Messages

For those interested, here is a tut on how to accomplish the 2d background in Blender's game engine (though if you've never used the Game engine you won't know how the hell to do what it's talking about). It's a simple method, should work with many other game engines too.

Shabazjinkens, you're a hero. Can you really use blender? Damn, it even doesn't have recognizable "File" menu! And one view only? Huh. After three hours of figuring out how to see top, side and perspective views (spacebar-menu didn't do anything), blender is outta list, becauseÃ,  I have only time until october, then army and no game design for a long time. I'm not going to spend all this time trying to figure out how blender works.
Damn. And it was free.

Are you joking?



You're not going to figure it out if you expect it to be just like 3DS Max, it's far different from what I've heard.

The documentation might help.

PDF, if you have broadband
PDF Volume II (Hotkey reference)

I wouldn't switch totally if I were you, you can import models from 3DS (though I don't know how well the scripts work) and just place them and use only the game engine.

Try to learn the very basic things (Middle mouse button is free rotate, MMM+shift is grab, MMM+ctrl is zoom) and then see if you can use this tutorial to set up a 3rd person camera to follow a character.

Really though, you're probably better off with DarkBasic or something that will directly import 3DS models, to be honest. You can get a free demo from the site to see how it works out. I wouldn't want to totally switch apps either, not because of functionality, but just because of having to learn a new program.

Look, if you don't like it, don't reply to it. I have read this thread many times before writing this without saying anything. It is possible.

free poser-like plugin for Blender that can be used fairly easily. It's possible that I could find a script to transport the models to you if you don't want to bother with learning the app. Clothes would still need to be modelled, as it creates nudies only

That would be great! I'll take a look at Poser over the weekend to see if i like it or not, but i've heard so much about it so i guess it's gotta be great. The clothing part ain't a problem, i think... as long as there is no wind or movement involved that is...

Poser does create clothes, MakeHuman (Blender plugin) does not.

Your modelling program may have cloth dynamics built in, which would make clothing a lot simpler.

Interesting model, btw.

(I did not make that model on the left. Shbaz lies.)

Well yeah, except this is what it looked like when I was through with it, and I created it from your drawing, therefore it is mostly your creation.

Haha, usually when MS sues someone to get more money it's a bad thing, but ironically when they sue spammers everyone is happy.

I can't find the news articles, but not long ago AOL sued a big spammer and won his exotic cars, money, and mansion. They gave away one of the exotic cars to AOL users in a drawing, to thank them for reporting spam. 

I know a lot about character animation, and it's probably not a fault with 3DS you're seeing, but a problem with low-poly stuff in general. If the models aren't carefully made, they can be a huge pain to rig. If you've never rigged a character before, even a great model might be difficult to rig. Right now I'm rigging a model I made for a huge project at Crystal Space and it's all GPL so I can show you that when I finish sometime today.

I'll try to explain it as best as I can here though.

First of all, here is the best forum in the world for game art critique. Here is the second best one.

Go in these forums and look for the really pro gameart (it's easy to see one from the latter) and look at it, specifically how they did the joints. You'll notice that usually elbows and knees have three edge-loops fairly close together. This is to allow a lot of freedom with bending and prevent too much distortion in the texture map. You're supposed to parent the main bone (thigh or upper arm) to the top edge-loop and begin another bone that will only control the middle loop. The shin or wrist bone will then be parented to both the middle and the bottom loops. So now you have the middle loop controlled by both the small joint bone and the wrist or shin. The reason for this is that the knee won't buckle as fast when it has another bone it is parented to that is not moving - it moves at about half the speed that the rest of the bone's vertices would, and gives a realistic effect of the knee bending.

Probably what you have the most problem with though is shoulders (everyone does). The arm has the greatest range of motion of any large appendage on your body, able to point directly up, down, and everywhere in between. A shoulder is similar to the knee or elbow, but has a somewhat unusual second edge-loop that doesn't make a complete circle, but rather connects back to the first edge-loop. You'll just have to look at some models for this one - describing it is kind of hard for me ATM. You need one bone that comes out from the shoulder and ends just a little before the arm starts, one very small bone coming from there, and then the big bone that will extend to the elbow joint. The first bone will allow you to move the shoulders up and down as the model moves its arms around a lot. The second is a control (like the small bones in the knee and elbow) to allow you to keep that shoulder from distorting too much when the arm moves a long way. The third bone has an obvious purpose, I think.

