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First sculpted models made their way in the game: The Torpedo Cruiser and a group of remodeled Attack Drones:
Can't help myself. Spam on! :p Torpedo Cruiser: <a href="http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/812/xintorpedo2.jpg/" tar
Muahahaha! Ok, I'll stop spamming now. ;)
Thanks. :) This is just too easy... <img
I spent some time today sculpting and retopoing the meshes for the Warp Cruiser and the Attack Cruiser for the Xin, because I always wanted to do a better job with them and to get the hang of the workflow for the rest of the mod assets: The Warp Cruiser: <a href="http://imageshack.us/photo/m
6 will work with Win 7 if you have the Ultimate Edition (has compatibility mode). I am using XSI 6 for final export because newer versions somehow manage to mess up the .xsi format so that the converter won't read them.
Ooh yeah, Genesis rising has some sweet models. But yeah, I'm totally blown away with the possibilities. I can finally spend the majority of time actually shaping and texturing the ships, instead of duplicating polygons and tweaking vertices. I can't update all the ships I did so far because I want to release the mod soon, but maybe I'll do a cosmetics patch later on and bring up all the ships to the same level. Gonna be a blast making the rest of the assets though! :D
You know, as awesome as your models are, IskatuMesk, I have a little inward whimper every time I think of UV mapping them... ;) Myself, just finished testing out a new workflow: sculpting instead of modeling, auto retopology, some minor cleanup and then this: <a href="http://imageshack.u
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Bigger, Faster And More Awesome I am pleased to announce a, for me as an artist as well as a mod developer, pretty big breakthrough in the workflow which will hopefully not only result in an increase in the quality of remaining art assets which need to be done for the mod, but also drastically shorten the amount of time required to finish the mod. As some of you may be aware, modeling organic models can be very time consuming. Maintaining proper edge flows, sm
What you want is even shading transitions . So, subtle color changes, no sudden green->blue stuff. Islands should generally be evenly colored, but there are exceptions, such as islands which are basically cylindrically mapped - there you will end up with both the color transitions and a sharp seam (which is why I usually break those into two symmetrical parts and adjust both to get rid of sharp transitions.
In Softimage, you open the compositor by View -> Layouts -> Compositing. It's really easy to use, since it's also node based like the material editor or ICE
By the way, for those of you interested in modelling organic ships, check out Sculptris from Pixologic. Just tried it and shaved about three hours off modeling. Won't do you much good with mechanical stuff, but mechanical is easy-peasy compared to organic. I only wish I discovered it three months ago, would have been done with the mod already. :)
myfist0, you can increase the intensity of the lights on your ship by opening the Material Manager (Ctrl-7), opening your material and cracking up the intensity value in the Incandescence section. You can type in a number greater than 1, this will overdrive it to your heart's content. If you want really nice space renders, erasing your default scene light, setting up Environment lighting, Final Gathering (will make your model Incadescence self illuminate the ship as well), and som
Have to disagree there. It's simply good practice to keep polygon counts in check, or better said, appropriate for the job. If you're building a set piece for a closeup CGI movie sequence, then its perfectly justifiable to go the extra mile with the polygons, as you need as much minute detail as you can get. But with game models... sure, you can spend 2000 polygons on a turret, but why? It's not like players can actually zoom in close enough to admire how smooth the 40-sid
Haven't posted in here for a while - here are some wire shots of a third superweapon for the Xin race - the Praetorian Drone. Unlike the first two superweapon options, which are both Titan ships focusing on amassing firepower and durability in a single vessel, this is just a small attack drone. But in the right hands and with enough time, it can almost double the total firepower of a player's arsenal. <a href="http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/267/praetorianwire.jpg/"
Only if you have a symmetrical UV island that's connected on one side (like a cylindrical mapping). Then you always get one sharp seam. The solution is to split that island into two symmetrical halves, then orient them so that you get a smooth transition. Also, don't try to get even shading. Some color variation is normal in certain circumstances. Just try to avoid sharp transitions and drastic color changes.
XSI can be a little buggy with tangents. Whenever I have to import models, I always use OBJ format, and then often select all faces and extract them, keeping the original. Then I erase all clusters on the new object, create two brand new UV sets and copy/paste the UV's from the original to the new sets. Seems to get rid of all bugs.
Have you applied the tangent modifier AND linked it to the second UV map? In case you haven't: 1. Select model 2. Property -> Tangent 3.Under UV's click "pick", then go to Selection, Clusters and find your second UV set in there, click that. And that should be that. Now when you change the second UV set, your tangents get affected.
Thumsin, first, thanks. :) Also, I did not know that Sins engine can actually illuminate objects based on particles emitting light. Neat! Normally, if you want to have that kind of illumination embedded in a texture, you would bake it in the 3D software of choice, same as with ambient occlusion (I don't use AO on my models because it takes a long time to render due to complex ZBrush topography and it doesn't really show that much - you need more complex, overlapping ge
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The center particle effect is around 90-ish per sec. The model uses three 2048x2048 textures (the standard color, data, normals set)
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Oh, that's coming. But in the meatime, enjoy these:
That's a real nice model there. However, just to clarify what I meant with "some models can't use them", for example my models, being mostly organic, must have smooth flowing forms by design, but I do have to fully symetrize them (including mirroring UV maps) to maximize texture space. So what I have to do is create a separate tangent UV set which is continuous across the central seam - this completely avoids any lighting seams. @<a id="ctl00__Content__RepeaterReplies_ctl08__L
As far as I know, tangents are used in Sins for both bump effects AND lighting surfaces - if your tangents are missing or are badly made there are obvious lighting artifacts on the model. Which in my opinion is a much uglier problem than a seam here or there. And yeah, you can avoid symmetry problems by hiding or avoiding seams with geometry. Not always possible , since that technique depends largely on the model design.
And btw, (just so you know if you ask around in different places), rigging is a process in animation when you set up skeletal structures (rigs) so that characters can move the way you want. There is no rigging in Sins moding.
Setting tangents is not a pain the ass - it's the easiest part of setting UV maps on the model. Just make a duplicate of your existing UV set, scale everything down in the Texture editor and willi-nilly throw the islands around so that they do not overlap, then rotate them until your model has a nice, even color shading (visible in the Shaded mode). I usually go with green, some people prefer blue but for me that produced inversed bump-mapping (might have something to do with ZBrush).