Edit: btw i still need ideas for a third item for my coal mining pack
Well I drew a very quick (terrible) concept
It's based off of a coal train engine. I know its not that great (but that's what you get when you spend 7 minutes on it) but maybe you could get some ideas from it.
if you open the viewmodel of the minigun you'll se that most of the gun is missing and the parts that are still there has alot of detail.
as the new weapons use the same model to both views you should try to make it look good in both views
Here's my latest attempt at a hat for the Demoman:
THE BEASTLY BERSERKER
Got the idea from reading about Celtic Berserkers, who would wear wolfskins into battle. It's not skinned; what you see here is a multi-subobject map in 3DS max. It's just a temporary placeholder before I do the actual skinning.
As you can see, my biggest problem is making it look nice and smooth. It's already over 1100 triangles and yet I still find flat spots, especially around the eyes.
Omny87, it could be interesting to analyse that new skull helmet from the last update, to see polycount/organisation of triangles. Will do the same for ma kurgan helmet.
I'm a bit shit at concepting but here's a first idea for the chainsaw, based on my 3d sketch fitting the minigun.
I know it's a bit generic, but I still haven't seen one made yet so I decided to do it.
Looking for any last minute crits before I submit tomorrow. I might try out some styles of painting of fur on the white parts to make it a bit more interesting than AO + Noise.
noors, that is the coolest thing iv seen in my life! alot of people don't use color when they concept, but this is much much better! it simply pops more! i hope ittl turn out just like the concept, i can't wait to rip scouts apart with this beatifull thing
you should probably make 2 smoothing groups (maybe 3 to split the entire gray strip) or split the uv where the fold is.
the grey area is on a different part of the UV
This'd normally all be quads but I split those up
I'm kind of new to modeling like this so how do I make multiple smoothing groups?
Forget it
I believe I solved my problem in a rather unintuitive way.
You see, the grey hatband seemed to be throwing shadows on those specific Tris so I deleted the faces on the band of the hat.
I am quite ashamed but the deed is done and now I'm off to completely wreck the game with this monstrosity of a hat, as soon as I get it ingame again
oh and as far as compiling goes, does anyone know what a bbox is?
EDIT: I believed I had solved the problem but somewhere along the compiling the error popped right back ingame again so no I have not solved the weird triangle problem
@ The Scrub: bbox refers to the bounding box. As the valve wiki puts it:
"an axis-aligned bounding box used by the AI to detect collisions with the world, mostly for movement purposes."
so my collision models are wrong...
thanks for that, so now I know I have to seperate the collison models and bind them both to the two bones involved because currently only one bone is used.
Cue Heavy
MINI TANKS!
Except my proposed method doesn't work any suggestions on fixes?
Currently blocking in another weapon, this one is for the demoman, the Big Bombs Launcher:
Should work similiar to the grenade launcher but does much bigger explosions, les distance and has to get reload after every shot. I guess the animation requiered gives it a bad chance to get in the game. That spiral launch pad should jump forward on pulling the trigger and launching the bomb with it. The whole front part can rotate upwards, could be for recoil absorbtion or it just rotates quickly upwards while shooting, so the bomb flys through the air in a very curved angle.
Elbagast has a good point about the bars, you could either just remove them, or offset them to one side to clear the arm & wrist if you really want to keep them.
Scrub - another thing you could check is with your texture map, if the uv scale of those dark tris might be off from the rest of the brim, perhaps too small or distorted.
@Noors: Yeah you might be right, I'll try upping the AO for those areas and see how it looks.
Hey, sorry for being a bit late with this reply.
I just wanted to suggest making him hold it like the bottle rather than the Eyelander.
I just think the Bottle's onehanded fighting stance would fit it a lot better, as seeing it swung straight downwards and the ball flying above his head when he's running just looks very strange.
The bottle animations would make the Demoman swing the flail more, and I think he would look a bit less silly when he's running with it.
