Where do I start?

[Theo1728]

I want to create an age in the worst way. Perhaps most of us do. I have had this unused architectural concept bouncing around in my head for over fifteen years. I've tried to cover the basics of Truncated Octahedral geometry in text elsewhere, and I'm unsure of what to repeat here. I don't think words can do it justice. My design would be a closest-packed array of rooms close to two hundred meters in diameter overall, containing literally thousands of rooms. To my knowledge, no one has ever tried to do anything like this in game before: something approaching the density and capacity of our real world. As a tri-split-level, closest-packed array, mine would surpass real-world values. D'ni Ae'gura may come closest to real cities, but even if the servers weren't limited to fifty players at a time, I don't see the basic design of that city supporting a working population of more than one or two thousand.

How do I choose between Blender and 3DSMax 7? These Cyan plug-ins, what do they do? Has anyone tried doing Blender versions of them? Is one application more space-consumptive than the other? Easier to learn? Would I get confused if I tried to learn and use both? Are either "big enough" for what I want to do? What are my next steps? Find a source for 3DS Max? Learn to use Blender? Come up with a compelling story / puzzles to fit the setting? Teach myself to program in Python? Assemble a team of more experienced "Writers" to do the heavy lifting? Where do I start?

[Chuckles58]

Theo1728, I haven't been able to locate a copy of 3DS Max 7, so I've been relegated to learn Blender. I've heard that 3DS Max 8 also works with the Cyan plug in. I'm way behind the curve but thought I'd let you know how I chose the program to begin. Good luck. The tutorials are most helpful for beginner age builders.

[Sirius]

That's really ambitious... I don't know if you can create something so huge, except if all your meshes are really simple, with only a basic material on it. Ahra Pahts is already quite huge for Plasma.
I usually prefer some small but very detailed Ages, such as Serene or Tehr'Dovah.

How do I choose between Blender and 3DSMax 7? These Cyan plug-ins, what do they do? Has anyone tried doing Blender versions of them? Is one application more space-consumptive than the other? Easier to learn? Would I get confused if I tried to learn and use both? Are either "big enough" for what I want to do? What are my next steps? Find a source for 3DS Max? Learn to use Blender? Come up with a compelling story / puzzles to fit the setting? Teach myself to program in Python? Assemble a team of more experienced "Writers" to do the heavy lifting? Where do I start?

If you really want to create something big, the best would be to have a team I guess.
IIRC, Cyan's plug-in allows more options, such as creating Graphic User Interfaces, particles; but on the visual side PyPRP is quite good too.
Blender is not too bad as a 3D program. Some people find 3DMax easier to learn however. I don't think some Ages are visually better because they were made with Max.

I can be wrong however...

[J'Kla]

Yes the first plugin worked with Max 8 it was not my copy of 3DMax so I went back to using Blender.

Enobmort is built using Blender 2.49b and you can have multiple versions of Blender loaded disc space permitting.

Enobmort is modular and the current core consists of 375 cubes when I first started expanding beyond this I used the same modules as corridors and eventually had issues I had a breakthrough when I decided to make the modules bigger and I revisited the basic module and realised I had loads of dead verticies.

The changes lead me to an understanding of extrusion and allowed me to make a big leap forward.

Big spaces are possible in Blender but there is some sort of limit to the depth of field you can see when designing. To model a realy huge space I would consider building lots of small ages that would load quickly joined by something that behaved like a wormhole.

I have been considering this for my next age an age consisting of 27 Enobmort master cubes 3 x 3 x 3 Before my modification of the basic module Blender could not handle now it may be able to do 5 x 5 x 5 master cubes 15,625 sub cubes plus joints (Thinks at last a project for Noidrocca).

Getting started with Blender is difficult but not beyond an average commitment. I've found "The Official Blender 2.3 Guide" available from the Blender foundation an invaluable resource and refrence.

Before you start on an age give yorself about 9 days free time (not full time but most spare time ) to do Chapter 4 the Quick Start (three times in full) this is Gus the Gingerbread man it's available on line and I would recomend having both the book the on line and Google available. There are inconsistencies ie they changed some of the menus (watchout for menu changes between Object and Edit mode particularly if you can't find a button hit tab and look again). If your using a laptop get a full keyboard or an external Number pad the Number pad is a must.

