14 réponses à ce sujet

[PJ156]

I am interested in sharing some thoughts on placeables.

I have spent many hours looking at placeables and seeing how they could be something other than they are. How they could form composits to be something else.

I wonder if any of you ladies and gents of the modding community might want to share some of your experience.

I will start with pedestal 04. This is a very well made model that stretches and deforms well. I have dome a lot with this which I will share once the areas are presentable.

I have found it combined with the estate tileset to make sumptuous clading for walls giving the whole room a different feeling without resorting to custom tilesets.

Cladding

Cheers,

PJ

[kamalpoe]

Purdy! (personally I'd move them out from the wall a bit to get rid of the bar across the middle.)



Unfortunately some of my favorite placeables don't stretch and deform well at all.

[PJ156]

Hello Kamal,

I tried to lose the bar but the pedestal sticks out the top of the wall and the effect is lost. The bar, like so many other things in the toolset, is a compromise.

PJ

[kamalpoe]

The birdbath makes an excellent base for a more ornate version of the mulsantir torch. I use it with some of the glowing ball vfx for a lamp light source, and scale it up for magic powered outdoor lighting in a city.

Likewise, platform 3 and platform 4 from SoZ make good firepits or base for magic lighting.

Modifié par kamalpoe, 10 août 2010 - 10:39 .

[kamalpoe]

Anything that looks good from the top, side, front or back can have the relevant scale set to 0.01 and be made into a floor or wall decoration. (I personally love the snake throne for this, it's very sculptural)

I've used the estate bookcases to make a bar in an inn.

Any large scale placeable like a building or rock face can be scaled down to make a diorama for decor. MoW did this in an inn. I've done it in a few places. Umberlee temple diorama (you can also see where I scaled a portal to use as a wall). In one spot I scaled down a castle and walls and seige weapons and stuck them on a table. It's meant to be for military planning purposes like how the army has units they move around on tables in movies to help the leaders plan (or maybe they just play DnD with minatures  ).

A purposefully missing tile wall with an empty tile next to it, portal magic!

I've used the solid black tile blocks as large pieces of obsidian. (example of this as well as another diorama) Also I put them inside see through windows like some of the church buildings have so you can't see right through the building.

[PJ156]

I am with you on the flooring Kamal, I love the portal, it has a real planar feel, and the diaorama idea is great. I have shrunk waggons and statues for toys but had not thought of buildings.

Here is my play area with some tester floors. There are many different tile posibilities, the main one is pedestal 04 the other I cannot remeber off hand but the small bar section is in the far corner. The oven in the picture has been sunk and scaled to make a fireplace.

Tiles

The bar placeable is also good as a shelf if scaled, allowing somthing like this.

Bar

The more ornate footstool makes a good enough arch for a garden type application and the less orante a good stile.

Arch

Back on wall cladding, using scaled estate bookcase ends and estate pillars allowed this chapel with an elevated door in the castle tileset.

Chapel

Similarly the estate walls and bookcases made a bespoke room division. The curtains placeable forms an adequate archway into the new room.

Libruary

Cheers,

PJ

Modifié par PJ156, 11 août 2010 - 09:03 .

[dunniteowl]

I don't have any shots or referents handy. This is a great idea! I do it, also, but not to this scale or purpose (and when I say scale, I mean the scale of use or scope, not size of items.) I have been wrestling with a module that requires me to rethink most of the placeables I use. It's nothing but resizing and rescaling to make things look different.

This, though. This is really a smart idea and it hadn't really occured to me beyond rescaling water troughs to look like big pools or sliding and rescaling buildings together to create that clingy, clumped together look of a medeival town with the Rural houses and slum rows.

If anyone else has any ideas like this, please share.

dunniteowl

[kamalpoe]

There's lots of these tricks in this sample area I made for the SoZ holiday pack,  especially with the diorama. A rescaled pillar makes the diorama base, it could also be a table. Light ray vfx gives a reflections off a glass wall look. Floating hags and the gnomish tree logger are scaled down to make knick knacks on the second floor.

I didn't discover it, but perfectly smooth water can be painted on the floor to give a shiny marble look (trap triggers are not visible beneath water either, making a nasty surprise for players....).