@davision : holy shit thats awesome. i think the style you made the flare gun and this one fit the tf2 style perfectly. the first time i saw the picture i imagened it working just like your description below. as for the ammo, i think the bomb you blocked in looks a little bit too generic. it does tottaly suits the demoman , howevver id love to see something more over the top, like empty bottles of scrumpy with a fuse or something . mayby somekind of molotov cocktail with a huge fireblast on impacact
I'll have to disagree with lampekap above me here and "speak up" a bit:
Davision3D, your freeze gun and this Big Bombs Launcher are really looking great, top notch work, but I must say they look more like something out of Ratchet & Clank than TF2. By that I mean they look fabricated, designed somewhere in a close future by an excentric inventor with lots of time, rather than created from scraps by a mercenary in a time of need back in a stylized '68. I mean, the cleanliness, the tiny logos and symbols, the huge amount of angular, circular shapes and details and the size of things. Again, I see Ratchet & Clank (another franchise I do love) not Team Fortress 2 (the game that is supposed to use the models).
Then again, one could argue that Valve themselves threw the art direction out the windowover a year ago, the old "caricaturish" and stylized now equals the general notion of "cartoony", and my words do not hold any significance or truth since I am but a beginner when it comes to modeling and the like. But it is an opinion, and I have the right to express it, don't I?
Anyway, I really like the flail I saw earlier and the steampunkish Gunslinger replacement (and a whole lot of other things way back in the thread). Keep up the good work, fellas! I hope I'l be able to join in on the fun too.
It really is well made and all, but I do agree with TankTaur, your weapons are a bit too sci-fi so I am doubtful that Valve would actually put it in game.
But if you're just doing this for fun and not Contribute! then I really do encourage you to go on, because I really like seeing your creative ideas ^^
Having some problems with painting on my santa hat. When in game testing the painting, no matter what color paint I use it shows up as white in the preview window. Does anyone know how to fix this? I've checked my painting parameters in the .vmt and they're similar to what I used for my Scuba Goggles and painting on that worked.
"$blendtintbybasealpha" "1"
"$blendtintcoloroverbase" "1" // between 0-1 determines how much blended by tinting vs. replacing the color
"$colortint_base" "{172 51 54}" // put the RGB value of whats being colored when no paint is present, if $blendtintcoloroverbase is 0 then put [1 1 1] here.
"$colortint_tmp" "[0 0 0]"
@ elbgast
yea see that too now, have not put in account that he holds it mostly from the top. Might try getting that to the side like suggested.
@ lampekap
thx!
yea the bomb is very basic. Need to get it more cool but still ball based and do something else then a fuse because it doesnt make so much sense with how the grenade launcher works.
@ TankTaur
Well most of the standard weapons are very grounded like shotgun, pistol etc. but if you look at the medic for instance he always had also fancy weapons which have nothing similiar in real world. Team Fortress 2 was always very cartoon like for me and I think its a world where crazy weapons easily fit in. I agree that the freeze gun has a more futuristic look, though its still basicly build up. Considering that freeze shooting gun sounds like a fancy invention it could just be made by a crazy scientist in that time. Dont think the bombs launcher looks futuristic, in fact its even more basic then the original grenader launcher! I mean the big basic bombs get launched by a spiral!
IMO it would be nice to have even more unique weapons in the game then just more similiar or grounded looking ones.
I have to agree with TankTaur, While your stuff is always technically superb, i feel the style you have going so far doesn't fit very well with TF2. It's beyond the stylistic conventions of TF2.
but if you look at the medic for instance he always had also fancy weapons which have nothing similiar in real world.
I agree there is a fair bit of invention in TF2's weaponry, however while alot of the items don't actually exist in the real world, they are always heavily based on a real world objects. Mostly fused together from different sources.
For example the Medigun as you were mentioning. The medigun its heavily based on a fire hoze nozzle.
Or for example the sentry gun, is heavily based on a minigun and heavy machine gun tripods.
It most cases, however outrageous or shy a design may be, its always good practice to ground ideas with appropriate real world references.
Just thought i might try to help, your work is great!
Does anyone know how I could go about optimizing the UV face layout of my model? Currently, I'm thinking that I've split up the gun into way too many pieces.
UV in question:
Just before anyone asks. This is my current arrangement of the UV faces. The one blender wanted me to do had the important faces scaled down to the point of only getting 1/100th of the page.
