Messages

181

Artwork / Alien hoverbot

« on: April 22, 2007, 08:38:52 pm »

Here's a link to the latest .blend file, in case I disappear or something. (Hopefully not! )

Edit: The link helps. https://webdisk.ucalgary.ca/~djetowns/public_html/misc_files/UFO_AI/hoverbot_lightcannon_v11.blend

182

Feature Requests / UFO: AI Chryssalid Successor? Alien Concept: Hydra

« on: April 20, 2007, 06:19:36 am »

(as opposed the the Reaper...did anyone EVER have one of those stupid things do ANYTHING damaging to a member of their team?).

I did. Spawned right underneath my Skyranger, and I had at least 2 more within striking distance of the ramp, and 3 or 4 floaters around there, too.
I managed to stick a stun rod into that reaper (which didn't do anything) but it still munched up one or two of my guys.

Moral of the story: If the LZ is too hot, take off and find a better spot. (Ie: reload. )

183

Artwork / Video material - Intro,gameplay,trailer

« on: April 18, 2007, 09:44:48 pm »

On the rendering side, it's almost always best to render to a sequence of images. That way if something goes kaput, or there are a few frames messed up, it's easy to just continue or rerender those few frames. (With blender, importing a sequence of images into the compositor is really simple, too.)

I didn't know .avi's could have alpha. That's neat.

184

Artwork / Alien hoverbot

« on: April 18, 2007, 09:38:44 pm »

Maybe someone else still has them?

Nope, the ftp server got hacked.
It's probably for the best, anyways. If I remade it, I would do it a lot differently and it would be a lot better.

Well, if you read the world history on the wiki or inside the game, there has been a lot of strife and collapse worldwide.

Yep, that's what I was thinking.

I'm following the idea that we're advancing, but not quite as quickly as most people seem to think or hope for. I mean, all over the 20th century, people were convinced that we'd have artificial-gravity space stations and permanent moonbases by 1984, 1999, 2001 etc. etc. None of that has materialised. We're supposed to be making second manned missions to Jupiter in 2010, for pity's sake. :p

Well, I believe we could have been making manned missions to Jupiter if there was a stronger focus on it - just look how quickly we got to the moon when we tried to.

Brilliant work, mate, I really like how you've pulled together that plasma gun. The spinning fan was not what I had in mind (which was static turbofan blades) but it works well enough. If only we had animated texture support.

There's the neat bit . The textures themselves aren't animated, but the disks they're textured onto are.
(I  might have to up the polycount of the disks, though. 8-sides is enough to not make a seal inside and to poke holes on the outside.)

hmm it doesn't looks like very extraterrestrial,

Alien textures will make it look a lot more, uh, alien.

Maybe fans are too large, in my opinion they should look a little more circular and thinner, like terminator 3 skynet model.

My only real objection to the model is the size of the turbines; other than that the model's fine, though I personally would go with a frame more reminiscent of the scanners from HL2.

If you see at the top of the thread, the original design had thin fans instead of turbines. I had two rings instead of one to make it more visually interesting. Of course, Winter's the Art Lead, so what he says goes.

Regarding the 2 spikes popping from the bottom of the plane, I assume they are done for planes stability purpose.

Uhh... sure? Let's go with that.  
Actually, the spikes are there to make it look dangerous. Angular and spikey make it look dangerous.
I suppose it also gives it ramming options once it's out of ammo.

Whats the pointy bits at the front for? Do they ram people and impale them on spikes?

Like I said, they're dangerous-looking.

It doesn't seem to have any kind of stability, wouldn't it pitch backwards and forwards on its axis?

On a very last note, how is this plane supposed to deal with ground height ?

The engines are located along the center of gravity - just like an Osprey or a Firefly.
The main body can pitch up and pitch down without having any effect on its movement. (If bits of hull weren't in the way it could pitch a full 360 degrees in place.)

It maneuvers through thrust vectoring. The engines rotate to give yaw forces, and differential thrust provides roll.
To give pitch control, there's thrust vectoring at the bottoms of the engines.

