88 réponses à ce sujet

[henesua]

This is a bit beyond my abilities, but it just occurred to me

Anyone who had the module B1 - In Search of the Unknown probably recalls the wizard lab in Quasqueton with teh mysterious black cat in the jar. That would be a very cool interactive placeable to make along with a 2x2 icon so it can be carried around as an item. This was a pointless thing in the module that was fun when you were kids.

 

"The larger jar is of clear glass and seemingly contains a black cat's body floating in a clear, colourless liquid. If the large cork lid is unstopped, the liquid will instantaneously evaporate, the cat will suddenly spring to life, jump out of the jar, meow loudly, and run for the door."

 

If anyone makes the item and the placeable with animations I'll do all the scripting and setup to make the thing work. The placeable would be activate to - water/liquid turns to mist, cat jumps out. The actual cat would then be spawned to the same location that the cat jumps out at... so it would be useful if you set it up to jump to a precise distance and facing and if it was the black cat version that ShadowM made.  The jar itself would remain empty at the end of the animation. Scripting would be necessary to ensure the whole thing doesn't reactivate.

[Tarot Redhand]

FWIW I like the stands you've made but I also really like the texture just above the brown rusty looking one. To me that texture looks like its tar/oil covered metal. BTW does the aperture in the side of the pyramidal gem have any purpose? Also are these gems going to come in a variety of colours (just curious)?

 

TR

[henesua]

I'm not sure what color the gems will be. But I think I'll just do one color, and allow people to modify. I'm currently thinking I'd like to do a pulsing glow, but I have no idea how to do this. All I've done so far is download ice and salt crystal references to see what I can do there.

 

I also liked that metal strap texture as it is very close to what I wanted (it almost looks like hammered iron that has seen lots of use and abuse) but the scale is all wrong and I've not been patient enough to make it the right size. Perhaps I could throw together some more metal scaffolding as furniture for a frankenstein lair, and try another stab at getting the scale of the texture right. And I'll have to experiment with the settings to remind myself how I got that affect. Something with the specular channel, the gradient on the black too that gave it almost a reverse relief of the grey one (same base texture) but I'll have to find the right knobs and plugs to wire that one up again.

 

[edit] pyramid question: not sure what you mean. The stand is the same in each of those, and the issue with the foursider is that it doesn't sit well within the tines of the stand so it looks awkward with the tines coming through it. I considered not including that one, but the 4 sided polyhedra is too strong of a shape to ignore and gives away the game that all the shapes are the standard dice except for the lumpy one which is the only crystal looking one. The rest to me look like a weird transluscent jello dice - maybe congealed green slime dice. I'm using a procedural frosted green glass texture for those. I wish we could get that affect in NWN, but its just not possible. When I get the crystal texture together I hope it still feels like you can see into the depth. But I've not seen this pulled off in NWN in a convincing manner.

[henesua]

Found a cool image and got distracted from doing some iron lattice scaffolding.

 

Ben Harrison's alchemy stuff covers us for most of that stuff, but I still like the modelling work this guy did and hope it inspires someone that can actually model. You can see the rest at the guy's deviant art profile.

 

Since I mostly like making geometry, I am gonna take a stab at a microscope.

[Tarot Redhand]

@henesua The aperture that I was referring to is on the left side of the pyramidal gem itself, towards the bottom where it rests on the stand.

 

 

TR

[henesua]

Yup. As I said above, that shape doesn't sit on the stand well so the tines of the stand poke through it. Because of that I considered not including the 4 sider.

[rjshae]

Heh, just having an old phrenology chart hanging on the laboratory wall could probably be considered weird science. At least these days...

 

 

 

Then there's always the craniometer:

 

[kamal_]

Heh, just having an old phrenology chart hanging on the laboratory wall could probably be considered weird science. At least these days...

http://deadhomersoci...hersimpson5.png

[Shemsu-Heru]

The theme for this month's challenge: "Weird Science":
  

 
This theme was suggested by Shemsu-Heru.
 

 

 

I just have notice this mistake, This topic isn't my suggestion, I think It's from Carcerian.

[henesua]

Using this as a reference (one of the first microscopes from the 17th century)

 

I spent a little time this morning starting the geometry for a microscope. I'm about halfway through the model, then I'll get to texturing. All textures are currently placeholders. Currently I'm at less than 340 triangles.

[henesua]

Modelling and basic texturing for the microscope are done. its 497 triangles. So not super light by NWN standards but for a complex object I think I did ok. I'm just not the modelling master who can texture 100 triangles to look like a work of art. My goal was to have a slide clipped to the tray but I ran out of triangles (I set 500 as my max). Also I don't understand how you animate for NWN and I wanted to have the slide in place when the microscope is activated, and hidden in the base when its deactivated. If anyone wants to collaborate I'll gladly give you the FBX to pull this off. Having a real texture artist help would be good too. Not happy with the textures on this one.

 

Its about 30 centimeters tall so I think in game the scale should work well.

 

Not having a great time getting my microscope from cheetah to blender to NWN. I tried an export and the file was broken on the NWN side. I'll futz around to get it in game and test a render there.

 

I'll play with NWN's "shaders" when I get it there. I want the glass elements and the metals to have some shininess. This is what I have now rendered in Cheetah with minimal lighting and the single texture I'll be using in NWN. 

 

and the texture

[Mecheon]

I've got some horrible mad scientist created critters coming along. Y'know, Owlbear kind of stuff, normal creatures infected with horrific fungi, turning them into abberations of unknown cause, mighty beasts exposed to forces beyond their control. Y'know, normal stuff

[Mecheon]

BEHOLD THE TERROR! SCREAM AT THE HORROR!

