A few of Erart's more 'unusual' pieces.

So this is the review I was talking about.  The one where I have some things to say that may be considered somewhat negative.  Overall, I have good praise for Erart but a word of warning I do have some buyer's remorse over one object - specifically the coconut throwing weapon.

I'm usually very careful about what I purchase; I want to make sure I only buy the things I plan on actually using or I can use to some functional end.  This means a great many purchases I make are actually based around my Sci-Fi WIP. 

That said occasionally I purchase models for my son to use or objects I just plain find interesting.  I recently made a octonauts themed series of items for my son (nothing special, just some alpha masked 2-D decals he could place, along with a poorly made 3D model of the octopod).  I decided to splurge and purchase two items from Erart:

First was 'coral reef 2'.  This is the lower priced of the two coral reefs he offers.  It's a simple coral reef with some anemone and a starfish.  That said, it's really impressive what he's done - he managed to make a very functional dynamically moving object that adds a lot of life to your underwater scenes.

As you can see from this video, it's got a lot of really cool behavior to it.

In game, it looks like this:

Nevermind the coconut, that's for later. 

Now the reef itself is rather small but blends in well with grey or brown surroundings.  I for one was extremely happy with this piece.  It has a surprising amount going on and I'd reckon it's pretty much required if you want to run an underwater level of any kind.

The next piece was the 'underwater skybox'.  I've made a number of skies myself so it's not often I purchase other people's skies.  This was however a very unique offering giving an 'undersea' view of the surface water above and some jellyfish flying by.

Well.. Overall this is an excellent skybox. That said there are *SOME* complaints.   Nothing major here.  Primarily that the jellyfish appear very flat, are too frequent, and move way - way - WAY too fast.  I mean unless those Jellyfish are mounting jet engines, there's no way they should be moving so quickly.  It can be tuned, of course, manually via the skybox settings files but the end user shouldn't have to do that.  So buyer beware - it's a good skybox but you may find yourself tinkering with it.


So having purchased two separate items and being reasonably satisfied by his work - I decided to go for it and purchase what I felt was a 'must have' silly item - the coconut weapon.

So as you can see from the video, the weapon seems reasonable enough.  I want it specifically as a 'cheat code' silly weapon that will basically destroy anyone it hits.  That's easy enough for me to implement, of course.  The fact it's a coconut is perfectly ridiculous for me.  I feel that this has limited utility outside of a strictly 'survivalist' game, which there's really not a lot available in that respect weapon-wise so you may find yourself never quite in the situation I was in.

So let's start with the nitty gritty - first off, the modelling, method, and texturing is really well done.  What was done here was ambitious and I look forward to future weapons by Erart.

Behold the coconut, mighty in it's glorious power.

So the coconut is a hitscan weapon.  It's modeled very well.  The hands are a little... cartoonish but nothing game-ending for me.  What kills me though is actually the OFFHAND.  First of all - it serves NO function; it's just there. And second of all, it makes your character seem like they have Bell's Palsy or something.  You literally run around with your hand sticking out stuck in a sort of rigor.  Then when you toss the coconut, the hand comes up and comes down as if it's attached to a stick.  It's ... unfortunate.  I really can't find myself wanting to use this weapon simply because I can't stand the offhand.  I'd rather he just get rid of it altogether, if possible.  I may write him and ask this, I don't know. 

Take a look:

This is the start of the throw. 

As you can see above, the initial part of the throw seems ok - though that second hand really never touches the coconut at all.  And the main hand is ... awkwardly angled but that's less of an issue than it might seem.

The problem is the left hand remains locked in that posture and simply ... goes down.  It looks absurd.

Apparently you have really bad arthritis from years of coconut throwing.

So .. yeah.  That's the meat of it.  If the hand movement was less rigid, it'd be a top shelf gimmick item.

As it is, it's relegated to my 'maybe one day' bin.  Overall, I applaud Erart's absolutely unique offerings.  Almost everything he sells has some unique edge to it that can't be found by any other vendor.  I'm shocked at some of the genuinely impressive things he's done.  If he can just improve his model animations a smidgen he'll easily best some of the Game-Guru community's top authors.