Ok, this is going to be an on-going dev diary of sorts, where I post my progress on one small part of the development process. This time I'll be taking a sketch by our illustrious concept artist o_nobody_o, and (hopefully) converting it into a 3d in-game skinned/textured/animated/interactive model. I'll post in this topic as I go, explaining little quirks and eccentricities of the process and hopefully what all is involved.

If you don't want to see all the in-progress posts, you can click here to see the post of the final product.

A note about this particular item. SF is going to be having new game modes in upcoming versions. Some of these modes will be created by the developers, but the new entity set should allow for map makers to pretty well create whatever they want. At least one of the new official modes is going to need a 'goal' of sorts (as in the soccer kind) that needs to fulfill the following requirements:

1. It's got to have some kind of arpeture. So you can throw a ball in it or whatever. Some way to use it to score.
2. It's got to be big enough for that to happen. This is going to be a decent-sized prop. Going to need some significant texel detail. (A texel is a pixel displayed in 3d. I'll get into that more later)
3. It's got to look cool. Goal posts are boring. It's got to look all techy and badass. Think 'power reactor'. Cables and shit coming off. You know, the whole deal.

Here's the concept that o_nobody_o produced. I think it's perfect. It's got the big hole to throw stuff into to score, it's big, should scale well, and it's got detailing around the outside to make it look cool. It even has big power cables. Ideal.


A few things I like the look of off the bat: The cables. They'll be polygon intensive, but they should look really nice, and what's more I can use a repeating texture on them and save texture space while they still look good. Plus KGtheway2B is awesome at making normal maps for stuff like cabling. Very excited to see the finished product there.

The little fans. Brilliant idea of o_nobody_o's - I can animate those and make them spin, maybe have them emit steam or that heatwave effect. Visually interesting. Also can't wait to see those in action.

The sides of the reactor - I can save texture space by repeating geometry. Perfect. Since a lot of the model repeats, I can re-use a lot of uvw space and up the model material resolution without sacrificing memory space. I'll get into this and explain more later when I uvw the model.

Anyway, I've started meshing it out in 3d studio. Updates to come.

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It's 'Fik-Shus'

Sexy.
Woo for content

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Currently doodling in 3ds max. This is going to be one of the eight segments to ring around the central bucket part of the model. The way I see it at the moment, the model will be constructed of four component parts, one of these segments (duplicated eight times), the power cables (probably a mirror of a single cable), the bucket itself, and any detailing to go in-between.

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It's 'Fik-Shus'

Looks like something good has come from the leak at least.

Nice concept.

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Woot, new game modes and entities!

That looks really nice. Model the big cables individually though, it would look strange if they all had the same shape, I think.

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This comment is entirely the opinion of Mudkip and doesn't reflect a final development decision one way or another. The topic is currently being discussed, and testing will take place in order to decide on the ideal course of action, based on decisions made during that discussion.

The cables will start as splines that I will sweep out into cylinders along their paths. I'll probably make individual cables for each side, then mirror them to the other side.

In the meantime, here's the central bucket, and a chamferbox to add some detail.

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It's 'Fik-Shus'

Different styles of modeling come in handy for different modeling tasks. Often I can start with a simple shape and extrude or bevel faces to arrive at the final shape I'm shooting for. This is typically called 'box modeling', and it's useful for static objects like tables, chair, guns, and usually anything that's got discernable edges.

The power cables are going to need a slightly different approach, just because of how they drop down from the side of the model. Even though these cables won't move, they need to appear 'draped' and as if they could possibly become dynamic, even if they're not.

It could be possible to box model the cables, starting with a long segmented cylinder and pulling the vertices about, but it would be pretty tricky to get them all to line up correctly. For this task I need to spline model them.

In spline modeling, you lay out a line of vertices in a spline, or an array of points. What's useful about the spline is that it can be moved or modified at each segment with just one vertex, instead of 18 or however many sides the final cylinder will have.

Here are the power cables in spline form. Ready to be swept into cylinders. When I do that, 3ds will extrapolate cylinders around each of the vertices relative to the rotation and orientation of their neighbors, and produce a smooth cylinder along the whole length.

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It's 'Fik-Shus'

This is rather interesting ;O

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...like this:


I also extruded some faces towards the end of the now-cylindrical cables to form the segmented ends of the cable connectors. At this point I'm almost ready to uvw unwrap the model, the first step in the skinning process.

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It's 'Fik-Shus'

looking good

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OWN3D