Community Nexus

[Pavitra]

As far as I know, Uru only supports textures repeating rectangularly; what I had in mind was to give each nonrectangular "tile" its own individually-textured prim.

I like how this is developing. The slightly-off-ness especially is a good idea, though I think it could be a little less pronounced in a few places.

Have you considered putting only three pens around a tile, rather than six, or would that make the motif too obvious?

[Egon]

What would the IC background for such a Nexus be? Would this be a re-purposed D'ni room? Would it be a room that someone constructed in a D'ni Age, or possibly in an Age that an explorer wrote specifically for the purpose of holding the nexus?

It will most likely not be part of D'ni age (same as old Nexus).

Or are we abandoning canon entirely to accommodate the Plasmuru Ages?

As far I can tell, plan is not to do that

[Carl Palmner]

@Pavitra...

Re: a Penrose design, do you mean having a separate physical object for each tile, and use two textures, one for each tile? That would solve the "giant texture" problem, but it seems like an awful lot of polygons devoted to just the floor. I suppose another method would be to create a triangular texture that could be mapped in a rotation that would form the general pentagon--that might be a good compromise between the two methods. I'm definitely intrigued by this idea and will play with it some.

Re: three pens, it occurred to me briefly but I personally like 6 better. I don't think the motif would become too obvious, as you suggest--however, I think the six-pen design is just prettier. It creates a lot of other secondary designs that I really like. For example, the lines down the center of the pens form rough equilateral triangles, and the negative space between the pens looks like a six-pointed star or flower. That might be just my personal opinion though.

@others...

Are the modellers here interested in using my designs, or in getting me to do some other kind of design? I won't be offended if you decide to look elsewhere for textures--just wondering what you think of the 2 I posted so far.

[Tweek]

Carl, a few suggestions:

- Square tiles feel not quite right for D'ni. Maybe hexagonal tiles, or a Penrose tiling (for the Five motif)?

D'ni use square tilings all over the place (in the hoods for example, plus K'veer has several styles of square tiling).

[kaelisebonrai]

@Pavitra...

Re: a Penrose design, do you mean having a separate physical object for each tile, and use two textures, one for each tile? That would solve the "giant texture" problem, but it seems like an awful lot of polygons devoted to just the floor. I suppose another method would be to create a triangular texture that could be mapped in a rotation that would form the general pentagon--that might be a good compromise between the two methods. I'm definitely intrigued by this idea and will play with it some.

Re: three pens, it occurred to me briefly but I personally like 6 better. I don't think the motif would become too obvious, as you suggest--however, I think the six-pen design is just prettier. It creates a lot of other secondary designs that I really like. For example, the lines down the center of the pens form rough equilateral triangles, and the negative space between the pens looks like a six-pointed star or flower. That might be just my personal opinion though.

@others...

Are the modellers here interested in using my designs, or in getting me to do some other kind of design? I won't be offended if you decide to look elsewhere for textures--just wondering what you think of the 2 I posted so far.

Hi there, Carl -

I like the idea behind the second one - but I'm not sure I'm fond of the actual texture - and I'm definitely not fond of the purposefully "imperfect" hexagons >.>

I'd personally recommend basing your textures on photos, and stock images, and altering them from there. =)

I'm also not sure about the "marble" nature of it >.> I don't necessarily feel marble is a common d'ni stone - its not necessarily unheard of... but I don't feel its terribly "common" either. =)

I disagree with pavitra on rose coloured marble being great - I personally feel deep browns and reds are much more appropriate than rose coloured things. =) That and while marble is probably not unheard of, I feel it probably isn't the best stone to use for a nexus, and a GoW themed location. =)

I'd also suggest taking a look at the stonework in Vothol Gallery for an example of a fan age that did the style and theme of the GoW, and of the D'ni Guilds /amazingly/ well.

However - I /do/ like the style of the texture - and feel if implemented using photos, and general manipulation, rather than creating the texture out of thin air (as it were, i guess =P) - it'd be amazing.

[Carl Palmner]

I'll definitely have a look at Vothol gallery. I'll also redo this with a different stone--probably just a generic look--and perfect hexagon-and-pen designs, so we can see what that looks like as well.

In general I dislike using manipulated photos. To me it feels less creative, and more restrictive. I could do something like that though if others agree with you that it's a good idea.

[Tweek]

I'll definitely have a look at Vothol gallery. I'll also redo this with a different stone--probably just a generic look--and perfect hexagon-and-pen designs, so we can see what that looks like as well.

In general I dislike using manipulated photos. To me it feels less creative, and more restrictive. I could do something like that though if others agree with you that it's a good idea.

I dunno, I use manipulated photos for pretty much all my textures. Don't really see it as less creative and restrictive myself but then I guess that's down to individual preferences.

