changed the Mercedes symbol to the peace one,
the windscreen has yet to be changed
I left out all the faces at the bottom,- but I dont know if one will see the bottom of the car. Are there explosions or accidents where the car can be seen from the bottom?
Also are ~2300 triangles still ok?
if so can continue with creating the UV layout
EDIT:
ok yes I counted including the wheels,- without the wheels its 1356 trianles (whoops,- could have spent more)
I´ve seen some videos,- just couldn´t remember that clearly
what about the texture size? - is the car including steering wheel (texture wise?). I assume the wheels apart.
Will do either a AO bake alternativly a cavity map. The way I usually do it is subdivide the mesh- bake on that retouche the baked result in PS - gives usually a cleaner base texture.
that is going to look phenomenal! I love the detail on the steering wheel and the sun visors. Absolutely top notch.
I don't know if you saw this a few pages back but I posted a small example of how I set up items for the engine for custom colors and stuff, it may be worth a look: http://myzerogear.com/workflow/
thx, yes I noticed that post and it was back in my mind. Will have a closer look before I continue.
and yes it has a bottpm- no holes. Things I changed on the model with the last post:
- window
- steering wheel
- sun visors
- back lights
- back bumper
- bottom
it seems the back of the lil vent things on the door have no polys, it seems the player will be looking at the back of the car more than the front.
yes I thought about that to,- will propably clone and flip them so that they can be seen from the back as well- after all I still have like 51 triangles left.
I started working on one too. (Datsun 240Z)
I still got alot of verts to push around. I started from the default OBJ. I think I might pull the seat out and do my own.
I have a few wheel ideas i'm gonna work on after i finish this.
it is so fun to squeeze all the defining characteristics of these cars into almost a cube form factor, all these cars look like we took regular sized ones and made them out of clay and squeezed them to be short and fat, can't wait to see them in the game!!!
BoilingOil:
nice going, you can remove lots of vertexes by merging/collapsing ones that are already close to each other and not really defining curvature.
marshmonkey:
what is your average trianlge count for 1 wheel? And while you are at it,- what about hats, characters, and anything else that can be customized.
Also regarding the wheel does it need backfaces even though the wheel is hidden in the car body- in other words can one see the wheel at times seperate from the car - like explosions where the wheel gets off or in the garage where the wheel is displayed as unique item and rotating?
Boiling Oil, diggin the datsun. Could probably lose some polys. Mainly the strips at the center.
I went a little low on my Mini's hood and window, I might end up increasing polies there at some point. It deffinately helps with the reflective cube map to have more polys.
Here a re a few color combos, was waiting until I had at least the wheels done.
It's basically a Chevy S-10 (gen 2 with gen 1 headlights, cadillac tails) and the rims are my favorite Crager 6 series (erm, I mean Zero Gear 6 series).
(The rims were mirrored for the render so the tex is backwards on one side)
The window will probably stay opaque, I wasn't sure at the time that transparent was doable.
I think it's just user created content more than 'contributions'. I haven't heard marshmonkey say anything about including this stuff in the release. But they are making it as customizable as possible.
Over at the zero gear forums there are threads about what stuff people want already.
I'm done for today but wnated to do this for awhile. It's early wip
T-Bucket
Thanks, I held off a bit 'til I was sure we could reposition rider in relation to wheels.
I'm hoping we'll be able to use different wheels front and back (Hint Hint). I'd like some skinny wire spokes up front. But I guiess the wide tires are OK.
Yeah renderhjs, it should be a pony
It's very cool, you've got alot of details in there. Are ya gonna do any anims/color changes?
yes color changes- the screenshots before were just about the mesh - no UV or textures. Started now with the textures + some color variations:
still work in progress...
Yeah, you can do anims
marshmonkeys were mainly the tailpipes rattling around so that's what I did with my truck. He has a fan on the back of his skull car, I'd bet it rotates.
I put one bone at 0,0,0 and left it named bone01 (3dsMax), then just used a skin modifier to attach the tailpipes to bone02 and bone 03. 30 fps. I don't know how critical frame count is but the anims play in Lexi View.
I named it Idle.
Not sure what kind of support there will be. I know accessories can be animnated too. Basically an idle anim when Idle, and when driving it will just be sped up. I inquired about a 'crash' anim, sounds like they might do that.