Modifié par kamalpoe, 12 août 2010 - 01:31 .

[PJ156]

kamalpoe wrote...

There's lots of these tricks in this sample area I made for the SoZ holiday pack,  especially with the diorama. A rescaled pillar makes the diorama base, it could also be a table. Light ray vfx gives a reflections off a glass wall look. Floating hags and the gnomish tree logger are scaled down to make knick knacks on the second floor.

I didn't discover it, but perfectly smooth water can be painted on the floor to give a shiny marble look (trap triggers are not visible beneath water either, making a nasty surprise for players....).

Love the model ship idea Kamal, I will use this in my mod.

The water over tiles idea I got from Bob Hall's very fine document. I have used it in the tiles screen shot above. I like it a lot more now I know it hides traps.

This is something I only recently got into, hence the thread. I have some other pics to post later but other ideas are the circular table scaled up then sunk gives a circular stage or stepped area. The stool in the picture above has a stunning gothic print on the side so you can do something like this.

Pillars

For me it's just a case of opening a placeable up, scaling it and trying to see it in different ways. Kamal seems very good at this, there is some inventive stuff in his pics.

Cheers,

PJ

Modifié par PJ156, 12 août 2010 - 08:39 .

[PJ156]

Nice one on the trough DNO, I have scaled it small now I am playing with scaling it big.

PJ

Modifié par PJ156, 12 août 2010 - 09:32 .

[rjshae]

Crates can be surprisingly versatile. A stack of square crates, suitably scaled, can be used for a wooden corner posts in the standard interior, or as cladding around the stone column. If you scale the crate properly, they make decorative filler for the wooden balconies (so that you don't see the empty support beams and hollow area underneath).
I've rescaled some of the tintable tapestries to serve as covers for the balcony undersides or the back of the booth seating. The meat slab, when scaled down and stretched, kind of looks like a piece of fish (for a fish monger).

Modifié par rjshae, 12 août 2010 - 09:54 .

[PJ156]

rjshae wrote...

Crates can be surprisingly versatile. A stack of square crates, suitably scaled, can be used for a wooden corner posts in the standard interior, or as cladding around the stone column. If you scale the crate properly, they make decorative filler for the wooden balconies (so that you don't see the empty support beams and hollow area underneath).
I've rescaled some of the tintable tapestries to serve as covers for the balcony undersides or the back of the booth seating. The meat slab, when scaled down and stretched, kind of looks like a piece of fish (for a fish monger).

I have not used crates, looking at them tonight I can see the possibilities. Some of them distort well. I guess this depends on the quality of the model and the dimensions of the texture used.

DNO's suggestion of the trough is a good one. It has sides that come up forming a pool or dip as DNO suggested. There are only a few placeables that do this, sandbox is another. Mulsantir chimney is another very good one. 

Anyhows it scales well if not distorted from it's oblong shape. I'm working on an inn right now so I have used it to give me something I have wanted since sheep and stone but never acheived a good enough finish.

Gaming table

This is a composite of Table 13 a water trough and two lecturns. I am pleased with it

PJ

Modifié par PJ156, 13 août 2010 - 09:38 .

[dunniteowl]

If you can get the wash tub separate (or cover the other stuff with a Balcony part) you can scale it to the proper size for a decent hot tub. Yeah, Marin in NWN2. I gotta get back into the toolset and play around and then get some screenies. I think you guys will enjoy some of the zany stuff I do with them.

I am, though, very impressed with using those pedastals for wall cladding and the crates to "hide" the open portions of the balcony pieces. Genius in both cases.



dunniteowl

[PJ156]

Thanks CW, it would be a waste not to have a dice game. Need to work out how to do that.

Came across this while trying to work up my inn this afternoon.

Cladding II

This is another customisation of the estate tileset this time with the bar 04 placeable. Scale it tall and thin then adjust the width to suit. set it to environmental then copy paste away. The whole job tool 20 mins on a 4 tile room.

The pillars are the same small bar section sacled 0.6,0.4,3.2. Note though that the detail is only on the back of the placeable so you can have plain pillars or ensure you have the rotation right on scaling.

I think it's a nice effect, much less warm than the pedestal but good for a mages study or such like.

Hope that sparks some thoughts and or ideas.

PJ