Spring RTS Engine

IIRC, you've had several dropship models sitting around, including a very nice one from GMN, just nobody's gotten them done yet




Since this is the last of the Overmind stuff, I think it might be appropriate to do a few more WIP shots than usual.

Here is my model, after uvmapping and initial fills. As you can see, while I have used textures everywhere, they're either very specific (to delineate a greeble) or very, very vague (to establish color and provide a little noise). This is how any well-painted model should probably look, during the initial stages- what you're trying to do is to establish form through contrast and color- enhancing what the viewer will see, by using contrast to pick out specific areas of the design.

While sometimes realism won't permit this to be done until later in the process (for example, with the S'44 stuff, they're not really establishing different values on stuff that's all Army Green until the greebling / fading process), with anything that's your own creation, it's often a good idea to follow an illustrative approach, and use light and dark to help break the model up immediately. Resist the urge to use strong textures at this stage, however- they'll just end up being hopelessly noisy, and you'll never be able to greeble with them as effectively as you can greeble on a relatively plain surface.

Here is the model, after the initial greebling stage is complete on the top surfaces. Very simple geometric patterns of beveled areas are used, using a color value that is lighter than the underlying texture, for the "armor plates", so that when I get to the weathering and detailing stage, it's even easier to keep a nice, sharp contrast between foreground and background.

As you can see, the model just went from "meh" to "hey, there are details now". And it doesn't take a very long time to do- just sit with the Lasso Tool and select areas which you want to change, and improvise as you go. The only tricky part is achieving consistency of shading- as I create new bevels, I make Layers and apply the same layer style to each one, adjusting only the angle of the light. This keeps everything very consistent and professional looking, but doesn't take much time per layer.

Warlord Zsinj wrote:So Argh gets a dropship? Where's our dropship!?!

Calm down there, slick, you've still got a queue to catch up on anyway

Here's the underside, after I've finished initial greebling for all surfaces. Since this is an aircraft, and (in theory) we can see the underside of the model fairly frequently (in Spring right now, this isn't the case, but hopefully the flight code will get fixed at some point), I used about the same amount of texture space for the undersides of things as the top.

Now that the initial greebling is done, the model looks a lot more detailed. All of this was done with nothing more than bevels, some interior shadows, and some textures- no hand-painting was required. I save all of the hand-painting time for the final stages of weathering and detailing- right now, I'm basically establishing the forms and shapes of the model, and pointing the viewer's eye to facets of the model in an intuitive way, working with the geometry, instead of trying to fight it. Note how my greebles often end where polygon angle breaks occur- this keeps the model looking 3D, instead of confusing the eye of the viewer. I can't always do that, but, in general, I try to use this trick wherever possible, so that people are looking at the geometry as it was designed- why go to all of the trouble of making a pretty model, then conceal the real shape when you finally skin it?

You should apply an AO bake to your models. Blender does them fairly well if you bake a copy of the model without overlapping UVs or animated parts inside of each other (like guns, legs, arms etc).

No, I've tried it, and I don't like how it works. It'd be OK for organic stuff with higher polycount, but it doesn't do what I want it to, for low-poly mechancals.

Hm... you may have to setup the smoothing groups again (set solid/set smooth) as well as auto-smooth (affects bakes afaik) and mess with the bias setting to get a decent result, at least I had to. Once that was taken care of the result of a 16x bake was rather nice. My inital results were horrible, though.

It's not just the setup / smoothing issues. It's how it basically requires everything to use a single light angle. While physically correct at that angle, it results in incorrect angles within the game engine. I'd rather set stuff up manually, thinking ahead to anticipate what angles are going to be seen on a regular basis.

Here's the final WIP, minus a couple of things you can't see (I haven't painted up the engine glows on the underside yet).



Doing the grunge-and-dirt stage took about 30 minutes.

I think a lot of people think that's the hard part, but really, it's not. Once you have your greebles on the model's surface, you know what's "sticking out" or is "indented"... just follow simple, logical rules, and you can do grunge like a champ. For example, this is an aircraft- therefore, except for areas that would not be routinely exposed to the slipstream, all "drips" must head towards the back of the model- the back is "down". On stuff that's land-bound, on the other hand, I simply follow "gravity", and since I have my bevels already telling me, visually, what's "up" and what's "down", it takes almost no work at all.

Here's my siege tank.




Click to Enlarge

840 triangles, 358 polygons, 15 objects.

1 core, 8 wheels, 2 deploy pads, 1 turret, 1 sheath, 2 barrels.

argh that ship looks like a slipper lobster

I dunno what's weirder, Smoth. That you're right, or that you were bored enough to look that up

Seriously though, "The Flying Lobstah of Dewm" does have a great ring to it... maybe my next game should be all about battling crustaceans... I can see it now... "pimp yo shrimp, Argh's down with Decapoda"

My family all scuba-ed for a long time. They were certified I wasn't so I would get book after book on sea life and I read all of them. I used to know all kinds of pointless crap about florida and gulf state sea life. Shit I still do.

Anyway, yeah slipper lobsters are cool.

Rock on My folks wanted me to become a marine biologist when I was a kid, and of course I became a techie slacker instead I'd have made a poor Jacques Cousteau anyhow, I'd have wanted to eat things instead of studying them- almost everything from the ocean is tasty... darnit, now I'm hungry, and I need to finish scripting this...

conch is nasty. Of course I hate most mollusk seafood. The best is squid and octopus. I actually worked a summer on a shrimp boat in the Louisiana gulf that was a cool experience.

Getting better, decided to try the samson. Still needs a proper reflection map:

oh god pantsu and now I cannot erase the image.

Sheekel, can I suggest making the actual turreted rocket launcher part a different/darker tone, as I'd imagine at a distance it would blend too much with the body tone.

make the bumper darker, make the glass lighter, an have team color on the treds or on the launcher, besides that, it's very well done.

It's how it basically requires everything to use a single light angle. While physically correct at that angle, it results in incorrect angles within the game engine.

I'm pretty sure it does not use the light source in the scene or a static light source but shoots photons (or what ever else) at the model from all directions.