Character:	Miles

History: Miles was a born and raised circus bear. Both his parents had been circus bears and during travel had met by chance, Miles was the result. This wasn't your standard bastard story, his parents didn't forget about each other after the one-nighter, but due to their work and travels any chance of a relationship was destroyed. Over the years the two lost contact completely.
	So Miles had never met his father, he was raised by his mother and the rest of the traveling circus. He was trained in all the standard acts, from riding a unicycle to acrobatics. Miles had a gift for the D.M.L. None of the crew had ever seen such skill with the midget cannon (or little-person-launcher for the politically correct). Due to his great skill, the act became his only, he trained every day to perfect his skills.
	The crowds couldn't get enough of the act, and eventually the crew made enough money to create a permanent location outside of Suburbia. The new permanent place drew people from all around the country, and tons of business to Suburbia. 
	But times changed, the circusfolk began finding other professions as the hype over the circus died down. The ultimate blow came when one of the support beams of the main tent came crashing down and crushed Miles' mother. In the hospital before she died she revealed the last known location of Miles' father to him and told him to find his father before he died as well.
	He didn't know what to do. The circus had been his life, and with the death of his mother his world seemed to crumble around him. Mr. Barnum, the circus master, gave Miles enough cash to get him on his feet before he departed. The circus grounds were left in ruins and Miles the only remaining at the site. Miles headed into Suburbia in search of work, he quickly found his experience assembling the tents and equipment would prove useful. 
	He met a rabbit named Rusty Carter. Rusty was a struggling contracter with no crew. Miles agreed to work with him. After 7 long years Carter Industries was worth millions, and Miles remained at Rusty's side.
	The ex-circus bear now scours Suburbia in search of his friend and co-worker Rusty Carter, who disappeared after being released from the hospital from a gunshot wound, and the world in search of his father.

Installation: Extract the files to your baseq3 folder.


Vertices:	532
Polys: 		1048
Bot Support:	YES
CTF Skins:	YES
LOD:		Not Yet
Custom Sounds:	The taunt only for now

Modeler:	Marauxus
Animator:	Marauxus
Skins:		BlackCat

Contact:	Marauxus@zdnetonebox.com
		www.toonsofevil.com

Notes: 	This as well as the Cobra models are in beta form, sortof. For our game (Toons of Evil), the model is beta and a more efficient, cleaner version will be created with little to no bugs. Accept for the lack of sounds this is the final quake3 version of the characters. (we'll release a sound pack when we find appropriate voice actors.)

	As I did with Cobra I wanted something to make Miles unique (besides the fact that he's a bear in quake ;). So this time the one unique thing comes in the form of a single facial animation. While I'm not the first to do so (Someone recently released a q3 version of a Tekken character with facial animation), I believe my model does a very excellent job demonstrating the animation. It's almost impossible to miss even from far away.
	The taunt, which contains the jawdropping animation (in more ways than one ;), is exceptionally long, actually its only 2 seconds which apparently is the limit because q3 cuts off animations longer than that. Due to the length of the taunt you may not here the sound immediatly, the first second of the sound is a breathing action which you can't hear over the madness of quake. The brute of the sound was borrowed from Gozilla (which was borrowed from Jurrasic Park).

Problems: I realize the model is pumped full of little errors, and some of them I have explanations for, others were merely not worth my time at the moment. 

First off one of the biggest problems: edge turning. For some reason popnfresh flipped the normals of my entire model, save the cigar, to counteract this I had to flip the normals in MAX. This would not have been a problem but the normals had to be flipped at the base of the modifier stack or else the UVW coordinates would warp. 

What does this all mean?

It means I had to work with the models faces inside-out, this made it impossible to work in wireframe mode, so it was near impossible to turn ugly edges. I did the best I could but I couldn't get them all in a resonable amount of time.

If anyone knows why Pop n Fresh did that, or how to fix it please let me know.

And the only other problem I noticed which is also visable in Cobra. When you have quad or enviro suit there is a large crack in the blue or orange shell the powerups place. I believe this is because of my UVW mapping techniques, and I'm currently working on a fix.

Final Notes: More than anything releasing this model is to draw more support toward our project, not to flaunt my skills (or lack there of ;). 

And if anybody, including the reviewers at polycount, can point out the rookie errors (which I know are there) it would really help out. If I'm going to improve I need to know how to fix the places I'm going wrong.