Coming up short on Hard Mode

After last post, I sat down and tried to decide what I wanted to do this weekend for my game.  I knew it would involve 3D modeling but I was not sure what to do knowing it would be a shorter weekend than I am accustomed to since I am posting Sunday night not Monday night.  I could have finished off the ranch-style house model, which just involved making two more windows and two more doors, more or less.  This would have went together in a few hours and then could be placed on the "To Texture" list.  My other option, which was significantly harder in comparison, was to finish getting comfortable with the texturing process and try my hand at it.  This is what I went with, and I did not get as far as I was hoping.

So for most of the night after posting I sat and watched video after video on how to lay out UVs, how to lay the base coat, how to add details and shading, how to make a bump and a spec map, and some small lighting effects.  By the time I was through I felt fairly confident in the process, since it was no different than the one I laid out in the previous post.  Then I went to put into practice all that I had just learned and picked up an interesting bit of knowledge: the way I model is great for the modeling end but pretty bad for texturing.  My basic modeling strategy is to block out the house in small panels, and then mold the panel into whatever it needs to be, a window, a blank wall, a window, or whatever else is needed.  This makes the work flow real quick since each panel can be manipulated freely or deleted and another copied in its place.  This is very bad for texturing.  The basic idea I took out of all of those tutorials was that you want to keep items with differing materials apart since the space in the color map is very tight and one pixel may straddle something you want brick and another you want wood and make one or the other look off.  What this meant was that while laying out my UV-map, I redid most of the background wall, which did drop the total polygon count from 4860 to under 4500.

It took me most of Saturday to get all of the UVs where I wanted them, and then after starting to lay the base coat of color, I found myself redoing some of the model which was not quite the right proportions.  Unfortunately I did not finish the base coating, which was my "quota" so to speak to post it.  Right now a bunch looks white which detracts from a lot of the rest which I finished.  So my goal is, depending on how life plays out over the next week, to post the finished ranch-style house Friday and the textured row-house, though not necessarily finished textured, for next Sunday.  Until then,
~gunnah

Slowly learning texturing

I have spent a decent amount of time over the last week looking over tutorials on how to texture 3D models.  I have the basics down, I think, but want to look over a few more tutorials before I start since I did spend quite a bit of time on the models.  From what it looks like the basic way to make a texturing starts with a UV-map.  This looks to take about half of the time of the entire texturing time, which is good if I am going to make several textures on one model.  Once the UVs are mapped and spaced appropriately, a UV-snapshot can be made.  The UV-snapshot is the main goal of the texturing project because it shows where the various attributes of the model are.  The snapshot is then brought into a paint program, preferably one with layers.  Color can then be slowly added to make a color-map.  A bump-map can be made by turning the color-map into a grey scale, then adding small details where the building should be more bumpy using a noise feature.  The bump-map is how the building should render non-smooth surfaces without adding each bump by hand, wasting a lot of processing time and increase the game specs with excess faces.  Finally a spec-map, short for specular, is made with another grey-scale of the color-map and then slowly altered.  The spec-map is how light reflects off of the surface of the model, I think the closer to white the shinier the object should appear.  Well this is what I have learned over the week, will probably look to spend another week or so going through a few more tutorials before trying it out on my own models.

Again, new post will be up Sunday night/Monday morning Eastern Standard Time, a day before normal.  While my schedule has not changed yet to mandate this, I am doing it preemptively.  So, until then,
~gunnah

Work in Progress: Ranch-style House (Part I)

Well, I was hoping to have this finished for this post, but I had a longer break over the weekend than I thought I would.  So here is the model about half finished.  It still needs to side windows and the front door from this perspective.  The back needs four windows and a door, not sure if I am going to try for a sliding door or double doors.I may try something different with the back doors but that depends on the polygon count.  Speaking of polygon count, the total for this so far is under five-hundred and from that I would expect the final model to be roughly a thousand polygons, guessing each door and window should be about 50.  I am not including shutters on side or back widows, so that fifty polygons should be close.

