Elite heads: Fully rendered!

[t3h m00kz]

Being the huge Elite fanatic that I am, I've noticed things about the Elites; like how the head seems to have a bizzare crease where the helmet meets it, as if it's clipping through.

Low and behold, with some curiousity and some crazy Theatre clipping glitches, I've discovered something pretty sweet.

baeleted imagery

The Elites have a fully rendered head and helmet that they never showed in-game.

This brings up a few questions, like, what's up with this, were they planning on having more crazy helmets in the Multiplayer armor selections? And, were there originally going to be scenes of Elites without their helmets that they wound up not using? I really would have liked to have seen an armorless Elite head as an option in the multiplayer options.

Honestly it seems to me that with all the detail in the head (The whole rubber comming up to the neck inside the helmet and whatnot), they may have originally had plans for it.

Ah well, maybe whenever someone figures out how to hack the SHIT out of the Halo 3 source code, we'll be able to extract these models and see what more crazy shit we can find.

Maybe a helmetless Chief head.

Pfft.

[JDMFSeanP]

Already hacked the beta and got a helmet-less spartan.

[t3h m00kz]

Any word on the full game yet?

And by that do you mean, THEY KNOW WHAT THE CHIEF LOOKS LIKE?

[JDMFSeanP]

Just a really dark scratched up face, no details or anything. Most likely not John.

[Con]

It's a bungie employee, sean

[t3h m00kz]

pix or gtfo :V

EDIT: nvm

http://videogame2play.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/spartan.jpg

[Kornman00]

I'm pretty sure its just the way they supported amour variates. So instead of actually making an entire new model for each setup, they just made a base line biped and made the separate pieces (ie helmets, shoulder plates, chest plates) render when the model is given certain permutation parameters.
Sadly, you can't force the engine to allow say, recon in SP because the MP model is the only one that has the variates included in its tag data. The SP bipeds are just the regular bipeds.

[t3h m00kz]

I'm pretty sure its just the way they supported amour variates. So instead of actually making an entire new model for each setup, they just made a base line biped and made the separate pieces (ie helmets, shoulder plates, chest plates) render when the model is given certain permutation parameters.
Sadly, you can't force the engine to allow say, recon in SP because the MP model is the only one that has the variates included in its tag data. The SP bipeds are just the regular bipeds.

Thing about that though, the Elites all have completely different helmets, the only one that shows any part of the face at all is the default Combat armor, none of the others seem to have any of the pieces from the default Combat armor.

Didn't see too many Elites in Single Player either, no honor guards to my knowledge... Come to think of it, I don't think I saw any other premutations in single player that showed any face other than the Default and the Arbiter (Looked at the Arbiter too, he uses a completely different head model, half the head itself inside the helmet is missing). All I saw were the default armor and the ones that cover the entire face, and I'd imagine those one's don't have the head model in them. I could be wrong though.

[Bad Waffle]

Its just easier for modelling if you do it separately.

[t3h m00kz]

ohhh. k.

WELL DAMN I hope sometime soon someone figures out how to extract that hsit

[CtrlAltDestroy]

Not anytime soon, as raw data extraction is being withheld. :(

[Kornman00]

Which is a good thing.

[t3h m00kz]

How so? I mean I can understand the whole thing with hackers on Live, but other than that...

[Masterz1337]

The majoroty of us don't want a repeat of what happened with the H2 content.

[t3h m00kz]

I don't see the problem with using ripped content honestly. It's not against the law or anything. I mean ripping is how you'd go about getting it as accurate as possible to what you want. Seems like if you're going made your own models and base them off of another gun from a different game in an attempt to get it as close to the other game as possible, you may has well have ripped it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying modeling your own guns is a waste of time, I'm saying if you're going to make a gun based on that gun, it would make more sense to mix it up a bit and add in some of your own personal touches to make it something original and outstanding rather than trying to copy something else. But then again, this is coming from someone who's attempting to port the Unreal Tournament weapons over to Halo...

JUST MY OPINIONS THOUGH ;O

[p0lar_bear]

It's not against the law or anything.