Studio 3DMax can be easier but if finance is an issue then blender beats it hands down. I did 3Dmax on a three screen system and It can be done with one but a second helps. Even blender you want as much screen as you can get lots of desktop real estate helps.

Once you know your way around Blender go to the Wiki (Link on the top bar of this screen) and work through "Getting Started with PyPRP" then in your first age build a ladder to nowhere (use the (short way) method) copy it to a few places.

Then study the parts you need as you need them.

[Theo1728]

Okay folks, I have successfully located 3DS Max 7, though I'm not sure of what lengths I'll have to go or what safeguards I'll need to use in order to safely download a useable copy.

I expect my size issues to be different than yours, as most of it doesn't involve big spaces, just very large numbers of small ones. Yeah, there'll probably be one or two big spaces, but the details won't be as extensive as Ahra Pahts when you're up on the tower looking over the expanse of it.

At present, I'm going through Roland Hess' _Essential_Blender_, at least the text of it, on my palmtop, and compiling a list of the hotkeys. As far as I can tell, 3DS Max 7 and 8 are no longer available for purchase, so there are some reasonable questions concerning the moral implications of obtaining and running one of them, and that's what I'm asking about now. It looks like Blender supports particle effects, but not liquid water.

At least one member of the URU community I've asked is running 3DS Max 7 because he never successfully figured out Blender at all. Not all of what I've read in Essential Blender is working for me yet, and the nature of what I'm trying to do requires a certain amount of precision that most Age creation is probably spared, so I have to concern myself with such matters as geometric construction techniques and the ability to key in exact values for some coordinates and angles. It's certainly better to be able to do geometric construction in three dimensions than having to do analytic geometry and spherical trig on the side, and key the results in. I know how to make cubes and spheres, but not how to make lines and points. My CAD experience reached its peak in CATIA 4, so naturally I want to be able to do the same things, even if it comes to the ability to create a two curves on on two different, seemingly abstract curved surfaces, and join them with a surface that is smooth and tangent to those surfaces on all its edges. CATIA was good for that. Even near the beginning I was designing elliptical geodesic domes and surfacing Klein Bottles, so naturally I'm wondering if Blender can be taken that far. Of course financial issues play into this, and though 3DS Max would be difficult to finance, CATIA would indeed be impossible.

Another reason for using Blender is the clear legitimacy. The ability to use it later on to create other artwork, games or animated features. If I did this now, or five years from now, with 3DS Max 7, would I find myself in legal trouble if I tried to market them commercially?

Naturally, I'll look for the Guide to which you have referred, and take a look at these ages in Deep Island, though with my work and family it'll take time. I've noticed elsewhere in this forum a scale factor: in Blender, for URU, 1 unit = 1 foot. I'm told an avatar is six feet tall. I'm assuming that's the male. I still have to find out how high he can jump, and if my ceilings are high enough at 8' 1".

Thanks for all your help so far, I hope that eventually my work will manifest well and won't disappoint you.

[Fuchida]

i recommend very strongly to read all the articles in the guild of writers Wiki. Most of your question concerning the Avatar can be answered. There is even a Blender Model of the male avatar, that you can use as reference. (used it my self, to be found under article "Age Scale")

If you work with what PyPRP calls Visgroups, Plasma should be able to handle however amount of cube, vertices or whatever.

Blender is the choice. To answer the visibility limit that was talked about, that does exist can be adjusted, standard is that your viewpoint camera sees only 500 units far, can be changed though.
Blender might be different from Catia, but once you have gotten into the most important things, it is very powerful. Working with CAD myself, i can only say, that even 3ds Max does not do all the things I can do with a CAD. And vice versa. However working experience with CAD is already helping you lots with the whole "how do i get the picture in my head into a form in 3d"-Process.

Overall difference between Modelling and CAD is that CAD is precision and reality. Where in Modelling you have to learn not to try working it as a CAD. If you want to set a bolt into a whole, a CAD needs the whole and then the bolt into the whole. In Modelling you just create the bolt head and put it on the "not existing" whole. Making it look like there is one, but modelling it would cost memory space to valuable. Thats it for the difference.

Blender is the choice cause it's free and can do almost all things you can do with 3ds Max. Newer versions (the newest Beta as an example 2.56) can calculate fluid simulations as well. But for your ages is to say, that they do not support fluids, as far as i know and only basic particle effects, therefore is the question if it really matters for that....

