My Age Building Journal - Questions and Progress Reports

If you feel like you're up to the challenge of building your own Ages in Blender or 3ds Max, this is the place for you!

Re: My Age Building Journal - Questions and Progress Reports

Postby DreamBliss » Sun Aug 10, 2014 1:30 am

They say a picture is worth 1000 words:
WeHaveCollision.jpg
WeHaveCollision.jpg (99.21 KiB) Viewed 2961 times


:D
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Re: My Age Building Journal - Questions and Progress Reports

Postby Christian Walther » Sun Aug 10, 2014 2:53 am

Cool! Side note: I know this isn’t what you were concentrating on here, so you may already be aware of what I’m going to say, but I’ll say it anyway since it’s something that bugs me about many fan ages: What you do not have here on this cube is edges. The cube is smoothly shaded, as if the surface was rounded. If you really want it to look like a cube, you should add an Edge Split Modifier to it to give it sharp edges.
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Re: My Age Building Journal - Questions and Progress Reports

Postby DreamBliss » Sun Aug 10, 2014 1:08 pm

Good tip, and thank you for sharing!

This is not an age beyond the technicality to get it into Uru CC. This is just me learning how to make an age. Taking up the reigns again, so to speak :)

A video tutorial series I have for Blender mentions the edge split modifier, and I have certainly filed that information away under important for when I am making stuff for any kind of environment.

In this case the cube has a default color material applied, and a default colored material has been applied to the floor, just so these objects will be processed by PyPRP and be distinguishable from each other in the level.

I am far and away from knowing how to apply textures in Blender, much less any normal mapping that may be allowed. That will have to come later. First step is getting something made that can be played. Learning the pipeline. Getting the export/import process down, including getting the scaling of things right.

I think I have that pretty much down now, can complete the next video, and from there move in to texturing.
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Re: My Age Building Journal - Questions and Progress Reports

Postby DreamBliss » Tue Aug 12, 2014 3:52 am

Progress!

The next video is nearly complete. I have a decent idea that I take the viewer through the modeling of, from a concept sketch I drew.

BE WARNED! The video will be long and rambling in spots! I make no apologies for this. I am teaching the usage of Blender as the age is built. I am learning right along with the viewer. So there is a LOT of repetition, a lot of fiddling and that sort of thing. But that's OK. This video is meant for n00bs like me, not you pros :P

I am still deciding if this next video will be divided up into parts or all stitched together.

Microsoft Expression Studio ROCKS!!! Just had to say that. Did a lot of work, audio was crap, but using this program allowed me to reopen the video and encode it with different audio settings. I guess because it does not encode on the fly, But the encode process isn't very long either, at least on my machine. It might me longer on slower computers. I was even able to record a video while another video was being encoded! That's how little system resources this thing uses. Microsoft did a good job with this program. So if you want to do your own tutorials, show me how a professional does it, now you know what program to use. Link:
http://www.microsoft.com/expression/eng/

Later!
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Re: My Age Building Journal - Questions and Progress Reports

Postby DreamBliss » Mon Aug 25, 2014 6:15 pm

Major Update!

I have collision pretty much down and have started to figure out how to add textures. Not only that, I was able to draw my own brick texture in Gimp with little effort or serious study. Just hand drew everything, tiled it, added the ubiquitous plasma clouds, desaturated them, and played with various Layer Effects including Grain. I also got a normal map completed. I was even able to get both of these into a material in Blender and apply it to my mesh. As you can see, sort of, here:
Normals.jpg
Normals.jpg (276.1 KiB) Viewed 2863 times


I have no clue why of the two textures, the normal map applied to the normal channel and the texture applied to the default color channel, that the normal map shows up and not the other :/ But I will keep playing around with this, and in the mean time, if you know what the issue is, by all means post!

Video tutorial series was going well until I hit a brick wall with collision (pun intended.) But I am very close to wrapping up, and everything I learn about applying materials can be fuel for a later video. My goal is just to get people through all the steps needed to build an age and play it in Uru CC. That might just bring in some fresh blood to the mapping and programming scene around here - we'll see. I consider my job, what I started all this for, complete after I have guided the viewer through successful import/export. Anything else is just a bonus.

More later!
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