Actually, it all depends on how it is used. Ripping assets from one game to use in another, regardless of them being in the same series, infringes copyrights. Ripping for redistribution also infringes copyrights. Ripping to use in something that you intend to sell violates copyrights.

The grey area is ripping to create something for educational and/or non-profit use and/or non-distribution. I'm sure it actually violates a law, but companies usually don't care since you aren't getting anything on their dime.

But, ripping content to re-use in the engine it was intended for is okay, it seems. While doing reverse-engineering to find out asset formats is a violation of the License Agreement, it's not illegal to rip Chips Dubbo from the Halo campaign to make him into the multiplayer character.

[t3h m00kz]

Yeaaah I was half-asleep when I typed that and I didn't really proofread too much. >D

Anyway, I do hear that ripping models does violate the copywrite and everything, but from what I understand, it's similar to fan art or even renders using H2 models in the sense that it's just a fan-made product using their content. It's similar to say, someone who has no hand in any of Bungie's affairs doing a comic strip about the Chief and Sgt. Johnson having a homosexual affair outside of the battle (GIVE ME SOME SUGAH CHIEF). If Bungie has a problem with it, Bungie can stop it if they want and ask for it to be taken down and removed, but if it doesn't bother them they probably won't have a problem with it being up.

That's just what I've gathered from what I know about this type of thing, though. I'm not too sure about all of it so my information may be a bit off, because I do know of EvilEngine (from the UT3 forums) taking the Halo 2 MC model and porting it to UT3 (WHICH LOOKED REALLY FUCKING AWESOME I MIGHT ADD), but not publicly releasing it due to the laws (as well as his reputation as a modeler), so I can't say.

[Kornman00]

If a company put measures in to protect their assets, its pretty safe to assume they don't want you touching their shit. So go shit on another game's models or just play the game to view them.

[t3h m00kz]

I understand what you're saying Kornman, but I think of things a little differently. The following is mostly from my roommate who understands much more about this type of thing than I do:

I'm not sure I get what you're saying 100%, but I think what you're saying is that using existing models is "shitting" on the modelers and texture artists. If that's what you're saying, think of it from some different perspectives.

By using someone's work, you're saying that you enjoy and respect their work enough that you're willing to put in your own time and effort to implement it in your mod. In a sense, if you just recreate already existing work, say by recreating the BR model, you could be sending the message across that "Your model wasn't good enough". I think that's worse, in a way. But everyone's different in what offends them more.

In general, I think a lot of the problems with using other people's work have to do with giving credit where credit is due. The BEST course of action is always to ask permission first, and you can do that when it comes to other modders - they're normally really accessible and easy to talk to. But I don't know how many people have the guts to go ask Bungie or Epic Games directly if you can use their assets.

When it comes to legality, unless you're creating your own models, textures, etc. from scratch, and not basing them on already existing content, you're performing copyright infringement. Even if you, for example, make your own BR from scratch, if it looks and sounds enough like a BR, it's an unauthorized derivative work. The CMT BR, and even the MA-5K are derivative works. Sure, the models belong to them, since they made them, but since they're still heavily based on existing things they're derivatives.

My point was simply that if you're got a choice between making an illegal derivitive work and an illegal copy, what's the difference? Why spend extra time to create something that's just as illegal to distribute?

[Pyong Kawaguchi]

Possibly to learn how to model?

[Kornman00]

Possibly to learn how to model?
there are millions of modeling tutorials on the internet. Its called Google (http://google.com).

[JDMFSeanP]

What you really do is pm kornholio until he gives you modeling hax.

[t3h m00kz]

Trust me when I say I'm working on learning how to model, I've downloaded multiple tutorials. However every time I post anything I get flamed by some really high repped person. Doesn't really help my motivation ;O

But that doesn't change the fact that I'd still like to see the Halo 3 Elite's armorless head in a normal view. ;P

[MNC]

It's probably been said, but Halo 2 used this same method.

[t3h m00kz]

Trust me, I knew that ;p They're design has changed SO MUCH though.