Gun for reference (I doubt anyone is going to understand exactly which faces go where, but I'm sure some are pretty obvious)
Blasphemy - you can overlap repetitive parts to let them share the same uv coordinates/mapping, or you can split the mapping up into separate uv maps that might give you better use of your texture space. Overlap needs to be done with your ao mapping taken into consideration. On one hand it makes sense to have all the bullets share the same texture, but that means you will lose the shading that is distinct to each one. If done right, no one else will likely ever notice, and it will cut down on the work you have to do as well.
<edit> looking at your map again, you may already have overlapped the obvious. Take another look at all your parts and see if there are any other elements that could share the same texture space... stuff like handles and bars of metal/bolts could all reference the same block of color and just be stacked up.
I have to agree with TankTaur, While your stuff is always technically superb, i feel the style you have going so far doesn't fit very well with TF2. It's beyond the stylistic conventions of TF2.
I agree there is a fair bit of invention in TF2's weaponry, however while alot of the items don't actually exist in the real world, they are always heavily based on a real world objects. Mostly fused together from different sources.
For example the Medigun as you were mentioning. The medigun its heavily based on a fire hoze nozzle.
Or for example the sentry gun, is heavily based on a minigun and heavy machine gun tripods.
It most cases, however outrageous or shy a design may be, its always good practice to ground ideas with appropriate real world references.
Just thought i might try to help, your work is great!
ha, didnt see that with the fire hoze! Still very futuristing looking what comes out of it.
I think i try to make the bomb launcher look more put together of different grounded stuff and simplify it more.
Don't bother with messing around with smoothgroups in blender to make it look right. It will disappear after you add textures. Example from a quick screenshot of my gun:
Just be sure to have smoothing enabled, and all will be good.
@Veerek, not sure how it works in blender but look for some sort of select by element mode. That way you'll be able to select the hat as once piece and delete it.
No one has any ideas on why the painting isn't working on my Santa hat? I've been messing around with it for the past hour and I can't get it to paint any color other than white.
Is the painting being done in something like photoshop? Maybe you have photoshop set to paint in black and white, instead of color?
I don't mean painting as in painting on a texture. I mean painting as in you apply a can of paint to the item in game to color it. I think I'm just going to submit it like this and let Valve sort it out if they choose it. I'm sure they've run into this issue and know exactly what the problem is and after messing with it for 2 hours I haven't gotten anywhere.
Don't bother with messing around with smoothgroups in blender to make it look right. It will disappear after you add textures. Example from a quick screenshot of my gun:
Just be sure to have smoothing enabled, and all will be good.
Your gun looks better without the smoothing tbh...
I've updated the design of the bolt on my shotgun to look somewhat like that of the BAR, then when I thought about making it animated I wondered what it look like if the slide could protrude from the gun when pumped:
The extruding slide is a feature of a real gun, the Winchester 1897 pump action, which is also known as a trench gun...a real army shotgun...
Design wise nothing's final yet, I wanted to see what this feature would look like animated. Anybody think this is a little too far?...or not?
I just wanted to suggest making him hold it like the bottle rather than the Eyelander.
I just think the Bottle's onehanded fighting stance would fit it a lot better, as seeing it swung straight downwards and the ball flying above his head when he's running just looks very strange.
The bottle animations would make the Demoman swing the flail more, and I think he would look a bit less silly when he's running with it.
I've already submitted it now but I just tested it out now to see what it'd look like. It looks pretty good in thirdperson, it does swing around a lot more and it looks really cool when he jumps. However in firstperson half of the animations look horrible with it .
Replies
Well I drew a very quick (terrible) concept
It's based off of a coal train engine. I know its not that great (but that's what you get when you spend 7 minutes on it) but maybe you could get some ideas from it.
as the new weapons use the same model to both views you should try to make it look good in both views
Hand looks great btw
THE BEASTLY BERSERKER
Got the idea from reading about Celtic Berserkers, who would wear wolfskins into battle. It's not skinned; what you see here is a multi-subobject map in 3DS max. It's just a temporary placeholder before I do the actual skinning.
