Lehnah wrote:Chuckles58 wrote:And yet there may be more folk like me that would like to learn Age Building, but have the same Busy Life situation. I would hope this community can hang in there. During Mysterium, Rand mentioned that he really loves Uru.
This! I'd LOVE to create Ages, but unfortunately my experience with any kind of digital 3D creation is zilch. If there was a way to learn that I'd have a go, but I've no idea where to even start.
The really wonderful thing about Blender (well, I personally think there are a lot of wonderful things about it, and I've tried some of the super-pricey tools, too) is that there is no shortage of video tutorials on YouTube that will teach you how to get started and do some really amazing things. The only other tool I tend to see as many videos for is probably ZBrush, but that's not particularly relevant directly to the sort of thing one would be making for Uru anyway.
Like any other skill, learning to make art requires a lot of time, devotion and
determination.
Sirius wrote:Tweek wrote:There is, my 3D skills were zilch until I just started doing it.
True, we all start from zero. But it's more a question of available time and dedication, IMHO. It's extremely hard to learn something completely new after a full workday.
But I agree whoever wants to build Ages should just get started whenever they feel like it, and focus on the fun parts of Age building. An Age doesn't need perfect visuals or complex puzzles to be good. Unless you're looking to be a professional 3D artist, but that's another story.
In fact, I would say that a good way to get started which doesn't require too much forward investment is to block things out with a minimum of detail. Get a sense of the size, layout, and gameplay of the Age you want to make. Sadly, a lot of Fan Ages seem to stop here, throwing at best some basic tiled textures onto things with no lighting at all and releasing it, but it's a good place to
start, and you can add to it as you learn. Importantly, it also means it costs less (in time and effort) to change things, and you will need to change things a lot from your initial design when you're inexperienced.
Of course, this doesn't work for everyone. If you're doing something a lot more artistically-focused and just making an artistic Garden with little interactivity, you may focus mostly on the composition, detail, lighting, right from the start and do something tight and small.
Honestly, I wish I were better at following this advice myself! I have a tendency to get stuck on details before I've gotten far in planning.
Sirius wrote:I'd love an MMOG based on the Uru universe, where the gameplay loop revolves around the idea of exploring other player's Ages to gather "knowledge", then build your own Age using a simple editor, let other people explore it, and so on. I think this would suit a lot of Myst fans, and provide a nearly unlimited amount of fan Ages.
Of course, creating such a game would definitely not be trivial, but I've given it a lot of thought over time.
People ask for this all the time. I know that you know how much work it would be, but generally it seems people don't. Not if the goal is something that doesn't just produce cookie-cutter Ages, or Minecraft-Alpha-level structures. Just like was discussed in the other thread regarding tooling, finding the sweet spot between easy-to-use and flexibility is not simple, and in the case of something like this it's also a bell curve in terms of quality. Make it too simple and you can't make anything good. Make it too flexible and the difficulty in making anything good is immense. Right in the middle is great, but that's the only place where novices can still get anything done worth making, and it takes the most effort to create a tool like that (and the assets to go with it).