Ooh! I just figured out how it works, too! Air forced into the nozzle from the sides can deflect thrust up to 15 degrees.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrust_vectoring

Now being researched, fluidic injection nozzles divert thrust via fluid effects[1][2][3]. Tests show that air forced into a jet engine exhaust stream can deflect thrust up to 15 degrees.

On a somewhat related note, this kind of machine must be cleaned from time to time, thus need to land in the hangar, maybe small landing gear or somehting similar need to be attached to it ?

There are actually two long 'feet' on the bottom of the machine. In the BFG version (The original one with a gun mounted between the main prongs) those feet were the lowest objects - thus the hoverbot could just land.
In the plasmagun version, the gun is the lowest object, and I haven't got around to updating the feet yet.
Actually, maybe the turret retracts or rotates upward... This would keep the feet from becoming oversised, and provides another reason for the white 'core' to be in there.

Ooooh, Preeettty toys. Me wants toy. MAKE TOY!

Mwa ha ha, I have the .blend version. The gun automatically tracks a target I have set up. (I can spend minutes just moving the object around and watching the gun go around to track it. )

185

Artwork / Alien hoverbot

« on: April 18, 2007, 02:45:05 am »

Very nice. Were you inspired by the hoverbot I proposed? So far the model looks excellent. However I would definitely recommend substituting the fan turbines for something sleeker and more advanced, cylindrical anti-grav units that emit a light blue glow (similar to the colouration of the plasma blasts)  perhaps?

Been awhile since we worked together on X-Com Last Hope Pshawn, it's nice to see you again.

Hey, Last Hope! I wish that didn't collapse. (I also wish I didn't lose the source files for my alien base.)

Actually, I had this design in my head for a few weeks, now. It borrows more from here: http://ufoai.ninex.info/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=669&start=0, but I worked on integrating the dev's ideas more. They also had the requirement for a hoverbot already, here: http://ufoai.ninex.info/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1302

As far as technological progress goes, maybe there was a "semi-dark" age in regards to technology - the threat of political, environmental, and economic collapse could have taken funding away from research on a global scale.

Or maybe technology follows more of a gaussian model than an exponential one. Evolutionary refinements in technology can only go so far without a revolutionary breakthrough, as we start running into physical limits. (ie: microchips with transistors/circuits just atoms in diameter.)

Either way, there's been some progress made on this model:


Edit: And now I have a fan thing that looks spinny:

186

Artwork / Alien hoverbot

« on: April 17, 2007, 09:21:23 pm »

Here's a very quick blockup of an alien hoverbot:



The side things are more fans than turbines, though. They rotate around to provide foward/reverse/turning motions.

The gun is garbage - it's just there to show where the gun goes. I also figured that having the gun turret on top would make it more difficult to fire at humans that are downward.

187

Artwork / Video material - Intro,gameplay,trailer

« on: April 17, 2007, 08:16:36 pm »

Oh, yeah... post-pro. I'm used to doing everything I can within blender that sometimes I forget about post-pro.

Unfortunately, I only have two of the aircraft ready to go. I've been working on upping the resolution of the Saracen (And adding landing gear and weapons bays and other animatable stuff), and I designed my Stingray to be high-poly and animatable from the start. I don't know if the Stingray has much of a place in the intro, though, as it's a alien-human hybrid craft that gets developed much later in the game.

I can get some simple flying Saracen done easily. Can you take a stream of .png files for the animation, or should it have a specific codec?

188

Artwork / Possible new craft

« on: April 17, 2007, 07:58:30 pm »

I was already planning on blocking out a couple designs for the hovernet. (That's what the flying robot is, right?)

My skills aren't quite up to animating organic thingies, yet, but mechanical stuff I can do.

189

Artwork / Possible new craft

« on: April 17, 2007, 02:20:07 am »

Release!

After working on the model over IRC with Winter, the textures for the game release were finalized. (I still want to throw on more paint decals for renders and that, but they're likely to be too small to matter in-game.)