As you can see, my biggest problem is making it look nice and smooth. It's already over 1100 triangles and yet I still find flat spots, especially around the eyes.
I'm a bit shit at concepting but here's a first idea for the chainsaw, based on my 3d sketch fitting the minigun.
Looking for any last minute crits before I submit tomorrow. I might try out some styles of painting of fur on the white parts to make it a bit more interesting than AO + Noise.
Also do you think the ball should be jiggled?
Unfortunately, dollars to donuts says that you're not even the tenth person to submit a Santa hat. Good luck anyway!
Nice work, and yes I think the ball should be jiggleboned like the Napper's Respite
Everyone likes jigglebones
JIGGLEBONES!
GLORIOUS JIGGLEBONES!
Seriously though, that'd be funny. Imagine Heavy running around with a big floppy minigun.
Also, how do I look at the new weapons? I thought GCFscape didn't work because of the halloween update. Or did they fix that?
I think you need to redownload GCFscape because that worked for me.
I'll post wires soon but I think it's a problem with the way the triangles are split from quads.
Anyone got any ideas how to tie one mesh to two bones like the attendant?
will this work?
It looks fine on that image but in game it's got those weird tris
the grey area is on a different part of the UV
This'd normally all be quads but I split those up
I'm kind of new to modeling like this so how do I make multiple smoothing groups?
Forget it
I believe I solved my problem in a rather unintuitive way.
You see, the grey hatband seemed to be throwing shadows on those specific Tris so I deleted the faces on the band of the hat.
I am quite ashamed but the deed is done and now I'm off to completely wreck the game with this monstrosity of a hat, as soon as I get it ingame again
oh and as far as compiling goes, does anyone know what a bbox is?
EDIT: I believed I had solved the problem but somewhere along the compiling the error popped right back ingame again so no I have not solved the weird triangle problem
http://www.fpsbanana.com/skins/76415
And I also saw this somewhere (Sorry for bad quality) :
But your Santa Hat is the most beautifull, I think. Make it jiggleboned and make a BLU one and it would be perfect.
"an axis-aligned bounding box used by the AI to detect collisions with the world, mostly for movement purposes."
so my collision models are wrong...
thanks for that, so now I know I have to seperate the collison models and bind them both to the two bones involved because currently only one bone is used.
Cue Heavy
MINI TANKS!
Except my proposed method doesn't work any suggestions on fixes?
Should work similiar to the grenade launcher but does much bigger explosions, les distance and has to get reload after every shot. I guess the animation requiered gives it a bad chance to get in the game. That spiral launch pad should jump forward on pulling the trigger and launching the bomb with it. The whole front part can rotate upwards, could be for recoil absorbtion or it just rotates quickly upwards while shooting, so the bomb flys through the air in a very curved angle.
Scrub - another thing you could check is with your texture map, if the uv scale of those dark tris might be off from the rest of the brim, perhaps too small or distorted.
I just wanted to suggest making him hold it like the bottle rather than the Eyelander.
I just think the Bottle's onehanded fighting stance would fit it a lot better, as seeing it swung straight downwards and the ball flying above his head when he's running just looks very strange.
The bottle animations would make the Demoman swing the flail more, and I think he would look a bit less silly when he's running with it.
Davision3D, your freeze gun and this Big Bombs Launcher are really looking great, top notch work, but I must say they look more like something out of Ratchet & Clank than TF2. By that I mean they look fabricated, designed somewhere in a close future by an excentric inventor with lots of time, rather than created from scraps by a mercenary in a time of need back in a stylized '68. I mean, the cleanliness, the tiny logos and symbols, the huge amount of angular, circular shapes and details and the size of things. Again, I see Ratchet & Clank (another franchise I do love) not Team Fortress 2 (the game that is supposed to use the models).
Then again, one could argue that Valve themselves threw the art direction out the windowover a year ago, the old "caricaturish" and stylized now equals the general notion of "cartoony", and my words do not hold any significance or truth since I am but a beginner when it comes to modeling and the like. But it is an opinion, and I have the right to express it, don't I?
Anyway, I really like the flail I saw earlier and the steampunkish Gunslinger replacement (and a whole lot of other things way back in the thread). Keep up the good work, fellas! I hope I'l be able to join in on the fun too.
