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Nick - Vanilla+

List of changes:
- His fingers no longer move parts of his hands. (His pinky doesn't move random parts of his palm.)
- Left hand's fingers have been reweighted to have bending fingers look more natural.
- Added producer_body_it as an available skingroup, allowing the holster to be covered in Boomer Bile.
- Implemented LOD models for better Source Engine Performance.

- Fingertip bones repositioned to match Nick's.
- Includes unique animations for adjusted fingertip bones.
- Collapse to Incap & Die Standing animations have had their fall landing sounds adjusted to match.
All of these were completely unnecessary and only created more confusion.

To summarize: I've improved the fingers, the thumbs now move the clothes, the sleeves move with the hands better, and Nick's LOD models have reduced polygons.
This means that this mod gives a performance boost without losing any real quality!

Nick's holster can now be covered in Boomer Puke!

This is a model mod. Other Nick mods that replace the model will conflict. Texture mods for Nick work fine.

I'm open to suggestions for other ideas on improving Nick.

I removed the included animations as they only created confusion.

A lot of Nick's animations are from Bill's, and some of them don't look that great due to Nick's rushed weights on his fingers. The SMG is the best example, as the animation wants the middle bones of all the fingers to rotate down, while the tip of the fingers rotate up. Nick's left hand just wasn't weighted for this kind of movement, so I re-weighted his left hand's fingers to better smooth them out. (Weighting is assigning the, "influence," a polygon has on a bone.)
I also weighted parts of the clothing to his thumbs so that whenever he raises his thumbs, they wont just clip through the clothing. Speaking of clothing, his sleeves have been tweaked to reduce dramatic clipping such as when Nick holds the Electric Guitar.

Nick, like most models, have LOD - Level of Detail - which is where the further away you are from a model, the lower the model's polygons have. Originally, Nick's LODs only reduced the amount of bones used but didn't reduce the amount of polygons. So, I made my own.


Nick has 17,446 tris, or polygons. Since Nick has a shadow which used his highest-poly model, double that number and the game was using 34,892 tris just to render one Survivor. That's fine with today's hardware, but we are running on the Source Engine which limits us on how many polygons we can have rendered total. (It's why high-poly mods can crash the game.)

With the LODs included, the game only has to use 21,711 polygons at most. That's 13,181 polygons saved. Of course, that's only if you're close to Nick. The farthest away from Nick will reduce the main model down to 4,265 tris, and his shadow won't be rendered since you're too far away to see it. So, being far away from Nick saves you 30,627 polygons! (Since the game disables shadows.)

Main Model (LOD 0) - Highest poly-count model. (17,446)

LOD 10 - Fingertip bones aren't used. Polygon-count is the same. This model is also used when Models/Textures are set to Low.

LOD 15 - Hair detail removed. Some fingers' bones aren't used. Overall polygon-count lowered ~20% (13,967)

LOD 25 - Facials disabled. Fingers not used. Toes not used. Overall polygon-count lowered ~40% (9,540)

LOD 50 & Shadow LOD - Hands and feet aren't used. Overall polygon-count lowered ~80% (4,265)

Before this mod, if you had all L4D2 Survivors rendered with their shadows, you'd get 125,328 polygons total.
If you have this mod and the other Survivors, you'd get 74,958 polygons. That's a 50,370 difference just from the lower-poly shadows alone!


Want better animations for Nick? Check out this mod!