[Forum Project #1] Graphics - GEuser's Submissions

[GEuser]

PIPES



Downloads (including .obj file):-

Coupling-Joint:

Pipe_Coupling_Joint.zip

(138 Bytes) Downloaded 250 times

Cross-Joint:

Pipe_Cross_Joint.zip

(629.68 KiB) Downloaded 239 times

Round-Joint:

Pipe_Round-Joint.zip

(132 Bytes) Downloaded 235 times

Straight-Joint:

Pipe_Straight-Joint.zip

(336.04 KiB) Downloaded 236 times

T-Joint:

Pipe_T-Joint.zip

(725.34 KiB) Downloaded 250 times

Y-Joint:

Pipe_Y-Joint.zip

(536.36 KiB) Downloaded 229 times

See the orientations illustrations here:( viewtopic.php?f=35&t=12471&p=89346#p89346 ). Had to make the round / straight / coupling joints because their not part of the pipes plugin in blender.

Materials: Brass, Copper, Iron, Steel.
Joints: Straight, Round, T, Y, coupling and Cross.

[happyjustbecause]

Great job, it's cool your not just submitting great art but you're explaining how you do it.

[GEuser]

Great job, it's cool your not just submitting great art but you're explaining how you do it.

Thanks for the compliment Happy. I don't see a point in submitting things half done without explanations for how you'd use them, just me

[GEuser]

3D Elevator

Screenshot of demo


Did a quick gE demo of Elevator. Not satisfied with the amateurise modelling but hey it might just be good enough for others to mess around with. Had problems with using the keyframe method in blender. The frame transitions were not linear with the time. Couldn't work out the graph thing for the animations so manually did each frame (yeah, I know, such a noob). You can change the materials in the blender file (they are generated internally = procedural). The gE code gives an idea of how the animations might be used. Here's the .zuip files:-

GameEditor Demo Code:

Elev_Test.zip

(1.28 MiB) Downloaded 229 times

Blender File:

Elevator_Test.blend.zip

(1.04 MiB) Downloaded 243 times

[skydereign]

Did a quick gE demo of Elevator. Not satisfied with the amateurise modelling but hey it might just be good enough for others to mess around with.

The effect is quite nice. We still haven't figured out how we are going to texture things, but for now this is great. This would make a lot more complex, but do you think you could create a universal elevator? One that can go along several different angled paths (at least the 45 degree directions). That way we could use one graphic for many different elevator positions.

[Jagmaster]

I actually like this a lot. It all looks so good!

I wish i knew how to synchronize those gears so nicely like that. I imagine it's a rather tedious process.


You mentioned in the other post that you were having trouble getting the 2D to transition to 3D without skewing perspective and so on. One thing I try to do with sprites is change the camera's Lens setting
to "Orthographic" which will flatten your perspective so you won't have that weird bulge in the middle of your longer pieces like the track and such.

Switching this is as easy selecting the camera, going to the camera icon and then selecting Orthographic
You will more than likely need to adjust the focal length to zoom out, because moving the camera on the y axis will have no affect.
Like so:


Orthographic vs Perspective:


You may need to bevel the edges of the gears to make them less flat looking.
But in the long run it should be a more accurate result.

Regarding textures: I'm still trying to figure out a good style without much luck. Next, I might just try sketching over the texture to give a more scribbly effect perhaps. Any suggestions are welcome.

[GEuser]

@ Sky

...do you think you could create a universal elevator? One that can go along several different angled paths (at least the 45 degree directions). That way we could use one graphic for many different elevator positions...

There would have to be a separate animation for each direction so if there are a lot of directions it could get heavy on the animation side. Any idea what the ideal amount of directions you'd prefer?

Heres a concept that would allow an elevator to travel along a shaft at any angle. Think of two gears bound to a circular guide that can be fixed into any arbitary orientation and adjusted for shafts at different angles. 0 degree would allow horizontal, 90 degree vertical and the others at all those imbetween these ( additional ones by flipping these). See below:-



Below is a simple model based on above. Of course there's loads of work to do on it. I like the fact that it would be smaller and simpler than the current demo version.