As for texturing, I want to go over some tutorials before I start on any of these projects, while I do not want to save it entirely for the end, at the moment I am just trying to figure out what buildings I need and how they will look.  Once I start texturing, I am hoping some of the buildings, like the row-house and this house above will be reusable with several different textures.Figuring a development with this and three or four other kinds of houses, each with four or five textures, will make a fairly large number, sixteen to twenty-five, of houses.  Hopefully it will make for an interesting map.

I know this was not a Sunday night post, next week may not be either, depending on how life decides to play with me, but that conversion should be happening in the next few weeks.  Again, I am hoping to get some things done during the week to should them off for that Friday night post, but most likely that will be a conceptual post and the Sunday will be a 3D art post.  Until next time,
~gunnah

Change of Availablity

This is a fairly poor fiftieth post, I know, but I have been doing a lot of thinking about how to work developing the game into what my life is likely to become in the coming weeks.  My free time is going from mostly during the week to mostly during the weekend, so I am thinking I am going to make the Friday-night/Saturday-morning posts optional, and the main post Sunday-night/Monday-morning, instead of the Monday-night/Tuesday-morning I currently have been posting updates.  Friday posts are going to be more ideas of what to include and concepts while the Sunday posts will hopefully be more 3D art.

With all of that being said, I am hoping to keep developing this game despite starting a new job and a new semester of school.  Until next post (Sunday-night/Monday-morning in the United States(,
~gunnah

Work in Progress: Row-House (Part 2)

So I really do not have much to report over the week, Life has become very busy and it looks to only be getting busier.  With that said, I have pretty much completed the modeling for the row-house.  To the left is the front and right side of the building which includes the billboard.  The overall model is roughly five thousand polygon faces, not great but for its size, I do not think it is a problem..  This means I do not think I need to worry about baking some of the details into the texturing, so that section of the previous work-in-progress post is not necessary at the moment..  I still am thinking about some of the other smaller detail I want to work into the building, like stair-rail and fencing.  As for the bars over the windows, I am still undecided about whether I think that would look good or just be a polygon sinkhole.  The other thing I think is missing from the overall picture is some kind of lighting from along the bottom of the billboard.

Continuing with the row-house, left is the back and left-side (when viewed from front).  It is mostly just reused panels from the front of the house, but does include the cellar doors.  I am thinking about also including a light above the cellar doors to add a little more detail to the model.  Besides these few little details, - which I probably will not waste a post on, though if I get a few projects that only need a few tweaks each, I may do one on all of the little tweaks, - I think the modeling portion of this project is a success.  Like the courthouse project, I am going to put off the texturing portion of this project until I get a little more comfortable with the texturing process and have a few models textured.

Just a note, I am note sure if I will be around to make my Monday post after this weekend.  From what it looks like, life is about to become much more hectic, and I may be forced to stop my Monday posts until life slows down a bit, which may take until the end of the semester or longer.  Obviously, I will try to keep posting as regular as possible, since I found posting once a week leads to me forgetting about it until the last moment.  Well, until next post,
~gunnah

Relaxing a bit

I could go on about one thing or another I plan to do over the coming days, weeks or months ahead, but I am not going to this time.  I am still working on the row house but I have not made enough progress to really talk about what I need to do with it again, it is pretty much the same list as last time.  The court house is still not textured, have not had much time to go through and learn how to texture real nice yet, which is what I am kind of waiting on.  My choice of engine is still in the air and probably will be for a while.  Over the next few weeks I am hoping to make a base set of tanks modeled off of the original tanks from Tanarus, but that is not a real high priority right now.

On a programming side note, I am trying to make an IRC bot, not really pressing, though if I get enough done with it, I may share the IRC channel.  In case you are wondering what I did with my time, the best way to start thinking about 3D worlds and environments is to play 3D games, and I have been playing several to trying to get some interesting ideas.  Until next time,
~gunnah

Work in Progress: Row-House (Part 1)

Initially I was going to use this post to discuss other engines I have been looking at and discuss the merits of each system.  Unfortunately, at least for this post, I ran out of time to fully look over each engine to do it justice.  The two I am currently looking at are the id Tech 4 and Source engines.  The Source engine is proprietary, and I need to read over the licencing very well before I look at it, but I already have several Source SDK packages available on my Steam account.  The id Tech 4 took me a little while to figure out where to get it since what I was reading sounded like all games made with the engine were just total conversion mods.  I have since found the download but I need to look over it thoroughly, but it is open source pretty much so that is one aspect in its favor.

