NewBie to Newbie: More "discoveries" ...

[boblishman]

OK... we all agree that the tutorials need updating in view of all the new progress that the plugin has made... but here are a few things I have 'discovered' that I could even find a refernce to in any of the tutorials (that I have read).

1. SPAWN POINT: FACING THE RIGHT DIRECTION:
This one was driving me nuts... Linking into my age and facing the 'wrong' direction .... grrrr .
Actually, this is very simple to change...by using Rotate in LOCAL view (not global) ... so that the Y axis arrow is pointing in the OPPOSITE direction of the way you want to face when you 'arrive' at your Spawn Point.

In the following example... I wanted to arrive at the small island and be facing the large one...

spawn.jpg (176.07 KiB) Viewed 4477 times

... which results in me arriving like this....

spawn2.jpg (168.31 KiB) Viewed 4476 times

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2. LIGHTING AN OBJECT WITH A SUN
This one also took me about an hour to figure out ....

If you are lighting something with a SUN (or in my case moon!) ... make sure that you have applied the Ctrl+A (Apply scale and Rotation) if at any point you have rotated your object during the design phase. (I had moved my small island around to several positions and rotations....and forgotten that I had done so. When I went into the age (before applying Crt+A) it was being lit from the wrong direction!!...
I have not done a lot of experiemnting with lighting, but I would suggest that if you rotate any objects at any time that are going to be affected by a light... then always use the Crtl+A command once your object is in it's 'final' resting place..

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I don't know if either of these things ARE mentioned elswhere...but if they are... I couldn't find them..
Anyhow, now I've started this thread...I'll add any new 'discoveries' as I find them ...

Hope they help some other newbie ...

[Aloys]

When you find stuff like that don't hesitate to add it to the Wiki. Editing a wiki is very simple if you want to add simple text.

Those two things you point out are indeed quite confusing at first. (and downright counter productive when it comes to that second issue). Ideally PyPRP should handle that by itself.

I'm pretty sure rotating the Spawnpoint 180° along its Z axis during the export shouldn't be too difficult to do. And although that's not a major issue it is confusing.

Now about that whole "Apply Scale & Rotation" stuff that's downright agravating. You need to do that in various circumstances so that stuff is exported properly (lighting, regions etc) But many times you need to keep your scale and your rotation... That can happen for many reasons, not the lesser of which being that when you do so you loose your local orientation; and then you can't use the local transformation (what you call the 'local view' in your post). Also you can't do that at all if you have instanced objects. Not many people may use those functions right now, but for those who do it's incredibly annoying, and some time it's downright impossible to do. For instance in Ahra Pahts I can't lit the Age because of the lighting issue you mention. (most of the objects in the Age are instances...)
Ideally what should happen is that PyPRP should aply the scale and rotation by itself during the export regardless of what Blender think, so that the objects remain intact in the Blend file but are exported correctly.. Now I won't put up a request for the PyPRP guys to work on that because I know they already have plenty of stuff to do; but that's annoying.
Actually thinking of it, it might be usefull to do it anyway for the regions..

[Kato]

Your Age (the lighting and water, especially) looks incredible!

Mind sharing your water texture? Also, was the lighting on those islands solely from an in-engine light or was it vertcolored?

-Kato

[boblishman]

When you find stuff like that don't hesitate to add it to the Wiki. Editing a wiki is very simple if you want to add simple text.

OK...I have editied the AgeCreate tutorial regarding the spawn point, but I'm not really sure what to do about the lighting one... (being a newbie I don't want to alter the Alcugs Tutorials unless I know what I'm putting is absolutly correct).

The lighting issues you describe seems a little complicated (with instances) so I haven't changed anything regarding lighting...

[boblishman]

Your Age (the lighting and water, especially) looks incredible!

Mind sharing your water texture? Also, was the lighting on those islands solely from an in-engine light or was it vertcolored?

Thanks Kato... well, it's a combination of both vertext painting and lighting (well, one light, a blue 'sun' ) ...and the water is done using one semi-transparant texture (70%), but mapped differently (size-wise... one large, one small) onto TWO seperate planes of water .... 1 about 1 ft underneath the other...

I have also found that continuing the land under the water means that when you swim, you get a very nice effect as you can 'just' see it moving under the water...

[Justintime9]

say... this thread brings up annother question I've been dying to ask; how can i change how big the age is acuratly! I mean, one time I linked in, and I was like: hey! where's my age! then i noticed that I wasn't falling into the blue... and... well that's when I saw that I was standing on the age! it was so small that I couldn't even see it until I jumped off . so... is there an acurate way that I can figure out how big the age is, relative to the Avatar, other than just trial and error (pleese tell me there's a way)\

o, and bob, will u be sending this age to ULM and or up for download? it looks awesome!!!!!!

[Aloys]

The unit used is the standard US foot (1 foot is around 30 centimeters). As a reference a male avatar in Uru is around 6 feet high.

[Edit]
If that can help you here is a blend file of a fake avatar I made that I use when I work on my Ages; I move it around everywhere in the Age to check the scale. You can import it in your scene using the 'File' > 'Append or link' menu (or shift-F1) then pointing to the avatar.blend file and then go into 'Object' and then select the 'DummyAvatar' object.

[Justintime9]

the link u put doesn't work. when i cliked it it said "URL not found"

[Aloys]

It is fixed now, sorry about that.

I added a very simple tutorial on the wiki about this. It is here. (it is a very simple thing, if anyone think some valuable info is missing please add it)

[andylegate]

Justin, when you're modling, do so in Edit mode, and make sure you pressed the Edit button. There is a pannel that will have a button that says something like Show Edge Length. This will show you how big your edges of your mesh is in Blender Units (and as Aloys said: 1 Blender Unit = 1 Foot.

Your male avatar is 6 blender units tall. It's good to make a rectangle cube and make it 6 units high, by 2 units on the side. Just give it a quick shade of bright red or orange, and use it as a yard stick as far as how big your stuff is compared to your Avie.

Unfortunatley, the only way to make your Age really big, would be to select everything in Object mode and use the S key to scale it bigger. BUT things will be slightly off, or not scaled quite right. Might be best to start over again.