TF2 - Polypack - ABCZZT
I came up with something when I saw this event, so I registered.
It's for the Scout. I thought about how fast he is and how much
he runs, and the word "marathon" popped into my head. Then I
thought about him wearing a laurel wreath, and I decided that
my theme would be the Olympics.
If you ask me, all the classes except the Scout and Demoman
have hats that relate to their classes, while most have hats
that relate to their backgrounds or personalities. The Demo
has hats that say "I'm Scottish" and one that says "I'm African,"
but none that say "I blow stuff up." The Scout's hats say
either "I like baseball" or "I'm from Boston," not "I am fast."
If you call these problems, this should solve one of them.
Back to the point, these are my ideas:
An olive (not laurel) wreath for a hat, "kotinos" is the Greek word.
For melee, an Olympic Torch. I'd like to make it on fire, but I'm
not proposing any combat effects from it.
An energy drink in a bottle instead of a can for the secondary slot.
I want it to be like Gatorade because it came out in 1967, while
TF2 takes place in 1968. Also, I can't imagine an Olympic-themed gun.
Hooray for Google Images...
and hooray for Wikipedia.
I plan to use these pictures as references.
Now that I'm done telling my idea... how do I implement it?
I don't know what program I need to use to make models
or any of the stuff I will need to submit. Would someone be
kind enough to tell me while I get a good night's sleep?
You can comment on my thoughts, too, of course.
It's for the Scout. I thought about how fast he is and how much
he runs, and the word "marathon" popped into my head. Then I
thought about him wearing a laurel wreath, and I decided that
my theme would be the Olympics.
If you ask me, all the classes except the Scout and Demoman
have hats that relate to their classes, while most have hats
that relate to their backgrounds or personalities. The Demo
has hats that say "I'm Scottish" and one that says "I'm African,"
but none that say "I blow stuff up." The Scout's hats say
either "I like baseball" or "I'm from Boston," not "I am fast."
If you call these problems, this should solve one of them.
Back to the point, these are my ideas:
An olive (not laurel) wreath for a hat, "kotinos" is the Greek word.
For melee, an Olympic Torch. I'd like to make it on fire, but I'm
not proposing any combat effects from it.
An energy drink in a bottle instead of a can for the secondary slot.
I want it to be like Gatorade because it came out in 1967, while
TF2 takes place in 1968. Also, I can't imagine an Olympic-themed gun.
Hooray for Google Images...
and hooray for Wikipedia.
I plan to use these pictures as references.
Now that I'm done telling my idea... how do I implement it?
I don't know what program I need to use to make models
or any of the stuff I will need to submit. Would someone be
kind enough to tell me while I get a good night's sleep?
You can comment on my thoughts, too, of course.
Replies
I've come up with some names for my items:
Hat: Winner's Wreath. The scout can usually
beat anybody in a foot race. And if I called it
kotinos, it would break the convention of
hat names containing more than one word.
Melee: Traveler's Torch. Not sure what to
say about the name... but I've decided to
let an orange light bulb, appropriately
shaped, represent the flame on the end.
Drink: Run-Up. Sounds similar to 7-up, it's
supposed to help him run like bonk does,
and if I'm a runner up in the contest,
then it would make a good pun.
I found a free program to make models with.
It's Anim8or, and it can export .3ds & .obj files.
The wreath is what got me going, I'm doing it first.
So far, I've made the little stem-like part at the
base of a leaf. I'll do the rest of the leaf next.
This is the leaf stem by itself.
This is the stem attached to a branch.
The curve at the bottom of the stem follows
the path of a circle. It took me a long time
using notepad, the calculator, and my head
to figure out where to place the center and
what the radius should be so that the circle
would be tangent to the branch and the
cylindrical part of the stem.
The center of the branch's cross-section is the origin.
The branch's radius is 5. The stem's cylindrical part
has a radius of 2.5 and a height of 10, and it rests on
the top of the branch. Along with the curve, the total
height of the stem is 11, and its width is 6.
That's how I treated the math. But the model's center
is actually at the bottom of the cylinder, in its center.
