1:56 PM 1/21/2009
11:58 AM 1/29/2009

Casteling Renzien
By James "SolaceEternal" Ensley


Holy crap, I have never written one of these before. 8D



Renzien is a cancermech casteling with a history I'll not go into. He comes with completely custom animations - a nessessaty, given his rig - and standard team colors. He also gets a custom skeleton I made by mangling the mokai one. :B Custom rag doll, too. And his stats are adjusted so you can use him as a bot for any skill level and not have to worry about it disrupting gameplay [read: no superbot stats].

He is also 4CTF compatable. I don't play it personally, but hell, why not?



He took about three months to make, start to finish, working on my days off. Started in blender, ended in 3dsmax, cannah getta haleiluiegh. 8D



Most existing [nonexisting?] custom characters are pretty standard - human [or mostly human] people with a gun in their right hand. So here is something that is neither of these things: he is not even remotely human, and he doesn't have any arms.

'Course, that meant I couldn't piggyback it to a stock rig, but that's fine. Doing the animations was surprisingly easy and really fun.  Aside from it being fairly tedious to do all the 81[+] animations, I don't really understand why so few people seem to have done this. I mean, there was the velociraptor, there was Magdalena... and that's about all I can think of at the moment. Maybe I'm wrong.



Anyway. You could chaulk this up to be a test to see how tolerant ut2k4's engine is with messing with the weapon bone. You always see it static, attached it the right hand. Ren has it attached to his neck. I haven't found a single limitation in messing around with its location. Check the AssSmack animation to see what I mean. >:3 





NOTE:	Getting a headshot on ren is a bit... difficult. This is /not/ due to him having his actual head inside the hood most of the time [I'm not that evil]; the head bone isn't attached to that. Instead, it's attached to the hood above it, and that's sort of the problem - the headshot radius doesn't cover /all/ of the hood. Specifically, the sweet spot is where the hood connects to the metal ring. Sorry, but there's not much else you could do about it. :/ Besides, it's my first custom character; I'm just glad I managed to somehow complete this.




Installation!

So, uh. Standard procedure. *.ukx goes in animations folder, *.upl goes in system, *.utx goes in the textures folder, *.ka goes in KarmaData, it rubs the lotion on it's skin or else it gets the hose again.






Thanks to gryph for tollerating me babbling at her for three months solid about this damn thing. And for drawing the reference to get me started on it to begin with; couldn't have done this without you mang. *brofist*


Contact info:

xslashmansonx@hotmail.com
Put "renzien" in the topic.

Alternatively, catch me on AIM as xSolaceEternalx.