Now, onto something that is more than just my musings, some 3D modeling.  This is my next building for the suburbia set, a row-house.  There is still quite a bit to do, but I felt I was far enough along to talk about it.  When it is done it will be four units combined into one building (this section of the building duplicated four times with various changes).  The current model is up to about 450 faces, so the finished front section will probably be around 600, though it can be higher if I decide to add some finer details.  Some of what I have done might be baked done in the final project which will save me a large number of faces in my polygon count.

So I will start off by naming what is missing.  Opposite the door will be a first floor window, this window will be the largest in the building.  On the second floor I am missing two types of windows, a standard window and one with an air conditioner sicking out (this is an object I can move around to make each section a little more unique).  Finally the top molding is missing.  Once those are done the front would be for practical purposes complete, though there are a few things I would like to add, though I am not sure if my polygon count has room for them.  I would like to fence in the small property including a rail up the stairs and a gate in front of the stairs.  I have also been thinking about if I want to bar or add something else to the basement and first floor windows.

Okay, that is everything to add to the front, moving to the sides is much easier.  Each side is going to have a continuation of the top molding and a billboard, both of which should be fairly low in the polygon count.  The back is going to be a little more demanding, since I want to repeat the first and second floor windows from the front into a similar spot on the rear.  I also want to bring over one of the basement windows and finish off the top molding.  The only new piece (repeated once per unit) will be a cellar door.

Once all of that is done, the modeling is finished and some of the finer details which are eating up my polygon count right now can be baked into the texture.  This probably includes the doorknob, mailbox, house number and light, as well as some of the detail on the cellar door.  I may not bake all of it since it will be closer to eye level and somewhat noticeable, but if I add the fencing, much of the detail on the front will be kept some distance away.

~gunnah

New Years' Project Evaluation

So here it goes, my New Years' assessment of the project.  Over last year I went over a lot of what I want to cover in this game and my goal with this post is to condense that information and see where I have major holes in the project.

Networking and Server Client programming: while if in the end I do decide to use Ogre I would either need to learn this or add a networking engine, I think I am looking for a 3D engine which has a built in support for this.

Non-PVP game content: most of this has been readily described already, this would be the log-in screen, the main page, the menus and all of the side pages with update notes, friends and user stats.  This will all need to be actually programmed once I figure out which engine I am using, but for the moment I have a decent idea of what I want it to look like.

Tanks: I have talked a bit about what I want the tanks to perform like, but I will probably spend more time on this once I start making models for them.  Right now I am thinking I want 7 kinds of tanks.  One neutral, 3 lightly favoring once stat and three heavily favoring one stat (stats being Armor, Equipment, and Speed).

Modules: I went over quite a number of these already, and when I go to release the game, my goal is to have pretty much everything already described ready.  There are a few more miscellaneous modules which I would like to go over, and I may as a filler post in the future (filler meaning more though and less production like this post).  I am going to get around to making some of the models for these closer to game release.

Maps: This is a very interesting part of the game design, how many levels do I need.  I am thinking at release my goal will be four levels.  This will give the game a decent amount of variation while not delaying the creation process well beyond what I am capable of in a timely fashion.  Right now I am thinking of doing the suburbia map which I have discussed a bit, a cargo hold on a space ship, and a medieval castle.  I have some time to decide what to make the fourth map since it will take me quite a while to make all of the props needed for the three already listed.

3D art: I could split this into game related and unrelated, but I am just going to summarize what I have done and want to do.  I feel very comfortable with making the actual models and will probably make several simpler models over the next few weeks to be houses filling up space on the suburbia map.  My biggest weakness, I feel at the moment, is in texturing.  This is partial why I am not rushing to finish the courthouse, but hopefully within a month or so I feel comfortable with that aspect of 3D art as well.

The Engine: The biggest problem is deciding which engine I want to use.  Once I make this decision I feel I will have no problem learning how to program the game inside of the engine, and will probably make a string of status update posts like I had been doing with the Ogre Engine tutorials before I decided to expand my horizons.

I believe I hit on every major area and hopefully I will have more to show from this year than I had for last year.

~gunnah