Micket

Indeed. I have no intuition about the mandrill, and since I had to piece together sources from all kinds of places, it's definitely difficult to determine if I totally messed up on some part. I probably spend twice as long time looking for & at references then I spend modeling. You never have to apply the modifier. You should add the suffix _L and_R or .L .R respectively on both the bones and the vertex groups You can check the Fox, Oryx, or Tiger models i made, which I rigged this way.

Well, about the shape itself, i would simply rely on a lot of reference materials. I always put in a background image of a good profile picture, then try to figure out the 3d shape from the outlines. It might sound boring, or like cheating, but noone really knows what animals actually look like unless you go through a myriad of references, meassuring all the relative sizes. If I were to draw even a common animal unprepared, like a cat or a bird, I would completely mess up it's anatomy. Now, I don't know exactly what species you were aiming for, and from hunting references I've come to appreciate the wide range of anatomy of animals within the same species, but i'd say you overdid the changes to the skull. A quick comparison with some reference off google search Had this been a model of a human, we would all be able to tell if something is off, like a huge nose, tiny eyes, enormous chin.. but in most animals, our memory alone is insufficient. For animation, there is some more practical things to try and sort out (and they are not that easy). The biggest challenge i find are the legs relative movement to the body, and here, legs are merged into the body. For quadrapeds, the stomach kind of "tucks in" behind the thigh. The font legs also needs to have something cut in in-between the leg and torso (up into the "arm pit"), to allow some relative movement there. Still, with lowpoly, and furry animals, you kind of have to find a good middle ground. Also, are you working on this without a mirror modifier? that has to be a huge inconvenience.

I put most of my models on opengameart.org as CC0, so i don't know if they are used elsewhere. It's just a bit of future proofing from my side. Since I've made a halfdecent selection of animals now, with similar polycount, it could probably find some use in mobile games and whatnot.

Difficult to find good sources. Rarely any pure profile/front/top photos, and if there are, never in the same pose (different headtilt, sitting standing, etc.) and of different animals (when you start looking, you start seeing a large difference within each species). Also, the fur is a pain in the @#$%. Especially doing it in a way that will look decent for animation. Next, i'm thinking bison or leopard

I'm not at all happy with this one. Head is sort of OK, but the long fur and mane makes it really hard to tell how the underlying anatomy is constructed. mandrill_male.zip

I know, and agree with your points. However, just waiting until someone just worked on the texture to throw it out is definitely inefficient. There are also plenty of animals still left on the list, so unless the bear is an especially important there is no need for all of us to work on the same thing.

Well. the measurements came from some image that showed the dimensions (not really useful for texturing), the rest of the shape is very basic, save for the statue, which I partly made up since the only references where those tiny drawings in my previous post.

I could take a look at this, but, I would likely change it a lot.. as in completely change everything, if I do anything. Meaning all texturing needs to be redone as well. I would be upping the polycount significantly. I usually make the my models way more detailed than necessary for 0AD zoom level, but it's because I want to have the possibilities for them to be used in other games as well. But, to wait until someone does a model.. only to redo it, well, that just feels like a @#$% move. It certainly isn't a very effective way to get work done!

I finished this some time ago, but never got around to post it. I don't really know what to do with the figures around the top part. It's to much work, kinda tricky to model, and would bump up the polycount even more. I left it with flat surfaces. towerofwinds.zip

He was probably inspired by the roundness of his head

Weeeell.. I'm kinda busy playing shadows of mordor these days.

I figured i ought to try and finish this up, but man, the statue is tedious. I only have such low res references.. and the references are only drawings from the front. I can't tell what he's holding. I thought it was a staff first, but when i look at all 3 images, it seems more like.. a mace,? Anyone know what it should be. Also, the tails.. oh man.. those suck to model. I can't tell how they are supposed to go, where they split exactly and so on. Edit: forgot the image:

I don't know what to say about that. They are normal PNGs (unless I made some mistake just before uploading, but they all seem alright to me). I used them in the screenshot above. I made some improvements to the UV-mapping (and a very tiny amount of mesh tweaking) on the roman civil centre. rome_cc_2.blend and roman_cc.dae are both in google drive folder above. Left previous, right new * Adjusting UVs for tiling region * Layered rocks and avoiding black creases on outer corners (which doens't make much sense) * Continuous bricks around pillars

I had some issues with Gimp that deleted RGB for fully transparent alpha values (even though the PNGs with the option for transparent pixel values selected.) In the end, I got tired of trying to make it work, so i just changed the darkest alpha (0) to 1/256. No visible difference. Lets see if this works: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0Byux4vjcSM5UfmZvQTFSdjFRdXA3bVJWck80ZFFRRzAwVXVhUDhadVVGRGlReWozMGY0SEU&usp=sharing

Well, i did some tweaks last night, but never got around to post them. I have considered dropping the existing texture and just make a high poly version to bake from, but that also seemed like a lot of work. But then again, all the time i spent on this it would probably have been faster to just model it directly. (granted, it was a learning experience as well). So, seeing how you are already well into making an awesome high poly model to possible bake from, I can't help to feel that I've wasted time trying to cut corners (only to end up un-cutting all the corners step by step). I have diffuse, specular, and normal/displacement maps finished now. I'll upload them to some google drive or something