Let me know what you think.


@ Jagmaster

Hey, thanks for that tip on perspective / Ortho really useful (I've been using the Numpad to toggle between ortho/perspective but its not the same as yours = better).

...I wish i knew how to synchronize those gears so nicely like that. I imagine it's a rather tedious process...

It was tedious to have to centre the cursor on each gear because can't find the hot key short-cut for centering cursor to object so that I can rotate it locally. I suppose there's probably an easy way around this.

For the actual gears its just a bit of maths. The trick I've used is to rotate through just 1 gear tooth rather than a full 360 degree rotation of whole gear. As long as there are no spokes in your gear this method will create an animated illusion of a full gear revolution.

Example: for a 12 toothed gear which will have 12 gaps between each teeth there are 24 angled sections. So 360/24 = 15 degrees. So a rotation (y -axis) of gear by 15 degrees will shift through 1 teeth. However, if I want to do this in 8 frames than rotation step for each frame would have to be 15 / 8 = 1.875 degrees per frame. So general formula for degree shift per frame for any gear is: 360 / (Number of teeth * Number of Frames * 2)

Here's the steps I'd follow from here:

1. Set animation start frame to 1 and End frame to 8
2. Advance to appropriate frame in sequence (starting at 1)
3. Ensure cursor centred on gear & gear selected.
4. Do rotation step for current frame: < r > < y > < 1.875 >
5. Insert Keyframe for rotation/location : < i > < LocRot >
6. repeat steps 2 to 5 until end of animation (from frames 1 to 8 in all).

I can just preview it all with animation playback thing when done. Also noticed that on the Outliner window you can click on the camera icon to toggle whether you want a particular object to render in the animation (I did this for the shaft so that it would only render elevator parts)

...You may need to bevel the edges of the gears to make them less flat looking...

I'm not confident with using bevelling yet. It's partly due to not knowing how to create a good mesh for all those irregular bits (the non-gear components of elevator). Steep learning curve. (Oh. I think the mistake I make is not selecting an edges when bevelling, doing it with faces messes up bevel...I think?)

Regarding textures: I'm still trying to figure out a good style without much luck. Next, I might just try sketching over the texture to give a more scribbly effect perhaps. Any suggestions are welcome.

Textures, haven't really played about with the settings but you could try using more than 1 texture for the material in the texture tab on the properties panel. tweak generated texture settings (Voronoi and all those with filtering options, blend, difference, ect...). Nodes (Node Editor Window) are powerful but got to get my head around how to use them.

in GIMP I've found creaing several plasma layers that can be colorised or greyed and applied on image with various filters can create worn down look or more rusted metal effect or grained/brushed effect.

Once again thanks Jag and feel free to alter that model if you want.

[skydereign]

There would have to be a separate animation for each direction so if there are a lot of directions it could get heavy on the animation side. Any idea what the ideal amount of directions you'd prefer?

I love your example images, they are always very nicely done. As for the directions, I'd say 8 directions max. Just up/down, left/right, and the four diagonal (maybe not 45 degrees though, but some form of diagonal). Luckily the actual number of animations is halved since it is just forward/backward animations.

[Jagmaster]

Thank you for your explanation on the gear timing, that makes sense!

It was tedious to have to centre the cursor on each gear because can't find the hot key short-cut for centering cursor to object so that I can rotate it locally. I suppose there's probably an easy way around this.

The comma (,) key switches to local rotation I believe. Period (.) switches the axis to the 3d cursor location I believe.

The trick I've used is to rotate through just 1 gear tooth rather than a full 360 degree rotation of whole gear. As long as there are no spokes in your gear this method will create an animated illusion of a full gear revolution.

That is actually a pretty neat trick! I wouldn't have thought of that.