All the files can be found here:

https://webdisk.ucalgary.ca/~djetowns/public_html/misc_files/UFO_AI/

The two important files are stingray_lopo_flightmodel.blend and stingray_texture_lores.jpg.
The model is optimised for flight, with everything sealed together.
The polycount is a bit higher than before, at 1752 triangles.

Be careful before downloading the source .xcf file if you're on dialup - it's a whopping 33 Megs! It got this big because it's a 2048x2048 image with 27 layers.

The high-res version of the .blend needs a bit of documentation. Many of the components are on separate layers, and are locked so that the only way to move them is through the armature on layer 2.

What other model types do you need? The high-res version has animatable engines, thrusters, bay doors, landing gear, and weapon hardpoints. (The hardpoint extends down to the bottom of the bay to allow things like cannons and rocket pods to be concealed inside the weapon bay.) It's easy enough to optimize models of any combinations of states.

190

Artwork / Video material - Intro,gameplay,trailer

« on: April 16, 2007, 11:42:02 pm »

Sounds good.
I am already planning on rendering stills of the aircraft for loading screens and that. It won't be too much more work to make some quick animations of the aircraft.

191

Artwork / question about autopsy

« on: April 16, 2007, 11:30:35 pm »

I think it's a great idea. Of course, one of the team might want to OK it, too.

Personally, I think doing it in blender will be difficult. If it's for an in-game model, most of the detail will be in the textures, and you'd end up drawing everything anyways.
If it's for a high-detail still, then there's still a lot of work to go into it anyway. It's a hard project, especially if you're new to blender.

And as far as drawings go, you can take advantage of that and make a non-photorealistic drawing. Maybe like a pencil sketch, with false colour to show things like different muscles and organs.

Of course, you're the biologist, so you know much more than me about how the whole process works and how insides actually look.

192

Feature Requests / Saving during missions.

« on: April 15, 2007, 06:11:17 pm »

Ahh, I read that thread before but only skimmed the first few posts. Only partway through does it start talking about legitimate saving.

193

Artwork / Modeling

« on: April 15, 2007, 06:02:49 pm »

I think the problem is the camo features are too small. Try just enlarging the texture and angle it so we can't easily see the repeating bits.

194

Artwork / Possible new craft

« on: April 15, 2007, 05:59:22 pm »

The funny thing is that this last one I tried to get it a lot closer to the existing alien texture.



The base texture I have is actually 2048x2048. I'll shrink it down for the release version (the one above is how it looks like shrunk), but here's a clip from the wing at full detail:



I can add some of the glowy green bits, too.


Edit: comparing the two side-by-side, I can see the differences in the overlay. How was the original texture made?

Edit#2: Here's the entire wing at 512x512:

And at 2048x2048: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v388/Psawhn/Blender/stingray_texture_hires_v9.jpg

Edit#3: Got some more alien greeblies. (I know it's "Greebles," but "Greeblies" is fun to say.)






If you guys like the alien-ness, then all that's left are human decals.

(I'm so happy I figured out what GIMP's Hard Light layer setting is for: bump maps! Apply your bump map onto a 50% grey layer with Hard Light on, and it looks just as if you applied the bumpmap onto the actual image!)

195

Artwork / Polymer

« on: April 15, 2007, 03:59:31 am »

Here's a polymer I whipped up in about an hour.


(The background isn't black, it's transparent. View the image itself if you're having trouble seeing the darker ones.)
I suppose it would be for things like Aircraft Polymers. Most polymers compose long chains that loop back in on themselves. Perhaps technology is advanced enough that they can actually be woven.

I followed a couple 'rules' I remember from Chem 209, but there's no way an actual molecule like this could exist.

It's not actually textured, I just coloured the materials. It should be easy to texture, anyways. Don't even have to leave Blender to do that.

Blend is here if you actually need it.
https://webdisk.ucalgary.ca/~djetowns/public_html/misc_files/UFO_AI/molecule1.blend