The color variations on my truck were just edited in notepad and I used the color_mask.png's to seperate color selections. Then rendered in Lexi view to get the cubemap working for specular.
all the karts have at least 2 animations, a turn left and a turn right - each one is 10 frames long and turn the steering wheel 25 degrees in the appropriate direction (plus anything else you want to happen when turning left or right). It also supports an idle animation.
another one started:
1977 triangles
(still have like 23 triangles left [and some to clean/ reduce up]- so maybe I´ll add some smaler details)
regarding animations:
are the animations vertex animations? (so that it has to be 1 mesh with a skin modifier to be exported ? And what about the car loop animations what frame range do they have.
looking cool! My only worry might be that it is not wide enough to support the entire range of possible characters, but that is something you should be able to see when we release the garage. The animations I do are bone animations, but it might not matter what kind of animations they are since the Ogre exporter should support most kinds.
The number of frames for the idle can be whatever, you specify the play speed for it in the item XML file.
a range mesh,- like ghosting the most extreme character animations and catched in a mesh-cage would help. Or some other reference to know to what extend the characters can bend. The wheels are already the close with the character - sometimes there is not really that much space to use for a design.
I mean more just some of the characters like the panda have a bigger ass than the human rider in the ref.
I know how hard it is to squish these cars together, I think the result is really great though. I am going to make sure the garage has a key that cycles through the player animations so that you can see what clipping issues there will be if any. It looks like people are doing really well based off the ref obj's I don't think there will be any major issues with how they fit together.
I want to privately give the first build of the garage to everyone in this thread that has already started building something, when we are close to having that build ready I will gather a bunch of email addresses to send something out.
*edit* hopefully part of what we send out will be better reference models and some more definite numbers on tricount / memory footprints.
Wow RenderHJS you work fast!
Carbon, is that a Dodge Challenger?
I did a bit more work on my ZKart: Now it's down to like 1300 polys. Gonna add the rest of the body to it and unwrap it. Hopefully I'll have it finished on Thursday.
Now i'm really new to all this 3d modeling stuff, so people, is my use of polys and my edge flow okay? Is there places where I could use work or am I headed in the right direction?
Wow RenderHJS you work fast!
Carbon, is that a Dodge Challenger?
Awesome, yes it is, at least its somewhat recognizable, the long lean and sometimes subtle shapes of the 70's muscle cars doesn't seem too easy to translate to a little lumpy form. I need to mess around with the side to give it that slight ridge they have along there, should make it more obviously recognizable.
As for the model, looks pretty good to me, but I might consider cutting a few polies out of the hood curve and adding a few to the lights. Oh and apparently the character is moveable, so might wanna shift the steering wheel back a bit, if I remember the shape of those things right the hood is much longer than the boot. Looks good though!
due to all the kick ass stuff people are making recently, we are going to make a push to try and get a build of the garage into people's hands sometime this week. While we are putting a last lick of paint on some things, everyone who is interested on getting their hands on the garage to start seeing how your stuff will fit into the game - go to the zero gear forums: http://myzerogear.com/phpBB3/ register a username, and then send a PM to marshmonkey that also contains a shot of something you have worked on for Zero Gear.
Thanks! Yeah, the hood is way longer. I just went from the kart in the SDK, I didn't do too much moving things around, because I didn't know if the character was movable. I pushed the seat and steering wheel back a bit, and added more detail to the lights.
Next i'm going to make some custom wheels for it.
EDIT: I pushed the seat back even further, and dropped it a little. Now it's starting to resemble a Z!
I think I need to add more details, I cut alot of polys out.
BoilingOil:
here is a technique I used for my cars,- it helped me saving lots triangles
since modern 3d engines have propper z-depth sorting and clipping mechanics you can use that to your advantage- letting the engine sort and clip objects that intersect into each other.
renderhjs,
Diggin the 'Cobra', good choice, I always liked those cars but for some reason I never even thought about them when thinking of what cars we need.
Boiling Oil,
I think the changes are good, deffinately more Z now. I'd raise the back up a little. The front seems really tall and I think the back should match that a little more.
Carbon14,
Awesome. Looks like a charger to me, what better muscle car to make? I think you could make the back a little taller too, that would accentuate the charger shape. Not the lights or wing, just the row of verts right behind player. And not much, just a tiny bit. Maybe drp the verts right by his elboe down a tad too, just to give more of that curve.
Carbon14,
Awesome. Looks like a charger to me, what better muscle car to make? I think you could make the back a little taller too, that would accentuate the charger shape. Not the lights or wing, just the row of verts right behind player. And not much, just a tiny bit. Maybe drp the verts right by his elboe down a tad too, just to give more of that curve.