I'm not confident with using bevelling yet. It's partly due to not knowing how to create a good mesh for all those irregular bits (the non-gear components of elevator). Steep learning curve. (Oh. I think the mistake I make is not selecting an edges when bevelling, doing it with faces messes up bevel...I think?)

If you're referring to the bevel modifier, It's horrible. I've never used it successfully. There is a bevel operation where you can bevel specific faces (ctrl-b) but I tested that and it didn't work so well with the gears. Then I remembered the inset function (the i key in edit mode) which worked nicely for this purpose.

Then all one would have to do is select the front faces, hit "i", then select the middle faces and pull them out just a little.

Textures, haven't really played about with the settings but you could try using more than 1 texture for the material in the texture tab on the properties panel. tweak generated texture settings (Voronoi and all those with filtering options, blend, difference, ect...). Nodes (Node Editor Window) are powerful but got to get my head around how to use them.

in GIMP I've found creaing several plasma layers that can be colorised or greyed and applied on image with various filters can create worn down look or more rusted metal effect or grained/brushed effect.

Ah, thanks for the suggestions, I haven't messed around with blender's generated textures much.

As for the directions, I'd say 8 directions max. Just up/down, left/right, and the four diagonal (maybe not 45 degrees though, but some form of diagonal). Luckily the actual number of animations is halved since it is just forward/backward animations.

I like how the 75 and 15 degree angle increments looked, They're more visually interesting than the 45 degree angles that are often overused.

Once again thanks Jag and feel free to alter that model if you want.

Hey, no problem! Glad I could help.

[moonforge]

Since we're all talking about textures, I think we should work out how we're going to do the game. When are we using 3D textures? When are we doing 2D textures? Are we even decided on if we are using 3D textures yet?

[kickstart]

This is going to have the best graphics of any gE game made of all time guys, these are some awesome 3D graphics you guys are making here, I am thourougly impressed with the amount of effort!

[GEuser]

Since we're all talking about textures, I think we should work out how we're going to do the game. When are we using 3D textures? When are we doing 2D textures? Are we even decided on if we are using 3D textures yet?

I don't think we got that far yet. But I agree we will eventually need same standard set of textures for the game theme. As for using 2D & 3D textures. The beauty is that blender can accept both. So you can mix the too (cool hey?). Blender can generate procedural textures so we might end up not using any 2D textures at all (although I very much doubt it). Not sure what Jag's plans are, it is a bit early though. The hard part is getting the 3D models done.

I'm a noob at it. Initially it was really difficult but I'm starting to get the hang of it. Very time consuming if you don't know all the short cuts (I've started to discover some techniques,long way to go). Blender is a fully professional program. it's really amazing. There's a steep learning curve though, It's very tedious at times but very rewarding at the same time.

Hey, it's free. Give it a go, look here:
http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender

There's a mac, linux and windows version.

Oh, feel free to make 2D textures. I know alot my stuff won't be used, so don't fret if it isn't used, just have fun submitting stuff.

[GEuser]

This is going to have the best graphics of any gE game made of all time guys, these are some awesome 3D graphics you guys are making here, I am thourougly impressed with the amount of effort!

Hey, thanks. If you have any doodles on ideas (don't have to be 3D or great stuff just imaginative ideas for inspiration feel free to submit on main domcument design thread). Not everything is always used (including my stuff). And keep those ideas flowing

[kickstart]

feel free to submit on main domcument design thread). Not everything is always used (including my stuff). And keep those ideas flowing

I would love to, except that I need help myself with my own games, and I currently being helped with graphics, but I will pitch ideas for cool animations.

[GEuser]

Elevator2 Parts

Screenshot:-


Here are the individual parts that you can import into blender and most 3D modelling programs that support wavefront .obj file formats. These are the raw parts and have not been optimised, smoothed or anything.

Download (.obj files):

Elevator2_Parts_objs.zip

(1.12 MiB) Downloaded 228 times