How to create a good looking object?
Community Forums/Graphic Chat/How to create a good looking object?
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| I know this has been discussed before but I REALLY would like to know the easiest and cheapest way of producing objects for my game, for example a realistic looking bomb. OK I know there are various 3d modellers out there, blender, 3d Studio etc - so I create a 3ds object but how do I texturise it so that when I load it into Blitz3d it looks real? A lot of objects just look flat. Is there a simple step by step guide for creating realistic looking objects for BLITZ |
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| I am by no means good at modelling (or in fact anything), but I know lighting has a big part to play in making things not look flat. How to get good lighting is another matter, but a good starting point would be the wonderful Gile[s]. Another thing to get more realistic looking textures would be bump mapping, but I am out of my depth talking about stuff like that. |
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| Don't know if this is what you are after but: Gamespace I find quite useful for generating textures for objects and creatures. While I am no 3d artist you can create higher polygon models with procedural textures and then take a render of them from different angles. At the simplest level - render the object from front and back (assuming it is somewhat planar in shape) and use the images as the texture for the front and back. Really poor use of UV space but its a start and is very easy. |
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| Boiled...I'd check out AC3D. I ran across this modeler a couple days ago and it looked pretty nice. |
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| Thanks for all your help. I have opted for Wings3d and Giles - this is my first effort, it's a rusty old bomb...  |
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| Nice look screeny there. I like the particle effects :o) |
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| Nice bombs ya got there.... I use "Med"(MD2 modeller). It's super easy to create objects from scratch, animate them and spit out a skin file to paint by hand. If your bomb was an MD2 it could have a built in explosion animation... |
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| Doggie, it does have an explosion animation using particle effects. Basically it goes boom, shakes the screen (which fades to red briefly) then shrapel flies out witha big puff of smore and fire. It's quite nasty. I'll take a look at the med thing though - thanks BTW do you have a link for it? |
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| Med is the modeller that comes with GameStudio. There's other MD2 editors that do pretty much the same thing. I just like it since it's so simple to use. |
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| you could go for that old black bomb with fuse, Write 'bomb' on it in big white letters too. |
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Another one - this is a time capsule - pick these up to gain more time... |
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| I think that Giles is the better blitzbasic program ever made ... It's a pure tool to increase level rendering ! |
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| IMHO good looking objects can be made when the UV-Mapping is done properly. Several Tools can be used. Deep Paint can be found for free these days, and there is Tatoo for more intuitive freehand painting. Personally I prevere the classic method, using a UV Unwrapping tool to align the Triangles the way I want them on the texture, and then save a UV Map as a Bitmap template, then paint it using some decent Graphics software like Photoshop or the free "the Gimp". As an UV Unwrapper I suggest to use the free "Lithunwrap 1.3" or the cheap "UltimateUnwrap3D" (actually UU3D is Lithies sequel, and it's also one of the few Apps that are capable of converting From/To animated .B3D - surely worth the money!) If you decide to use the free LithUnwrap, you need to fix a little problem: it exports .3ds as unwelded and therefor flatshaded meshes. You need to load them in third party apps that will allow to WELD a mesh and to SMOOTH or AUTOSMOOTH a mesh (not talking about adding triangles!). If you plan to lightmap your objects in Gile[s], you don't have to worry too much about smoothing because Gile[s] using its own smoothing algorithm AFAIK. Anyway, good looking Objects require good UV-Unwrapping, eg: Here's 2 photos of a gun:   and here's the 3D Mesh:  This is the texture used:  The UV Wrapping template was made with Lithunwrap 1.3. BTW feel free to use the model http://www.melog.ch/models/SIGp220_se.zip Depending on the Tool you are going to choose for UV Unwrapping, you will have to read some tutorials, since good UV Unwrapping/Mapping is a science by its own. |
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| jfk EO-11110, thanks - this is very cool, one day I hope to be able to create meshes that look this good. Have you tired the auto UV unwrap in Wings3d? I'm not expert but it seem pretty good to me and free too. |
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| No, never tried that. I've heared Wings has a pretty good UV Unwrapper too. Not sure if auto unwrapping can be useful for all kinds of meshes. I'd prefer to do a box mapping and then correct things, scale parts depending on its priority etc. Sometimes cylinder mapping is a better choice to start with, for barrels, columns etc. Actually this gun isn't done very well, compared to real pro stuff. |
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| actually wingshas cool max like unwrapping. you define the seams then wings splits it apart. really cool |
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| what the heck is that sweet boiled guy talking about... that stuff looks great... how much more good looking do ya want!!!! :) --Mike |
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| Erm Red, forgive me if I have misunderstood you... I was saying that the gun model looks very good and loads better than my poor efforts... "this is very cool, one day I hope to be able to create meshes that look this good" you seem to think I don't think it's any good, i think it's way cool! |
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| I think he mean't your screenies look good, Boiled. He probably doesn't know that you didn't model the hourglass. :) I like the rusty bombs, btw. If I were to do a bomb like this, I'd probably automatically think of doing it black and shiny, with the word BOMB written on it - as someone else has already said. I wouldn't have thought to make them rusty. They look cool. |
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| yeah... that's what i meant... thx big10... --Mike |
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| Cool - I do not claim to have made the hourglass mesh, sorry if there was any misunderstanding. I did put the particle effect in it and light map it though :) Here's the new teleport (activated) - is spins so creates a nice effect with the rim...  |
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Again not mine but here is a bridge (that needs to be activated)... |
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| cool. I like bridges that need to be activated :) looks like you game is more than a few lines of walktrough code. |
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| The game code alone is near 12,000 lines of code. I wrote a custom world editor too... I hope to have a preview for the community very soon... This new version (0.8) has had some MAJOR enhancements and is getting close to a finished game. |
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| Bought ultmiate unwrap 3d too :-) |
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| Hey Jfk, I was wondering why you mentioned Deep Paint as an unwrapper. I've been playing around with it for a bit and it seems to be nothing more than a paint program(though a very good one) |
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| Hey Jfk, I was wondering why you mentioned Deep Paint as an unwrapper. I've been playing around with it for a bit and it seems to be nothing more than a paint program(though a very good one) Have to agree here. I tried deep paint a ton, and could never get what I needed from it. UUwrap was my final decision in the UV deparement. |
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| yeah, sorry, I guess I confused some titles here. |
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| Yeah, DeepUV (by the same company) is a very nice UV unwrapper though. ($800 US, ouch) |
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| I use Blender3D and Paintshop Pro. I've used Wings3D for a long time before switching to Blender3D (which is better, IMHO). you define the seams then wings splits it apart. really cool That shounds like Blender, not Wings3D. I remember wings3D as selecting polygons and tagging them with a color (which there were only about 10, which is really limiting). With blender, you mark seams, unwrap, and paint or edit the UVs. Very easy. It also lets you selectively edit UVs of selected polys, which helps when you're mapping any complex object. It's also easy to assign multiple textures to a single object. If you want to learn to model (and don't have a very big budget for you're tools) I would suggest Blender3D and some inexpensive paint program, like Paintshop Pro or GIMP. I also use SlimShady to lightmap some of my objects, which really improves realism sometimes. |
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| No, it's Wings, I use it myself, and it does as he says. |
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| Interesting. Wings3D must be catching up with Blender3D since I last updated. I ought to download the latest version or wings. |
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