Guild of Writers

I FINALLY did it! I got my cave walls and floor to blend correctly . . . thanks to tachzusamm once again (no surprise there). He gave us the example in the Relativity Blend file. All it took was stacking 7 hand made from scratch textures on top of each other combined with two UV maps and two decals reset to Orco and bing, bang, boom! I haz cave

Cave Walls

Disclaimer: There are zero lighting effects in here yet. That's always the last thing to do and I'm not even remotely close to that stage.

I also got reminded that when all else fails, check for youtube modeling tutorials. I had to model a pirate hat that resembled the one Jack Sparrow wears and for the life of me, I couldn't get it where I wanted it and still stay within poly limits. I found a video tutorial of modeling a different hat, but it was enough to help me see what needed done. It may not look like much, but that little hat had me stumped .

Silly Little Pirate Hat

I have to get back to work; I want this thing done by Christmas. If my grandson is agreeable, I'll probably throw it up on Deep Island. It's going to have young-boy pirate stuff in it (including a skull with a knife through it), so it will need some sort of disclaimer that it was built for a little boy to play in.

Shades of Peter Pan, at least we won't need pixie dust and the flight direction of "second star on the right and straight on till morning"

Over all, from what I can see an excellent creation.

I made a Cutlass, inspired by Pirates of the Caribbean and a Scull I downloaded off the net some time ago if your interested

Pizza knife Show Spoiler

[img]http://i306.photobucket.com/albums/nn264/Dances-with-Madness/Cutless000.jpg[/img]

Skull Show Spoiler

[img]http://i306.photobucket.com/albums/nn264/Dances-with-Madness/Misc.jpg[/img]
Making skulls in Max is a bit out of my league but I did manage to find a few free down-loadable sculls

I can see that Skull sitting on the desk in my age, except that it would have the texture of Black Quartz, or maybe Clear Quartz

Karkadann,

I've got a sword and a flintlock, but that cutlass would go nice in here . Yes, please, I would like that.

The cave has already turned into two sections. He'll link into the first, climb up a scary hill, walk through a dark tunnel, come out on the back of the ship and have to walk the plank and jump off to get to the treasure. It's being built in both Blender and Max7, because I eventually want to use some of the nifty effects I can get from Cyan's plugin, but I'm still a lot faster when I build in Blender. Plus I'm using the lighting effects we can get from the new version of Blender. But first, I have to get the thing built and I'm only giving myself a couple of months to do that.

I think I might ask the Cyan pro to explain how the physics--->shootable option works in the plugin. It sure would be fun if he could fire that flintlock .

This learning curve! Good grief, the curve isn't even getting less steep, let alone going away. It never ends . Then again, the ages keep getting better.

And to stay on topic, don't forget to check that all the normals are pointing in the correct direction before exporting from Blender and importing to Max. If the normals aren't right, the polys won't show up in Max at all and it's a big mess. On the same note, if you import objects into Max and a lot of faces are missing, check your normals .

Also, don't forget that the fog settings in the .fni file effect the final lighting. My cave is really bright in that screen shot becuase I forgot I had changed the fog to white.

Calena wrote:I think I might ask the Cyan pro to explain how the physics--->shootable option works in the plugin. It sure would be fun if he could fire that flintlock .

Ha ! This could make for an excellent puzzle. Find which rope to shoot to release the canon that would crash the wooden fence, allowing you to progress to a new area of the boat Would be a bit tricky to do, though.

Anyway, your boat reminds me of Stoneship...

Got the cutlass . . . thanks Karkadann!

Now Sirius is giving me ideas. Thinking through the criteria for shootable objects, my thoughts are that there must be a python file controlling the trajectory, which then triggers a sequence of events on the target object. I realize I can't get this done by Christmas, but I'd like to do more research afterwards. I can always add to the age and I already have a cannon in there.

Here's an updated screen shot of the entry cave (because we can't have too many screen shots ): Pirate Cave

There should probably be a pirate ghost in here somewhere. That wouldn't be too hard to make happen.

And . . . always remember to turn off MipMapping on large blending decals! If you don't, you may find yourself scratching your head wondering why everything looks so bizarre. On a good note, it will be a great lesson on exactly what effect MipMapping has on images .

Calena wrote:
Here's an updated screen shot of the entry cave (because we can't have too many screen shots ): Pirate Cave

ooh, scary!

Would it be possible to reverse engineer bits and pieces of Talahdan and the various associated plasma plug-in components to figure out how the Shootable component needs to be set up?