Uhoh! its a Dodge Challanger, not Charger, but your crits might still apply! I chose it because it was the most lumpy curved shape to start with, Cuda being less so and the charger even less than that. Then there were the boxy shapes like the Roadrunner and Dart, which I am still tempted to try just to see if I can get a boxy shaped car to actually look good!
RenderHJS, thanks for the tip on the lights. I did the bumper that way, I dunno why I didn't do the same for the lights. I think I'm done with the mesh on this kart now. I added corner markers, fender flares and tail lights, and the side runner thingee. I also put that little swoop over the back fender and raised the back up a bit.
Is the tricount on this thing decent? What's the limit for the body?
Now for UV mapping and texturing. Still have to make custom wheels too.
Uhoh! its a Dodge Challanger, not Charger, but your crits might still apply! I chose it because it was the most lumpy curved shape to start with, Cuda being less so and the charger even less than that. Then there were the boxy shapes like the Roadrunner and Dart, which I am still tempted to try just to see if I can get a boxy shaped car to actually look good!
OH, It looks like a Dodge to me, I'm not actually enough of a muscle car buff to say which one
I think part of the challenge here is to make it look like a specific car convertable. Roofs deffinately help with shape recognition, just make more of a challenge eh?
I'm wrapping up my T-Bucket this week. Fighting the 2,000 poly limit pretty hard but it'll be close.
Needs a sterring wheel, tex (AO is baked) and animation yet.
I was wondering though. How much time are you guys putting into these. I tend to waste a bit of time here and there while working, but I think I'm going on about 10-12 hours of solid work by the time I am done. Am I slow?
Nice cake marsh! Does your girlfriend have a sister?
I was thinking of doing a roof on my kart, but I wanted to keep that Power Wheels or whatever other kind of kids replica car style.
I don't get to work on my kart every day, and I get about 3 hours at a time when I do, give or take an hour. I haven't really been keeping tabs, but I'd say i've probably put in about 9 hours so far. I'll probably be at 15-17 hours by the time i'm done.
yea I have not figured out yet how a roof would ever work. The character would just clip like mad through it, and you can never really be sure how tall the hats are going to be.
Did some pretty major poly reduction today. Took alot of polys from bottoms of pipes, they are still there to see from bottom and I don't think it's noticable. Went around and took a few polys from all the little details.
Got it down to 2050 with a steering wheel. I could take 50 more out but then I start messing with the major details (mainly the bucket and the tank which will be seen most, I want to keep them nice and smooth.)
The coils are two sided material. All the caps and steering column are cones to cut polys and keep round. The engine pulleys are 10 sided (no caps). Probably a waste since they can't be seen well, but I think the engine really needed them.
So without further ado(?)
Some Lexi View renders
Uses 5 materials:
spec, matte (no enviro), glass, twosided (coils, carb valves, steering wheel), spec_alpha (the two sided colormask seems to overide the lum_alpha, without color it works, had to add this for chrome alpha). 4 color changes, will probably add paint details, still need to finish tex but it's close.
are the holes in the steering wheel modeled? Making it solid or doing it with a texture would save 50 tris easy. Also, there seems to be some pretty complex stuff in between the radiator and the engine, not sure how much of that anybody is ever going to see.
Replies
the windscreen has yet to be changed
I left out all the faces at the bottom,- but I dont know if one will see the bottom of the car. Are there explosions or accidents where the car can be seen from the bottom?
Also are ~2300 triangles still ok?
if so can continue with creating the UV layout
EDIT:
ok yes I counted including the wheels,- without the wheels its 1356 trianles (whoops,- could have spent more)
the car will be very visible from all kinds of angles so it will need some sort of bottom. I usually leave it pretty sparse.
You sound like you are doing awesome on tri count without the wheels.
the added details on the back are great. Are you going to bake an AO base? There are so many parts on that car that will look great with AO.
what about the texture size? - is the car including steering wheel (texture wise?). I assume the wheels apart.
Will do either a AO bake alternativly a cavity map. The way I usually do it is subdivide the mesh- bake on that retouche the baked result in PS - gives usually a cleaner base texture.
current progress:
triangle count is now excatly at 1949 tris.
