<June 26th 2000>

* How to use this model *

Unzip md3-honey.zip into your quake3/baseq3 directory with "use folder names" turned on. This will automatically create a quake3/baseq3/models/players/honey folder, which you may need to have for the new model to show up in the selection menu.

================================================================

Model Name              : Honey
Installation directory  : quake3/baseq3/md3-honey.pk3
Author                  : Conor O'Kane
Email Address           : cartoonzrule@cokane.com
Web			: http://www.cokane.com
Model description       : An experiment in cartoon-shading.
Additional Credits to   : id Software
Thanks to               : Everyone on #model_design and the Polycount boards who helped me.
			  NPherno and Pop'n'Fresh for the tools.
			  Rogue 13, Hunter and the rest of the polycount team.
			  Steady and Dines for the excellent skins.

================================================================

* Play Information *

Skins			: 6 - default, red, blue, leopardskin, honey-dines and nacre
Bot support		: Yes - based on Hunter
New sounds		: No - uses Hunter's sounds
CTF support		: Yes
LOD support		: No

* Construction *
Poly count              : 759 polys with no skirt or outlines, 1658 with the skirt and all outlines on.
Skin count              : 1 256X256 and 1 256X128 texture image for each skin.
Base                    : New model - based on my lovedoll contest entry, miss Mississippi
Shaders			: Conor O'Kane (and Steady for the nacre skin)
Skins			: Default, leopardskin, red and blue by Conor O'Kane
			  
			  Honey-dines by David Durrenberger (dines)
			  http://www.nexen.net/koubis
			  durrenbe@yahoo.com

			  Nacre by David Fromberg (steady)
			  http://www.quake3mods.net/steadfast/
			  factor2@home.com
			  

Editor used             : 3D Studio Max3 with Pop'n'Fresh's plugin & Npherno's compiler
Known bugs              : Some clipping between the skirt and legs during the run sequence. I couldn't fix this
			  without adding more polygons to the skirt, so I decided to leave it.
Build/Animation time    : I've no idea... months.

================================================================

* Author's notes *

Honey is more of an experiment than a normal player model. Cartoon shading has been available for a while now as a rendering effect in the better 3D graphics programs, but recently it has appeared as a real-time effect in some Dreamcast games. I decided to see if it would be possible to re-create this effect using the Quake3 engine. There are two parts to the effect. Firstly the black outlines, which are done using LOTS of polygons. Basically the model has a duplicate of itself colored black and with flipped normals. This duplicate surrounds the original model completely and, because of the flipped normals, is only seen behind the original - thus creating the outline effect. The second part is the two-tone 'cell-painted' look that you get in anime characters. This is done with a Quake3 shader script that environmentally maps a two color image (shade.tga) over the model. Check out the honey.shader file to see exactly how it's done.

The downside is the huge polycount - at 1658 polygons (with all the outlines and skirt visible) Honey is about twice the polycount of a normal player model. The honey-dines and nacre skins do not draw the skirt or outlines, so if you have a slow computer and you want to play some bot-matches try using these skins. They still load the geometry into memory, but do not draw it so the performance hit is almost halved.

I hope someone else will take this technique and do a really low-poly cartoon character now that I've shown it can be done. As far as I know, this is the first time this technique has ever been used on a PC game... if anyone knows otherwise, please correct me.

Feedback is always welcome - mail cartoonzrule@cokane.com

Conor O'Kane

* Copyright *

QUAKE III(R) is a registered trademark of id Software, Inc.