More important than the skeletal structure isÃ,  the way that you parent your vertices to the skeleton. This is also very hard to sum up in a small place, so if you want I could just examine your model with one of the .3DS to .Blend scripts and see what could be causing you problems.. though I don't know how trustworthy those things are. In Blender when I parent the skeleton to the mesh it asks if I want it to automatically assign vertice groups to the bones and I let it do that. It will then find all of the closest vertices to the bone and parent those to each bone. After that, I look at each group and try to find mistakes, I edit out the vertices that don't need to be selected, and then start testing out the rig and adjusting slight problems, before making my animation loops.

$50 in the USA will also buy 100 liters of Coke, or 200 liters of an off-brand soda, or a used video camera. It is a lot of money, but most good games here also come out costing $50. If it's something you really want you can save the money (here, anyway). In Estonia though, I'm not sure how life is, so sorry for making the quick judgement.

Make fun of me for liking Blender all you want, I think it's funny too, I never had tried the search. Even I can admit that Blender still has it's faults too.. the game engine is missing a lot of standard things (rendering functions) like bumpmapping and shadows. I don't know how well 3DS models would transport to it. There are a few problems that could arise, but if you want, we can try it.

So what's the verdict Increator? Have you found anything better that escaped our notice yet?

A sidenote, you mentioned that one engine was for fps games.. most engines are actually fairly general, and you may be able to simple edit out the monsters and guns to come up with a fairly good RPG engine. With any engine I'm fairly sure you're going to have to do quite a bit of scripting to get things like hunger, Body Temp. and etc. though.

So perhaps they overclocked it to boost performance?

How expensive are water cooling systems?

I wondered if the character might be a part of the test.. still, you're gonna have to pop out some nice models to keep up with that kind of quality of environment. How experienced are you with organic models? I may be able to help you out with that if you need it, there is a free poser-like plugin for Blender that can be used fairly easily. It's possible that I could find a script to transport the models to you if you don't want to bother with learning the app. Clothes would still need to be modelled, as it creates nudies only.

If that's the best character you can do you might want to work on those skills in particular, but otherwise it looks like you're plenty good at 3d and you should go for it.

A simpler route that will still carry the style of 2d would be using cell-shading (toon shading) to render your stuff. You wouldn't get the ultra-dramatic scene you have above, but you can achieve some great looking cartoonish renders. It's hard for me to tell they aren't 2d.

There are only a few of the pretending to be a man ones.. the others have varying themes. Did you read them?

Hey guys here's the 411... hey I just learned that idiom from some weird "get to know what your kid's talking about" page... and I just wanted to use ist, no matter what topic it is

it rock's

Uh.. that's kind of an old idiom really. It's from the telephone companies, if you need a number and have no phone book then you dial "411" or "1411" and an operator will get you the number and connect you for a small fee. Because of that, it's become synonymous with information.

Just out of curiosity, why the Radeon? I've heard the newer Nvidia cards were getting better reviews.

Yes, only delete the account though, the folder will be gone automatically afterwords.

You must log on to the new account you've created before it will make a folder for it.

Once the folder is there, simply overwrite all of it's files with yours, and delete the account with the name you don't want.

It should make a new folder.. Mine did when I had a seperate profile for my roomate. The only reason I can think of that it wouldn't is if you share your settings with them. I'm gonna try it and I'll post what happens.

Create a new account as a copy with a new name and delete the other then. This may be one of those many things Microsoft never considered (or didn't think to be important).

Change it in Control Panel / User Accounts.

I've just found out about this one..

http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/features.html

Open source, multi-platform, and packed with features. It imports 3DS files too.

I don't see Normal Mapping in there, which is something I'd much prefer, but otherwise it looks great.

Nevermind..

http://www.elysiun.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=26162

I use Irrlicht for the game I am doing right now and do the modelling with Blender. Take a look at the export scripts. The rest you'll have to do by your own. Irrlicht is a 3d game engine framework, which means it is a library that allows you to program your game. Irrlicht doesn't have game entities, it doesn't have a main loop, it doesn't have sound, it doesn't have physics and it doesn't have any builtin scripting or networking support - so writing a code generator (I supposed your question was pointing in this direction) would need to write a main loop (which would be very game dependant - think of a GUI for changing game settings and stuff like that) using Irrlicht and other libraries for sound, physics, networking and scripting (for example Angelscript or any other plugable scripting language) on the other hand and your own game entities (object properties and stuff). That'll be a lot of work because it means that you write your own game engine.