: Has anyone else seen this model? I think it is very well modeled but the
: animations are really crap. What do you think?
Yes, I've seen it and tried it out on my underpowered 500MHz G4 PB with only 8MB of VRAM. Let's say I'm ambitious, but I have managed to eek out a lot of performance from that graphics card in, spite of its age, by reducing color depth among other things. The 3D Pfhor are part of a larger project to create 3D models to replace all the sprites in Marathon - something that will ultimately be necessary if AO is ever to transition some semblance of a modern game. As noted here very recently, the existing sprites look like crap against the background of the high-res textures, and increasing the resolution of the sprites would not only involve a lot of work, but it would be significantly more graphics intensive than 3D models.
Now, the 3D models you mention are very well-done, but they really slow things down. One important point - the instructions call for enabling the Z-buffer in OpenGL. I'm not sure why this should be necessary, but on my PB this slows things down to the point that the game is completely unplayable, with frame rates measured in the seconds per frame range. The 3D animations work fine without the Z buffer, so this is well worth trying if it works for you. All of this said, there are problems with the 3D animations which, so far, are only for the fighters. Firstly, the animations as you note are not what they ought to be. There is one point in the sequence where the fighters seem to take a bow - it just doesn't look right. More significantly, the models just plain contain way too many polys. Compared to even the most advanced video games on the market, these fighters are significantly more detailed. The result is a model that is incredibly computationally intensive, and when there are many fighters in the field of view, the game essentially comes to a hault. If you look at the 3D models developed for the UT mod of M1, although they are not nearly as detailed and they don't quite look like the Pfhor and S'pht we are used to seeing, they apparently work quite well. Maybe someday I'll break down and get a copy of UT to see for myself - if Team Unpfhorgiven ever gets aroud to completing the task of porting the entire M1 game to UT (and M2 & Inf?).
Which brings up a question for the community - since all the 3D models for M1 have already been done for the M:R project, could these be converted for use with the 3D rendering engine of AO? I realize that this is probably a lot trickier than converting the textures, which have already been done, but it still seems to me that it would be much simpler than starting from scratch.
