Simple 3D models

[Ineluke]

You shouuld make some more dart models for blowguns
where did you learn im interested in learning but it is kinda scary with the learning curve and all.

[Erik]

I cannot speak for him but i can for myself. I use 3dsmax for about 3 years now any learned it by using loads of books and internet tutorials. With more proper educational stuff, like training dvd\'s, and teachers you could learn it a whole lot faster though

[Skizzik]

Originally posted by T?ri Tasart?r
By the way, those bottles... isn\'t \"Urea\"... umm... ?( [/I]

Yess, it\'s pee...

The best thing about your models, Cherppow, is that they\'re really useful. It\'s just everyday stuff that might actually make it into PS.

[Cherppow]

Greetings fellows!

Again i had a little pause with the forum, but fear not, i haven\'t been sitting idle on my workbench.

Thanks for the comments, they are very welcome!

To Cirque:
 You\'re right, of course. Wooden pestles are rare and must be made from quality wood (mine is certainly not). So i went and created 2 new textures for the bowl; they should fit better for mixing ingredients. Thanks for setting me right.

To Karyuu:
 I haven\'t had the courage to send an application yet And thank you, although i don\'t find my own work that special. I mean, anyone can make a ball with 3d editor, paint it orange and call it orange! It\'s a lot of fun doing the models though

To Ineluke:
 I checked out some basic web tutorials when i started, and that\'s mainly it. The first tutorials very easy, they actually explain every mouseclick, so it\'s hard to go wrong. If you\'re interested in creating 3d models for real-time engines, i\'d also recommend checking out some tutorials about uv-mapping. Ah, blowguns you say see my following posts.

To Skizzik:
 I\'ve tried to keep it as simple and neutral as possible. I know i\'m not proficient enough to create anything grand, so i don\'t.

[Cherppow]

Almost forgot the new meshes.

In addition to the new bowl skins i created another kind of mortar and pestle.  



Picture key:

Right & Center - show the mortar and pestle from different directions
Bottom middle - some examples of herbs.
Left - club. Just for balance It\'s actually my very first model.

The mortar&pestle are pretty simple, just made of gray-white stone and single line of color as decoration. I imagined they could be used for alchemical purposes, mixing herbs and grinding them into fine powder. Powders could be used as spices, or to create potions and salves. Creating alchemical compounds may also need more tools than these, and professional alchemists may have an entire laboratory in their basement.

Most* of the herbs models consist of 4 rectangular faces that join in the middle, creating an X silhouette. Also these meshes have 8 triangle faces. The faces are fitted with plain images with alpha channel as transparency. They look ok when not zoomed too close. The textures are pretty small, which further reduces scaling possibilities. In addition if viewed straight from front or behind, these models show as thin X.

*The two kinds of berries are true 3d, as can be seen from the shadows.

Technical data:

Root (herb) - 10 vertices, 8 faces, 64*128 tga texture
Grass tuft (herb) - 10 vertices, 8 faces, 128*32 tga texture
Leaf (herb) - 4 vertices, 2 faces, 64*64 tga texture
Blue flower (herb) - 10 vertices, 8 faces, 128*32 tga texture
Thicket grass (herb) - 10 vertices, 8 faces, 128*64 tga texture
Violetberry (herb) - 5 vertices, 6 faces, 64*64 tga texture
Strawberry - 10 vertices, 16 faces, 128*128 tga texture
Club with spike - 53 vertices, 72 faces, 256*256 tga texture

Herbs update 6.12.2004:
Tyc branch (herb) - 4 vertices, 2 faces, 64*64 tga.
Broadleaf Plum (herb) - 4 vertices, 2 faces, 64*64 tga.
Thornleaf (herb) - 4 vertices, 2 faces, 64*64 tga.
Purple moss (herb) - 4 vertices, 2 faces, 64*64 tga.
Cave ungon (herb) - 10 vertices, 8 faces, 32*64 tga.

The mortar and pestle data can be seen on the picture, so that\'s pretty much all.