Oh, and yes in Blender you can type in exact measurements for your objects, you can position all parts according to an 3d coordinate system and can rotate it with degrees. So all these things are available as well.

My opinion,

[ZURI]

IIt looks like Blender supports particle effects, but not liquid water.

On the contrary, you can have water but not particle effects "with the plug-in that is.." The water, however "as you stated," is not liquid. To my knowledge, Plasma does *""Edit"" NOT support that technology. Remember that we're working with a rather, uhm, archaic... game engine. Not all of the uber-cool special effects that you see in later games are available. Otherwise, you can add particle effects "rain and snow (not sure about the leaves from Kadish), through a round-about way. There's a tutorial in the wiki that describes the process.

As for the rest of your concerns, yes, you can do all of that in Blender. Although the learning curve can be a bit steep "depending on your willingness to watch/read lots of tutorials... as well as keep a reference handy," it is a wonderful program and is VERY powerful. There are even quite a number of custom scripts to create objects and automate tasks.

My best advice is to hit YouTube and start with the easy stuff. Download the pdf for "Blender: Noob to Pro." Coupled with the Keymap images, "also from Blender Foundation," the Noob tutorial is by far the best reference I've come across. Plus, it's free to download... or you can view it online.

Once you master the hotkeys, you'll find that it's a fantastic program - and is quite capable. Plus, you can't beat the price!

*Edited... see above.

[Theo1728]

Thank you all very much. You have given me a fair amount of material to review and study, so don't be surprised if it's a week or two before I post again, though I may check the forum during that time to see if there are more suggestions or questions.

[Christian Walther]

One nice thing about Blender when you want to use it for CAD-like constructions, that I have made use of numerous times, is its extensibility. (I would expect 3ds Max to have similar features, I don’t know.) You can write a quick extension in Python that does exactly the geometrical calculations you want (or even use the Interactive Python Console to enter them step by step if they’re simple and not reusable). No need to do trigonometry outside and key in the results, you can do it right in Blender. (Assuming you already have a numerical algorithm to solve your problem – if you still need to do algebra, an external CAS is still helpful.)

[Theo1728]

Where I Am Now:
I have this recurring error message, and I wonder if I need to overcome it before going further:

"
blender.exe
Compiled with Python version 2.6.2.
'import site' failed; use -v for traceback
Checking for installed Python... No installed Python found.
Only built-in modules are available. Some scripts may not run.
Continuing happily.
"

I am slowly making sense of Blender, but some things still elude me. I'm reading through "Essential Blender", but my available online time is so starkly limited that going through the available tutorials will take me months. Usually, by the time I get my hands on the home computer, it's so late that I can hardly think straight.

I'm used to being able to construct things from 2D views, lines, points, circles, multiple user-coordinate systems, and being able to snap things to contact with each other.

I know what I'm used to: being able to project lines and curves onto planes and curved surfaces, (either parallel to an axis, or perpendicular to the surface, even if curved), to create circles and ellipses by intersecting planes with cones, cylinders and spheres, to create surfaces that are tangent to multiple planes or other curved surfaces, (not just to bevel or chamfer edges and corners, but to form cylindrical, conical or complex radii, even from one complex curved surface to another).

Blender doesn't seem to have the ability to create independent points or lines in space for geometric construction, rounded edges, spherical corners, or multiple axis systems, though "empties" resemble multiple axes in the systems I'm used to.

How do I do three-dimensional constructions in Blender? For what I want to do, I need to construct truncated octahedra, whether by beveling just the corners on a cube back to hexagons, or by rotating and translating hexagons and squares. I now know that I can make a hexagon by setting a "circle" for six vertices, but how do I create perpendicular planes at the ends of an edge segment, duplicate the hexagon, and rotate the duplicate about one edge, (not its center, and an adjacent edge to the one with the planes), until its edge is coincident with one of the planes previously mentioned? Alternatively, could you tell me how to create an octet-truss in Blender? Or how to translate an inclined hexagon until one of its edges becomes coincident with the hex it was copied from? Right now, I still have things snapping to center, and I'm expecting to find that there's an easier way than attaching "empties" to the vertices of the hexagons and making the empties into "parents" for them, though I don't yet have translation snapping working for this process.

Please advise.