It really is well made and all, but I do agree with TankTaur, your weapons are a bit too sci-fi so I am doubtful that Valve would actually put it in game.
But if you're just doing this for fun and not Contribute! then I really do encourage you to go on, because I really like seeing your creative ideas ^^
"$blendtintbybasealpha" "1" "$blendtintcoloroverbase" "1" // between 0-1 determines how much blended by tinting vs. replacing the color "$colortint_base" "{172 51 54}" // put the RGB value of whats being colored when no paint is present, if $blendtintcoloroverbase is 0 then put [1 1 1] here. "$colortint_tmp" "[0 0 0]"@ elbgast
yea see that too now, have not put in account that he holds it mostly from the top. Might try getting that to the side like suggested.
@ lampekap
thx!
yea the bomb is very basic. Need to get it more cool but still ball based and do something else then a fuse because it doesnt make so much sense with how the grenade launcher works.
@ TankTaur
Well most of the standard weapons are very grounded like shotgun, pistol etc. but if you look at the medic for instance he always had also fancy weapons which have nothing similiar in real world. Team Fortress 2 was always very cartoon like for me and I think its a world where crazy weapons easily fit in. I agree that the freeze gun has a more futuristic look, though its still basicly build up. Considering that freeze shooting gun sounds like a fancy invention it could just be made by a crazy scientist in that time. Dont think the bombs launcher looks futuristic, in fact its even more basic then the original grenader launcher! I mean the big basic bombs get launched by a spiral!
IMO it would be nice to have even more unique weapons in the game then just more similiar or grounded looking ones.
I have to agree with TankTaur, While your stuff is always technically superb, i feel the style you have going so far doesn't fit very well with TF2. It's beyond the stylistic conventions of TF2.
I agree there is a fair bit of invention in TF2's weaponry, however while alot of the items don't actually exist in the real world, they are always heavily based on a real world objects. Mostly fused together from different sources.
For example the Medigun as you were mentioning. The medigun its heavily based on a fire hoze nozzle.
Or for example the sentry gun, is heavily based on a minigun and heavy machine gun tripods.
It most cases, however outrageous or shy a design may be, its always good practice to ground ideas with appropriate real world references.
Just thought i might try to help, your work is great!
UV in question:
Just before anyone asks. This is my current arrangement of the UV faces. The one blender wanted me to do had the important faces scaled down to the point of only getting 1/100th of the page.
Gun for reference (I doubt anyone is going to understand exactly which faces go where, but I'm sure some are pretty obvious)
Why does it remind me of Ratchet and Clank
<edit> looking at your map again, you may already have overlapped the obvious. Take another look at all your parts and see if there are any other elements that could share the same texture space... stuff like handles and bars of metal/bolts could all reference the same block of color and just be stacked up.
edit: Penny Arcade Watches.
Not always. If it is, you could just detach half of the overlapping faces and bake so only one of the overlapping parts would render AO.
Also are these promotional items you're posting for TF2 or that weird poker game?
ha, didnt see that with the fire hoze!
I think i try to make the bomb launcher look more put together of different grounded stuff and simplify it more.
Just be sure to have smoothing enabled, and all will be good.
No one has any ideas on why the painting isn't working on my Santa hat? I've been messing around with it for the past hour and I can't get it to paint any color other than white.
I don't mean painting as in painting on a texture. I mean painting as in you apply a can of paint to the item in game to color it. I think I'm just going to submit it like this and let Valve sort it out if they choose it. I'm sure they've run into this issue and know exactly what the problem is and after messing with it for 2 hours I haven't gotten anywhere.
Your gun looks better without the smoothing tbh...
The extruding slide is a feature of a real gun, the Winchester 1897 pump action, which is also known as a trench gun...a real army shotgun...
Design wise nothing's final yet, I wanted to see what this feature would look like animated. Anybody think this is a little too far?...or not?
I've already submitted it now but I just tested it out now to see what it'd look like. It looks pretty good in thirdperson, it does swing around a lot more and it looks really cool when he jumps. However in firstperson half of the animations look horrible with it