Hardcore
You may want to look up Blender though, it's an open source modeling program that has a more modern feature set.
Good luck with your entry, you've got some good ideas going.
Oh man Anim8or, that brings back memories! I probably wouldn't be doing game art had I not found that program. It may be outdated but it should have more than enough tools for you to model out all of your items. I like the idea of the flaming torch as a weapon, hopefully you can get some nice looking fire fx on it.
of making the leaf steam a separate part, along
with the curve at the bottom. I feared I might go
over the 800 triangle limit with just the leaves.
By my count, each leaf contains 50, and I plan
to put 4 pairs on each side of the wreath for a
total of 16, exactly fulfilling the triangle limit.
But it's not a hard limit, so it won't be too much
of a problem if I add another 100 or so with
the main branch of the wreath, will it?
The hexagonal prism and the point at the top
have a combined height of 111. It still extends
1 unit below the origin to sink into the branch
and still has a radius of 2.5. For the curve of
the edge of the leaf, I plotted y = x² from
x = -5 to x = 5 in steps of 1. Then I scaled it to
have a width of 20 and a length of 100. I copied it,
pasted it, rotated it, and placed one on each side
of the leaf with one end on the pencil-like part's point.
The last part is the hardest to describe.
I made a triangle with one side coinciding
with one side of the hexagon and one side
on the x-axis, going away from the hexagon.
The 3rd side is obvious, and it was scalene.
I extended this triangle into a prism parallel
to the main "pencil," divided into 5 sections.
For each slice of the prism, I dragged the
outward points over to the corresponding
points on the curve that I placed (skipping
over every other point that I had plotted).
I did make sure that the ends of the curves
at the base of the leaf went to the sides of
the "pencil," not into it. The last things I did
were removing the 2D curves and the unseen
inner faces of the triangular prism that had
been formed from the side coincident with
the hexagon's side.
Do yourself a favour and pick up blender, it's free and has a good commercial license.
you are going about this in a very methodical way, and i think itll help in the long run if you run into scaling issues.
i think you could reduce the poly count on the leaves pretty easily. first i wouldn't make it a hexagonal prism, but rather just a rectangular. you have to remember how close the player is going to see it. and no one's gonna be able to tell you got rid of a couple of sides on the stems. also you could weld some of the vertices together in the middle (see image) and still retain the same shape.
hope that helps.
hexagonal prism, but my polygon count was
still reduced from 50 to 30 per leaf.
I found a link to an archive file that contains
the models of the 9 classes. It sure beats
taking screenshots from the model viewer.
I've constructed the main part of the wreath.
I won't bore you with math this time, it was
made through trial and error. Next step is to
put the leaves on it, then apply color/texture.
Here's a bunch of pictures.
How does it look so far?
It has a total of 842 triangles, and
I used a single 8 x 8 texture on it.
I started with 256 x 256, and I
wanted to put veins on the leaves
while leaving everything else in
solid colors. But nearly the entire
thing was defined by a single pixel!
So I scaled the texture down as
much as I could without altering the
appearance of the model negatively.
I could go back and do something
about the textures, but making the
torch and sports drink has a higher
priority for me.
ABCZZT, your program seems very restrictive and I don't think you'll be able to create anything of good enough quality to be made official with it. I would recommend that you pick up some more advanced modeling programs, such as Blender.
I am not saying you don't have the potential to do good, I'm saying you don't have the tools to do good.
Anyways, I thought of something great to
put on the bottle. Originally I thought it
would be a good idea to put the TF2 symbol
on the lid of the bottle, but I wouldn't know
how to animate the lid coming off when it
gets equpped. So the bottle won't come
with a lid. I don't know how to make jiggle
bones for the liquid either, so I have to
cover up the surface of the liquid.
Here it is, a variation on those rings on the
Olympic flag. I made it in Paint.
Personally, I think the 10° one looks better,
so that's the one I put on the bottle.
Which one do you guys like better?
The bottle was pretty easy to make.
Here's the bottle with the rings on it.
It doesn't look quite as nice as I'd like,
but it's still much better than the wreath.
