Since a large portion of my emails ask about making new units, I thought I might save some time by writing up a brief spiel in how I made the sheep.
You’ll more then likely need to be fairly competent at animating and modelling in 3d. I’m currently in a design degree so I have access to powerful programs and tips. If you know your way around 3d then there isn’t much to stop you apart from the actual insertion of the sprites.
Modelling the sheep was fairly simple. Many programs are suitable these days. If you can get your hands on a metaball program it will also help immensely.
Once I modelled my sheep I imported him into a suitable animating 3d program. I strongly suggest a program that supports bones and Inverse kinematics. This will make it much easier animating your unit. Texture your critter and setup the animation sequences. Sequences are the individual actions of your unit. Most units in Myth use walking, idle 1, idle 2, transition, attacking, special, hard death (exploded pieces), soft death, sequences and more. You must create the sequences in your 3d application and animate them suitably for use in Myth. You will also need to animate these units on a flat colour background to make transparent when you show them in myth. Bungie uses pure blue for all of their unit backgrounds. Also be careful about the lighting. Use ambient lighting and either very weak or no strong directional light sources.
The units in Myth are rendered from about 30 degrees off the ground. Each sequence contains about 8 camera viewing angles set apart by 45 degrees. In symmetrical units you can get away with 5 views then mirror the rest. My sheep used this technique. The major sequences use about 8 frames of animation. The lesser ones like flinch, death, idle and trans use only a few.
Once you have created your animation sequences you can then export them. If you have a walking sequence using 8 viewing angles with 8 frames of animation each you will end up with 64 sprites in that sequence. As you can see making units gets very laborious at this point. You will need to make sure all of your sprites, when rendered, are the same size or you will have the units pulsating.
To insert the sprites into Myth you will also need to make them all use the same indexed colour palette. You will also need to be very careful to make the units use only one background colour. If you anti alias the units to the background (which photoshop will probably do anyway) you will have a nasty fringe.To make sure you avoid the fringe you will have to index the sprites very carefully. If you give photoshop only one colour to index the background to then it will remove the anti aliasing. Debabilizer is recommended for palette manipulation. Next, using photoshop’s batch actions you can create your own script to take the 200-500 sprites you have and resize, crop and index them all to the same palette. For this reason I also recommend using a naming scheme that will allow you to send all of your sprites into the same folder for easy batching.
Now that you have all of your sprites ready for insertion we come to Amber. Amber is a third party sprite application for Myth. Amber 2 is currently under development and will be released when it is ready. Amber2 will hopefully use two methods of insertion. It will allow the use of plates and a batch import of individual sprites. For making units from scratch, batch import is the way to go. You will need to have all of your sprites saved in bmp format and all using the same colour palette. The first colour in your palette should be the background colour that you rendered your sprites on. This first colour will become transparent in Myth.
When you have inserted all of your units into Amber you will need to set them up in sequences for Myth to use. My recommendation is that you look at how Bungie set up their units and use one as an example. I based my sheep on the pig unit. Explaining how to make the unit from here on is more a matter of looking at Bungie’s examples and emulating their methods.
You will need to align the frames of the sequences up and the sequences with each other. This process hurts. It is laborious, boring and difficult. Good luck. ;)
You will also need to create shadows and align those also. In your sequences you will need to set the speed that Myth cycles through the sequences. The units for time are called ticks. Each collection file in Myth has a collection type. Set the type for units to Monster and Projectile.
Now comes the actual making of your unit in fear. You will need to make a new monster, colour reference, projectiles, projectile group, unit types and more. The Fear and Loathing Documentation covers all of this, and if you get stuck look at Bungie’s own units.
If making units sounds difficult , that's because it is. It is much more difficult than making a map and that is why so few are made. To anyone remotely thinking of making new units I strongly encourage you to know your programs and get up to speed on how Bungie did theirs.
That all said and done that is a quick (heh) rundown on making new units. I have left out how to make your units in 3d programs, and I have left out the main Fear stuff. There are individual manuals for each 3d program and Fear and Loathing documentation included on the MythII cd.
Good luck, and I look forward to some new units from budding 3d artists.
Fisj