I want to start painting on this texture by tomorrow
I don't know if you saw this a few pages back but I posted a small example of how I set up items for the engine for custom colors and stuff, it may be worth a look: http://myzerogear.com/workflow/
*edit* woot! 200th post!
and yes it has a bottpm- no holes. Things I changed on the model with the last post:
- window
- steering wheel
- sun visors
- back lights
- back bumper
- bottom
That'll go good with the monacol (?)
Thanks, I had already found that though, was after the car rig, I must be stupid or something because its obvious other people have it!
(i hope)
1008 tris so far (bottom almost closed)
I would like to get a beta version of the garage out to the people that have already started contributing - hopefully sometime in the coming weeks.
I started working on one too. (Datsun 240Z)
I still got alot of verts to push around. I started from the default OBJ. I think I might pull the seat out and do my own.
I have a few wheel ideas i'm gonna work on after i finish this.
nice going, you can remove lots of vertexes by merging/collapsing ones that are already close to each other and not really defining curvature.
marshmonkey:
what is your average trianlge count for 1 wheel? And while you are at it,- what about hats, characters, and anything else that can be customized.
Also regarding the wheel does it need backfaces even though the wheel is hidden in the car body- in other words can one see the wheel at times seperate from the car - like explosions where the wheel gets off or in the garage where the wheel is displayed as unique item and rotating?
if I got it right so far
vehicle:
- max 2000 tris
- 512² tex
1 wheel:
- 256² tex
- max 400 ???
Boiling Oil, diggin the datsun. Could probably lose some polys. Mainly the strips at the center.
I went a little low on my Mini's hood and window, I might end up increasing polies there at some point. It deffinately helps with the reflective cube map to have more polys.
Here a re a few color combos, was waiting until I had at least the wheels done.
It's basically a Chevy S-10 (gen 2 with gen 1 headlights, cadillac tails) and the rims are my favorite Crager 6 series (erm, I mean Zero Gear 6 series).
(The rims were mirrored for the render so the tex is backwards on one side)
The window will probably stay opaque, I wasn't sure at the time that transparent was doable.
Still needs a steeing wheel.
The tailpipes are animated.
Gotta finish the interior too.
Over at the zero gear forums there are threads about what stuff people want already.
I'm done for today but wnated to do this for awhile. It's early wip
T-Bucket
1985 triangles
(the horse of the ferrari logo has been altered,- in the original the tail is upwards and longer)
Baddcog: I was about thinking doing something close to your T-Bucket as well - might find something else now as yours already looks very good.
I'm hoping we'll be able to use different wheels front and back (Hint Hint). I'd like some skinny wire spokes up front. But I guiess the wide tires are OK.
Yeah renderhjs, it should be a pony
It's very cool, you've got alot of details in there. Are ya gonna do any anims/color changes?
yes color changes- the screenshots before were just about the mesh - no UV or textures. Started now with the textures + some color variations:
still work in progress...
Yeah, you can do anims
marshmonkeys were mainly the tailpipes rattling around so that's what I did with my truck. He has a fan on the back of his skull car, I'd bet it rotates.
I put one bone at 0,0,0 and left it named bone01 (3dsMax), then just used a skin modifier to attach the tailpipes to bone02 and bone 03. 30 fps. I don't know how critical frame count is but the anims play in Lexi View.
I named it Idle.
Not sure what kind of support there will be. I know accessories can be animnated too. Basically an idle anim when Idle, and when driving it will just be sped up. I inquired about a 'crash' anim, sounds like they might do that.
The color variations on my truck were just edited in notepad and I used the color_mask.png's to seperate color selections. Then rendered in Lexi view to get the cubemap working for specular.
all the karts have at least 2 animations, a turn left and a turn right - each one is 10 frames long and turn the steering wheel 25 degrees in the appropriate direction (plus anything else you want to happen when turning left or right). It also supports an idle animation.
1977 triangles
(still have like 23 triangles left [and some to clean/ reduce up]- so maybe I´ll add some smaler details)
regarding animations:
are the animations vertex animations? (so that it has to be 1 mesh with a skin modifier to be exported ? And what about the car loop animations what frame range do they have.
The number of frames for the idle can be whatever, you specify the play speed for it in the item XML file.
I know how hard it is to squish these cars together, I think the result is really great though. I am going to make sure the garage has a key that cycles through the player animations so that you can see what clipping issues there will be if any. It looks like people are doing really well based off the ref obj's I don't think there will be any major issues with how they fit together.
I want to privately give the first build of the garage to everyone in this thread that has already started building something, when we are close to having that build ready I will gather a bunch of email addresses to send something out.