[Cherppow]

As promised here are some more darts. I also made a simple bamboo stick as a blowgun



On the left there\'s the old dart and a new darts dart with white wings.

The middle shows the bamboo tube and two types of darts for it. The mesh is same with every dart (5 vertices, 3 faces), just the texture (128*32 tga) varies. Again, the small texture causes the dart to look messy if it\'s zoomed too much. I imagine the darts would be pretty small objects though.

[tygerwilde]

Actually, urea is a byproduct of the energy creation process, which is passed into the bloodstream and leaves your body through your sweat glands and your kidneys, yes it is a part of urine... and sweat, but it isn\'t specifically urine. urinating is a disposal means for bodily toxins, urea, excess liquid, salt, and heat. Essentially sweat is urine that leaves through your sweat glands...


my question is, who took the time to filter four entire bottles of urine and sweat.

[Cherppow]

Oh man, this is spam, but here\'s some mushrooms for making you wait so long



On the left you see mixed collection of mushrooms, while the middle and right side shows all variations nicely arranged.

Basically i made a \"one size fits all\" - texture for the mushrooms. As many mushrooms look like a ball when they are young, and flat when they\'re older, this was practical solution. Now i could have both ball and flat shaped mushroom with only one texture. In addition to the former, i made a third model named \"special\". This actually looks like a miniature fir, but it can still use the same texture.

After the models were ready, i added 4 different textures. 4 textures*3 meshes = 12 different mushrooms. Fast catch.

Ok, it\'s time for me to go to bed. Have a nice summer holiday everybody within the northern globe.

[FredrikH]

looks good but as with your other models you might want to add some smoothing groups
i think that it would be just as fast to render it ingame and take upp less memmory depending on how the fileformat works wich i have no idea how it do work
but anyway you have done a great job on all of them

[Wedge]

Yeah they would be rendered with smoothing in game, but I believe this is automated by CS, and has nothing to do with how you export them.  In any case, you can assume they would look much smoother in PS.  And dammit man, you have to get this stuff into the game!  It\'s all so frickin awesome, the world would be so much livelier with these objects hanging around.

[Skizzik]

Errrr, nice mushrooms.

[Karyuu]

... What\'s the problem with posting that knowledge for others to see? Seems to me like you\'re overreacting a bit... :/

[Skizzik]

You\'re right, thanks for pointing that out Karyuu.

[tygerwilde]

... What\'s the problem with posting that knowledge for others to see? Seems to me like you\'re overreacting a bit... :/

what knowledge? did I miss something?

[Cherppow]

Hey people!

Don\'t get sad anyone! I brought you something nice to help you forget the rotting toadstools

To Skizzik:
 Sorry for my last reply to you was a bit short. I actually wrote a longer one, but deleted most of it since i figured you\'d just get bored reading stories about my models. But now that it came up again, i might as well tell a little more.

 In the previous posts i mentioned that i\'ve been trying to keep the models pretty simple and neutral. The main reasons behind this are that i\'m really not that good doing meshes, and that i don\'t want to impact the game setting. The larger and complex the model is, the harder it is to create and the more it affects the game\'s appearance.
 For example if i\'d make a curved staff with a crystal as magic amplifier on the other end, i would affect the game much more than if i make an apple. The staff would propably be in a players hand most of the time, while an apple would be lying somewhere in the wilderness below an apple tree, or hidden in an adventurer\'s backpack. In addition, to make such staff i would have to know a lot more about planeshifts setting. Something like who uses the magic there, who built the staff and when. What the crystal is, and why does it have special magical abbilities, are these abbilities permanent... in case of an apple, you don\'t have to think how it links to the world around it, since it\'s just plain apple, and everyone knows apples.

 I actually did a dead tree mesh some weeks backward, but it looked so bad, i won\'t post it anywhere I\'m sure someone else can do a model of same category with much less time and have much more fun doing it.

 So in the end i decided to stay with the simple stuff and let pros concentrate on the legendary landmarks and castles. Simple is something even i can make look fairly enjoyable.

