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.