I find working from photos gives more depth and realism to textures, combine with good lighting/shadow effects either on the texture or on the mesh the texture is on and it can end up looking pretty sweet.

If you have a wide enough library of textures/stock images/photoshop brushes to use you can pretty much work anything out.


On another note, I do like the looks of Atheni33's room design though.

[Pavitra]

Re: a Penrose design, do you mean having a separate physical object for each tile, and use two textures, one for each tile? That would solve the "giant texture" problem, but it seems like an awful lot of polygons devoted to just the floor.

Yes, that's exactly right. This is why I said that hexes would use fewer prims.

I suppose another method would be to create a triangular texture that could be mapped in a rotation that would form the general pentagon--that might be a good compromise between the two methods.

Penrose tilings don't repeat usefully as you go outward, so this is basically the same as "one big texture", except that the big texture is one-fifth the size. I'd just go with the hexes.

[Carl Palmner]

@Pavitra: Agreed. Although now you've got me hooked on the penrose design and I really want to do one--maybe for something smaller than the actual floor, like a wall hanging or something, I don't know.

@Kaelis: I've done another one using your suggestions, with the exception of using photographs. BTW I meant no disrespect to anyone who uses photos when I said it felt less creative--I meant that for me, personally, it's more enjoyable to build the texture "from scratch" as it were.

Here's the new one:

WNexus Floor Kaelis Show Spoiler

As per Kaelis' suggestion, the colors are now brown and red and the material is polished stone (some simple reflection would be good on it). I can make this appear rougher, like natural stone, but it seemed to me that whatever kind of stone is used, it ought to be smoothed and polished anyway. The hexes and pen designs are now perfect (well, more perfect--this time the imperfections are unintentional, but they are much smaller and I think would not be noticeable in-game). Keep in mind that this is not the completed texture but a sort of "preview"--it is currently not seamless yet.

And here are pics of how the two textures appear in a 3d environment (rendered in Bryce for the sheer ease of doing so). The first one is the one based on Kaelis' suggestions, and the second is the one Pavitra liked.

WNexus Floor Kaelis 3d Show Spoiler

WNexus Floor Pavitra 3d Show Spoiler

Also remember that all the textures I've posted are unfinished--I did enough to show what it would look like, but have not bothered to smooth the seams yet and make other minor improvements. I can do that when and if we decide on one (and of course, this is all dependant on whether GPNMilano and/or Atheni want to use my designs. Neither has commented yet).

[GPNMilano]

(and of course, this is all dependant on whether GPNMilano and/or Atheni want to use my designs. Neither has commented yet).

I like the first one myself (the brown and red design). It feels more D'ni like. It needs work, perhaps greater detail to make it look broken and old, but it's a start.

To be fair, I have refrained from commenting because of other issues that my original idea for the Nexus was tied into. The Writer's Nexus was intended to be part of a much larger project, that has yet to be announced. Mainly because that project involves an assortment of other people that I have not talked to about announcing the general project to the community as a whole. However the Writer/Community Nexus, since it was intended to be used by everyone and for everyone for the prupose of hosting the links to everyone's fan ages, seemed like it should have more input from the community on the development front than the project as a whole.

Once I talk to everyone involved in the overall project about wether we want to let the community know what we're developing, and how we're going to do that, then another post will probably be made as an official sort of annoucement.

But as far as the Community Nexus (Which i'm starting to like more then the Writer's Nexus name) it's development isn't as tied into the overall project so much as a spinoff of it, mainly to be used for the express purposes of clearing out the Nexus and providing a space for everyone's ages. So it's open to development, IMO, by everyone and everyone's input should be at the very least considered during it's development. Wether or not we use all the ideas is entirely based on what direction we, as a community, feel it should go. To that end I'd like to remind everyone of the main goals here:

1. The Community Nexus will host only the links to fan created ages. IE, any area in D'ni you decide to make will at this time be accessed via Cyan's Nexus.

2. The Community Nexus is a repurposed D'ni age. It's my opinion at the very least that we, as explorers, in this part of the story shouldn't be able to create an age like the Nexus. To me since we have zero clue, IC, how the thing works except for general ideas culled from the DRC's information books, we shouldn't be Mary Sueing that to fit our own desires to have the Nexus be written by us.

3. The Community Nexus's interface however DOES allow us to say that we did hack our own nexus together. We've been dealing with fooling around with the KI, while the DRC is not around, as well as the Nexus, long enough for us to get a general idea of how to cobble together an interface in english that we can use.

4. The Design of the room, and it's textures should fit into the style of D'ni. It's a repurposed D'ni age, so it should look old, and used for thousands of years. Not newly made. It's architecture should be reminscent of D'ni style architecture.