models will have as much as possible crammed into a single texture, like this one from a later expansion:

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Of course, they might not have known that back in those days, what with graphics cards being practically brand new... but what they did know is that they had very little memory to work with. Easier to keep pixel counts low with a few 32x32 to 128x128 textures, and maybe a 256x256 for something with a lot of detail, than to have one 512x512 texture like the above.

Plus, having separate textures for different parts of the model is what allowed classic armor textures to work in the first place. Couldn't have a leather texture for your wrist and a chain texture for your chest if there was only one texture to cover the whole model at a time!

Originally Posted by James_Joyce [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

This is quite neat. Has anyone done any custom texturing/modelling for EQ? I'm getting an itch...

Have dabbled with EQ's model data formats a bit and made some (most crappy) tools for importing stuff into the game. Weapon models make a neat beginner's project for learning a little bit about 3D modelling in Blender or Maya/3DMax. Even someone with zero artistic ability like me can make some passable stuff relative to classic EQ models on the second or third try:

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Importing custom zones is about as easy as custom weapons, though they'd definitely take some skill to make. Got halfway done making a tool for importing animated models (i.e., mobs) at some point, but actually working with skeletal animation is definitely beyond me, and interest in doing custom models for EQ is pretty much nonexistent in general, and probably less here given how P99 goes.

Just replacing textures is pretty trivial compared to doing custom models. Decent texturing takes some art though, at least for stuff that you can't stock photo your way through.