Lara Croft, from Tomb Raider, for Quake 3 Arena.

Version 1.3, 2000-07-20

Author: Stefan Gustavson (stegu@itn.liu.se)

Changes from version 1.0: Pistol and holsters added,
skins improved, some new animation, weapon tag moved
a bit.

Changes from version 1.1: Sound pack added.
Some slight skin changes.

Changes from version 1.2: Minor taunt animation tweaks.
Sunglasses moved to a separate texture for faster
shading and considerably better appearance in 16 bit.
Now the sunglasses are double-sided, too. Looks nicer.

Comments, constructive criticism, and bug reports
are most welcome. Any future updates will end up on:

http://www.itn.liu.se/~stegu/lara/


Why Lara Croft?
===============

OK, I know, Tomb Raider might be considerd a sissy game by
hard-core Quakers, but I liked the Tomb Raider games quite
a lot, and Lara Croft fits quite nicely in the Quake 3
environment. Someone who seems to enjoy killing everything
in sight and without hesitation fights dragons armed with only a
couple of pistols and a shotgun ought to enjoy the Arena, right?


Summary info
============

Original mesh. 818 polygons.
One default skin and two CTF skins.
Sound pack included. No bot support.

Mesh, skinmap and skin by me, Stefan Gustavson.
Animation mainly by Paul Steed, taken from the Hunter model.
I remade the taunt and the weapon change moves, and changed
Hunter's characteristic split backflip to a somewhat less
ostentatious move. The sounds are remixed samples from the
game Tomb Raider III, published by Eidos Interactive.

Please feel free to distribute this model in any way you like,
as long as you do it without charge and keep this text file attached
to the distribution. If you make any custom skins, please send
me a copy. If you by any chance would like to use this model
commercially or use it as a base for derivative work, please
contact me first. Please also note the copyright issues below.


(And now the long version. Feel free to stop reading here.)


The mesh
========

This is my very first attempt at a low-poly model ever.
It is in fact my first serious attempt at any kind of model.

The mesh is all original, created as a learning experience from
scratch without much guidance except for a few promotion images of
Lara from the Tomb Raider website. Of course, it helped a lot having
stared at Lara's butt for quite a few hours while playing Tomb
Raider. I have seen a *lot* of that behind.

The original game Lara is extremely low-poly and has separate rigid
limb parts. I stayed away from that, since I wanted to learn how to
do a contiguous mesh model. The original Lara is also very cartoonish
in appearance and fairly flat shaded, which I didn't think would look
very good in Quake 3. My version is a kind of re-interpretation with
reasonably realistic human proportions (well, to the best of my
abilities, anyway) and a slightly more detailed skin than the original.
I tried to stay reasonably close to the original in-game appearance,
though. (I never really liked the cutscene/promo model. It looks
plastic, animates like a rubber doll and has downright silly
proportions.)

The 818 polys include 54 for the sunglasses and 32 for the
pistol. For the sunglasses I could of course have cheated with
only a few alpha masked polygons, but I wanted the frames to
have thickness and crisp edges. The pistol is hidden except
in the taunt animation, which seems a bit of a waste, but I'm
happy with it. Even though this is my first model I wanted
something slightly beyond the mere basics in there, and the
model as a whole still has a very reasonable polycount.

No LOD - I don't have any good automatic tool for that,
and I lack the energy to do it manually. I doubt that I
will ever do it.


The skin
========

This is also my first attempt at skinmapping and skinning.
OK, I knew my way around Photoshop pretty well, but I had
never used it for creating anything much from scratch.
I quickly realized that painting with a mouse sucks.
Luckily, I found an old digitizer tablet at work.

I used the excellent Texporter plug-in to provide a base
for the skin painting, but otherwise I used just the basic
Max toolbox.

I really tried to make the skinmapping simple and regular,
so that people can easily make their own skins if they
want to. I used one 256x256 image for the body, one 128x128
image for the head, and one small 64x32 for the sunglasses.
The sunglasses have a shader associated with them to make
the glass transparent, but the body and the head are just
plain image textures.

There skin area for the pistol and holsters is a bit small.
Originally, I had plans for doing only the holsters,
but added the pistol because it was fun, so I ran out of
room in the skinmap. I could have scaled down the arm
to make room, but I didn't. The holsters are dark and
low on detail anyway, and the pistol is mostly hidden.


The animation
=============

As stated above, the animations are heavily based on Paul
Steed's BIP files for Hunter. I changed a few moves - the
weapon change, the taunt and the backflip - but everything else
is from Hunter. I have never done any character animation before,
so I really needed that shortcut to get my first MD3 done before
I got sick of it.

There is some slightly objectionable mesh distortion and creasing
in some of the more extreme moves, most notably around the armpits
and in the butt area in some of the death sequences. I don't think
you will notice it in the game, though.

This was my first attempt at non-rigid mesh animation, and
my first encounter with Character Studio. CS was not an
altogether pleasant acquaintance. It is quite obvious that it
is not meant for low-poly work. I can't count the number of
times I had to reassign every single vertex to the biped after
I made some small geometry change to make the mesh animate
better. Sigh.


The sounds
==========

The sounds are rough but suitable samples from the Tomb
Raider game. The death sounds are not that varied. Lara
always dies with the same sound in Tomb Raider, so I had
to cut and paste a bit there. Also, only the taunt sound
is explicitly synced to the animation, but it sounds OK
to me. You will notice there's no talking in the sound
pack. Lara lets her gun speak for her instead.


The author (as if anyone cares, but here goes)
==========

I am 35 years old, I have a PhD and I teach computer graphics
at Linkoping University, Sweden. Sadly, I have really only
doodled around with various 3D modeling tools before, doing
mostly simple, quick and dirty stuff for demonstration.
My students usually have all the fun doing real projects.
I desperately wanted to do something myself for a change.
This is what came out of it. I had great fun.


Tools used
==========

3D Studio Max 3.1, Character Studio 2.1, Photoshop 5.5.
Texporter freeware Max plug-in for the skinning.
Some guidance for the skin texture from a few quick
rendered images from Poser 4. (I have perfectly legal
access to these tools at work. Lucky me. Now I also don't
suck quite as bad at using them as I did before.)
Exported to MD3 through id Software's command-line
tool, Q3DATA.EXE.


Copyright issues
================

Lara Croft, her name and likeness are copyrighted by
Eidos Interactive. So it doesn't help that I have a
license for all the software I used. I am still a
criminal. If any of the copyright holders at Eidos should
read this, please understand that this is meant as a
tribute for fun, not as a rip-off for profit.


  Stefan Gustavson, 2000-07-20