*edit* hopefully part of what we send out will be better reference models and some more definite numbers on tricount / memory footprints.
Needs a lot more work, but getting there! Must have a muscle car =p
Carbon, is that a Dodge Challenger?
I did a bit more work on my ZKart: Now it's down to like 1300 polys. Gonna add the rest of the body to it and unwrap it. Hopefully I'll have it finished on Thursday.
Now i'm really new to all this 3d modeling stuff, so people, is my use of polys and my edge flow okay? Is there places where I could use work or am I headed in the right direction?
Awesome, yes it is, at least its somewhat recognizable, the long lean and sometimes subtle shapes of the 70's muscle cars doesn't seem too easy to translate to a little lumpy form. I need to mess around with the side to give it that slight ridge they have along there, should make it more obviously recognizable.
As for the model, looks pretty good to me, but I might consider cutting a few polies out of the hood curve and adding a few to the lights. Oh and apparently the character is moveable, so might wanna shift the steering wheel back a bit, if I remember the shape of those things right the hood is much longer than the boot. Looks good though!
Next i'm going to make some custom wheels for it.
EDIT: I pushed the seat back even further, and dropped it a little. Now it's starting to resemble a Z!
I think I need to add more details, I cut alot of polys out.
here is a technique I used for my cars,- it helped me saving lots triangles
since modern 3d engines have propper z-depth sorting and clipping mechanics you can use that to your advantage- letting the engine sort and clip objects that intersect into each other.
Diggin the 'Cobra', good choice, I always liked those cars but for some reason I never even thought about them when thinking of what cars we need.
Boiling Oil,
I think the changes are good, deffinately more Z now. I'd raise the back up a little. The front seems really tall and I think the back should match that a little more.
Carbon14,
Awesome. Looks like a charger to me, what better muscle car to make? I think you could make the back a little taller too, that would accentuate the charger shape. Not the lights or wing, just the row of verts right behind player. And not much, just a tiny bit. Maybe drp the verts right by his elboe down a tad too, just to give more of that curve.
Uhoh! its a Dodge Challanger, not Charger, but your crits might still apply! I chose it because it was the most lumpy curved shape to start with, Cuda being less so and the charger even less than that. Then there were the boxy shapes like the Roadrunner and Dart, which I am still tempted to try just to see if I can get a boxy shaped car to actually look good!
mmmmm frosting *gurglegurgle*
RenderHJS, thanks for the tip on the lights. I did the bumper that way, I dunno why I didn't do the same for the lights. I think I'm done with the mesh on this kart now. I added corner markers, fender flares and tail lights, and the side runner thingee. I also put that little swoop over the back fender and raised the back up a bit.
Is the tricount on this thing decent? What's the limit for the body?
Now for UV mapping and texturing. Still have to make custom wheels too.
OH, It looks like a Dodge to me, I'm not actually enough of a muscle car buff to say which one
I think part of the challenge here is to make it look like a specific car convertable. Roofs deffinately help with shape recognition, just make more of a challenge eh?
I'm wrapping up my T-Bucket this week. Fighting the 2,000 poly limit pretty hard but it'll be close.
Needs a sterring wheel, tex (AO is baked) and animation yet.
I was wondering though. How much time are you guys putting into these. I tend to waste a bit of time here and there while working, but I think I'm going on about 10-12 hours of solid work by the time I am done. Am I slow?
Nice cake marsh! Does your girlfriend have a sister?
I don't get to work on my kart every day, and I get about 3 hours at a time when I do, give or take an hour. I haven't really been keeping tabs, but I'd say i've probably put in about 9 hours so far. I'll probably be at 15-17 hours by the time i'm done.
Got it down to 2050 with a steering wheel. I could take 50 more out but then I start messing with the major details (mainly the bucket and the tank which will be seen most, I want to keep them nice and smooth.)
The coils are two sided material. All the caps and steering column are cones to cut polys and keep round. The engine pulleys are 10 sided (no caps). Probably a waste since they can't be seen well, but I think the engine really needed them.
So without further ado(?)
Some Lexi View renders
Uses 5 materials:
spec, matte (no enviro), glass, twosided (coils, carb valves, steering wheel), spec_alpha (the two sided colormask seems to overide the lum_alpha, without color it works, had to add this for chrome alpha). 4 color changes, will probably add paint details, still need to finish tex but it's close.
looking good though!