When the mysterious elven mage Aeon Mekkanos opened a portal to the Plane of Ash, he expected a clean getaway from the authorities breaking into his lab. Instead, he opened a doorway for creatures tainted by the essence of that dead place to come back to our world!



oh hey its an Ember Hulk. Technically there's already one of these on the Vault, but I was never a fan of it because the original description of it (over here!) described them as more intelligent, and shorter than their original Umber Hulk origin, while the Vault one was a reskin of the Umber Hulk that was a bit more firey than ember-y.

Still a work in progress, its currently using the Project Q Iron Golem envmap which is going to change for sure, and I think the upper legs need to be shorter. I do like the look it gives with those massive clobberarms. though. And yeah, its hooked up to a_ba. Clips like anything else though

We'll hear more about Aeon's horrible experiments and run ins with the law when I get more things sorted. And as these were created by a mage it clearly fits in and is not me pushing my elemental planes agenda

[henesua]

I finally got my blender pipeline unclogged and the microscope made it through to NWN land. Once I saw the thing in game and how big a 512x512 tga was (1 MB) with an alpha layer I adjusted the texture down to 256x256. I lost a lot of the detail I spent time on, but this is a small object so it turns out you can't normally get close enough to see the detail anyway...

 

This is my first placeable built from scratch in NWN.

First shot for scale

 

Followed by some closeups (showing lack of detail, but i did get the reflection as I wanted)

 

Now that I've seen how this stuff looks in game... next time I'll focus my efforts in a different direction. I'm not happy with the look of this thing. I should have increased the size of the portion of the texture for the wood platform, and minimized other features. In retrospect I would have added stains and stuff to the base since that seems to be the most looked at part of the model when it is in game.

[Mecheon]

Mad? Of course I'm not mad. I'm just fulfilling what someone asked me to do: Aeon, on why he thought this was a good idea


Oh hey, its the Bearbug. Its the opposite of the Bugbear! And its where certain things for a failed insect project of mine in a previous CCC may have ended up...

I have a few more ideas coming, but I have to ask if anyone's got some decent cloud textures lurking around? Trying to make a cloud-sheep. Yep.

[henesua]

playing with a metal table. texture is a placeholder. will likely do black and aged like i did earlier on the gem stand thing (which I am too lazy to bring into nwn so far)  I was unhappy with the microscope, so am trying to do a better texture on a simple model. (244 triangles before i tweak the model. this will be kept below 500)

 

[rjshae]

Now that I've seen how this stuff looks in game... next time I'll focus my efforts in a different direction. I'm not happy with the look of this thing. I should have increased the size of the portion of the texture for the wood platform, and minimized other features. In retrospect I would have added stains and stuff to the base since that seems to be the most looked at part of the model when it is in game.

 

I think it looks good. Note that if you darken the wooden base, it would draw the eye less and should provide more "focus" on the other elements, so to speak. Just a thought...

[Gruftlord]

I think it looks good. Note that if you darken the wooden base, it would draw the eye less and should provide more "focus" on the other elements, so to speak. Just a thought...

 

yes, some partial texture darkening will go a long way in simulation vertex colors and/or SSAO.

 

also you might think about a noise filter added to the textures. the textures from bioware have a sort of grainy look, and adding some noise to a texture will help to blend the object with its surrounding. it also helps to fake a bit of detail that is otherwise lost due to the lack of normal mapping in NWN.

 

i'm thinking of something like this:

http://docs.gimp.org...-hsv-noise.html

the example shown in the link is bad, but the ground in the image shows the strength of such a filter. you might want to give it a try.

 

if you are concerned about texture size, dds compression will reduce it by a factor of roughly 4 iirc (so a dds compressed 512^2 texture has a comparable file size to a 256^2 tga)

[henesua]

Thanks for the advice. I'll look at using a DDS since I am concerned about texture size.

 

Meanwhile... working on the table.

[Gruftlord]

i tried myself in an alternative texture for your microscope. i used your 512 pixel texture, downscaled it to 256 and run an HSV filter over it twice.

 

 

haven't tried it in-game, but you can give it a try if you want. it might give a better blend with the vanilla look

[henesua]

Gruftlord, I appreciate you going the extra mile there, and if you wish to reskin the microscope, have at it. I can get around to uploading the model if anyone wants to give it a try. At present I'd like to work on the table.

[Gruftlord]

oh yes please, i'd like to give it a try. textures are pretty much all i can do, so i appreciate being given the offer to contribute something to ccc. thank you!

i'm not really good with the CK, so i guess it'd cost me half the time i got tomorrow evening to fiddle with the texture, just to get the model to show up in game. if you could upload the module with the placed microscope as well, that would be really decent.

[henesua]

No problem, it'll take me a day to get that uploaded. The model I have in my dropbox is not the most recent so what I'll do is when I am done with real life stuff today I will create a copy for reskinning, and upload it to dropbox with my textures for it. I might include a PDF of the UV Map too, so it can be paint by numbers if you want.

 

This is what the CCC is about. So I say have at it.

[henesua]

I have put together a microscope modding kit and posted on dropbox for anyone to download. This is the alternate microscope (ccc_scope_alt) to the one I will be contributing to the challenge.

 

Included is a hak, module, several textures, a blender model, and a PDF of the UV map. All textures are at 512x512. The alpha layer in the texture in the HAK is currently crappy, and so you might want to redo the thing. Its focus is to make the glass elements and some of the metal reflective.

 

Anyway, have at it and enjoy.

[MerricksDad]

As requested: Craniometer