Looking in retrospect, Fightoon’s models are really awful. The legs are nice, but that’s all about it.
The hands are horrible. Making some good hands was a nightmare. Except for the thumbs, none of the fingers could be modelled individually, due to performance constraints. A pair of hands with all fingers modelled individually would require roughly the same amount of triangles as rest of the whole model (back then I even knew the exact number in my head, as I used to calculate that a lot). Using the skin texture to simulate individual fingers didn’t work well at all, as there’s no way to make the lines in it match the width of the cel-shading outlines, and as there’s no way to make the gouraud shading work separately for each finger. Normal mapping and per-pixel lighting is how modern engines solves this, but this isn’t an option for this engine.
Still, I think that with enough optimizations and more modeling work, we could get either individual fingers working at an acceptable framerate, or at least more natural-looking hands.
The chest and the shoulders have a truckload of problems. The fact that they doesn’t look natural enough was caused by the difficulty in animating them well. The amount of mobility that a real human shoulder has is insane, and replicating that without making half of the poses become blobs of distorted triangles is difficult. I could have taken the easy route and modelled the arms separately from the chest, like many official Dreamcast games does, but I didn’t want the characters to look solid like robots when animating.
The feet. Their shading doesn’t look well in a number of positions. I’d hate to spend more polygons in them to fix this, but maybe that’d be necessary.
The models’ heads are too experimental. They were developed enough to be functional, but they lack a lot of polishing to become of quality. The mouth lacks some more triangles to be really expressive, the eyes have a lot of complications of their own, and the overall shapes of the heads still looks too alien (they looked like lizards when that project started).
Overall, what I’d like is to have models with enough detail and functionality to animate and look well at any resolution, needing only a few more triangles in some key points to smooth their shape out at higher resolutions.
I have some ideas in my mind for making a different game, and will need to develop these things further.