To tygerwilde:
 You seem to know your biology Hmm, if memory serves me, urea was the first organic compound ever synthetically produced from inorganic substance. By  Friedrich Wohler, in 1828, to be exact. I\'m not much of a chemist but it seems possible to produce urea CO(NH2)2 from eg. ammonia NH3 and carbon dioxide CO2. Also, maybe the 4 bottles were created by an alchemist. (leaving only the fifth bottle. And that one was sold to the alchemist by a dubious doctor) The reason why i put urea there in the first place, was to show that not everything bottled is drinkable.

To FredrikH & Wedge:
Thanks for the tips. It\'s quite hard to know what would be the best balance between fast renderability and good looks, because i have no previous experience of real-time modelling. As for now i have intentionally kept the face count under 100. The smoothing and special effects are another thing that i\'ve been keeping to the minimum, or disabled actually. Of course they\'re easy to turn on with a few mouseclicks. The question remains; should i set them on or off within these pictures? Ps. FredrikH, your swords are perfect! You clearly know what you\'re doing, and it shows.

And now for the \'nice\' things that i promised


Treasures - with smoothing, specularity, transparency and bump mapping disabled (updated 6.12.2004)


Treasures - with smoothing, specularity, transparency and bump mapping enabled

Picture key:
From left to right - step cut gems, brilliant cut gems, oval cut gems, pearls and finally 2 versions of a coin. Please note that the cuts may not be historically accurate.
Left wall - shows the 3 different coin textures; silver, gold and platinum.
Bottom right - shows the flat coin version of each texture

The gems have very simple texture, mainly just highlighting the corners. The gem color is controlled within the 3d software. This way you can have different colours with just one texture. Upper picture shows the gems with updated textures and without any special effects. In lower picture the gems still have old textures, but with different amount of transparency and specularity.

The pearls are simple rocks that have gotten inside a seashell and covered with the white protective material of the shell. They\'re still a bit angular, but i tried to do as round mesh, with as little polygons, as possible. Pearl color is also controllable from 3D software, as the texture is loaded into lightness.

The coins. Ah, what a headache. Only after i had finished the coin, i realized that it\'s too angular. I didn\'t want to increase the number of faces, so i decided to do a new coin that is just a plane with coin picture in it. The three coin textures represent silver, gold and platinum coins. The coin textures are huge for such a small object and should be resized to wanted size. In addition, the PS team will propably want a coin that looks like them, so this mesh was just for fun. Although making it wasn\'t that fun. At least it\'s making me smile now.

I added the new flat version of the coin. It is nothing but a plane with picture, so if viewed straight from side, it looks like a thin line. It has 2 triangle faces and looks the same from both sides. I was thinking of making both sides look unique, but as it would have doubled the face count, i dumped that idea. I also dumped backside of the coin from the texture, reducing its size to 1/2 of the original. To counter to the reduction of detail i decided to use bump mapping. This makes it seem less flat and together with specularity, gives the coins a nice glare.

The steel coin is now seen in the lower picture. I imagined that since it is used by the poor people, it would be pretty simple and not have much details on it. Who knows, someone may be pressing these coins at his cellar! I also figured that the steel (iron) is not as noble metal as silver and gold, so it might actually catch some rust.

Upper picture coin models update: In addition to making the coin model less angular, i gave both 3D and flat coins new textures. Basically i tried to implement the specularity and bump mapping into the texture, so that 3D engine didn\'t have to do it.

Technical data:
Step gem - 16 vertices, 28 faces, 128*128 tga texture
Brilliant gem - 13 vertices, 22 faces, 128*128 tga texture
Oval gem - 14 vertices, 24 faces, 128*128 tga texture
Pearl - 17 vertices, 30 faces, 64*64 tga texture
3D Coin (upper) - 20 vertices, 36 faces, 256*128 tga
3D Coin (lower) - 10 vertices, 16 faces, 256*128 tga texture
Flat coin - 4 vertices, 2 faces, 128*128 tga texture

Oh, thunder here, gotta shut the machine. Plus i want to walk in the rain.