I don't really know how to deal with the
rest of the bottle, though.
remember you won't get a 360 view of the bottle anyway
and because it's a weapon you can get away with a bigger texture than with hats and more polys too so it won't look so urgh pixelised
Oh... and coding your model is impressive. I mean I'm modeling in Blender and I'm doing a lot worse than anyone here so I'd hate to have to resort to a program like that.
If I arranged them like that, I wouldn't be able to link
the ends together. Plus I don't want to copy the
original Olympic flag too much.
I'm using a 512 x 512 texture and I got that.
I'll see if adding more polygons helps. Thanks.
Winner's Wreath
Run-Up
Traveler's Torch
I finished the Run-Up energy drink, it turned out well.
I modified the wreath so it would have under 800
triangles, it should now have 776. I made a plain
old torch. I would have liked to make it have a
flashlight on the end shaped like a fire, but I still
can't figure out how to do that.
And now I just submitted them. 40 MINUTES LATE.
And then I realized when I submitted the torch, I
forgot to change the "Proposed Item Name" field
from Run-Up to Traveler's Torch.
Somebody shoot me.
Seriously man, go get an actual 3D package to use.
You can resubmit an item as an updated version as long as you mention that it's a new version in the additional info box.
And honestly man, I think you'd be better served to learn Blender or something if you plan to continue modeling. Whatever you're using at the moment looks way too cumbersome to do anything terribly complex.
And you are painful to listen to.
If you'd take the time to look at
more than just the end of this
thread, you'd find it in the 2nd
post: I used Anim8or.
Just from looking at the website for that program it looks like it's pretty well past it's prime. I'd still suggest downloading Blender considering it's more modern feature set.
I don't really think people wonder what program you're using, rather they wonder WHY you're using it.
I then switched to milkshape 3d, which was horrible, then max.
I only submitted them just now...
I still had the upload page open
and I just noticed there was an
error message saying that the
thumbnail has to be a JPG file.
Seriously, take all our advice and get either Blender, Maya, or 3D Max
Like everyone else, I HIGHLY suggest stop using Anim8tor immediately and download Blender. You won't get anywhere with what you have now. Look at some tutorials for Blender and you should be all set.
This guy has very little (to no) experience but at least he tried and send something in! Hell it might not be the best game art you have ever seen but at least he did something! plus you have no idea in how much effort he put into it! Hell for all we know it was allot more then laro for example! It takes allot of effort to start fully inexperienced with a very strange free modeling program. I was surprised he came this far! so yeah, this guy deserved the greentooth.
If you wanted it as well then you should have done something! and in polosko's case, finished your damn models!
His models aren't good at all, but the effort he put into it is worth rewarding.
He seriously need to pick up a better modeling program if he wants to continue though
It's like watching someone enter a photo manipulation contest while only using MSpaint.
*Scouts voice*:Um, no!
As I thought!
@Simski: He put little to no effort in the models. Why would it be rewarding?
@EVIL: Maybe I am a dick, but I think this person should of known not to use some retarded free modeling program. This guy probably knows that he wont win lol, so why submit?
:poly103:
Honestly why does it matter to you that much? It's a virtual badge in a video game.
I'd like to see this guy use a real program and start getting some real experience in 3d.
As regards ABCZZT getting into modelling, I think he's taken the first few steps and we should encourage him to push his skills further. I'm not even going to say he has to use a more advanced program. Loads of art forms are about deliberately making things hard to force innovation and develop a distinctive style.
@Norron - go look at the TF2 forums. Witness the rage that other people getting things in TF2 causes
He deserves the greentooth badge or even a unique item for doing it with such application xD
But next time use a more up to date/advanced application like Blender, which is free, this Animator approach is way too technicaly and you're loosing the artistic part, with better applications you get more freedom for creativity once you know how to use it of course.
*shamelessly showing off*
*shamelessly showing off*
*shamelessly showing off*
When entering a contest however, I still think that unless you're already insanely good with the program you're using you should use a more advanced program, so you don't have to send in stick figures.
Still, nice effort
(like how they made categories when they showed up the propaganda posters at the end of the contest.)