Gearing up for some Site "B" related models - so, to get me started in that direction, here is my take on a Radio Lan shack (obviously heavily influenced by s13n1)
that was discussed earlier in his thread. More to come when work and time allows. Hope you like. The model was made in wings 3d and rendered in bryce7.
Not finished yet as I have yet to do the interior...which I have only had to time to do a sketch. Oh, and there are no textures applied as I am in no way good at creating those!
That looks really good mate!
Great attention to detail and the proportions look spot on.
I'll send you what i did of my tower structure, so you can see the interior layout and slight changes i made to the tower supports. I made a little pot belly stove inside on the right as you go in, as i figure in real life they would require one if people were spending any serious amount of time up there. It also makes for a great sleeping location too. I haven't done any serious thinking in regards to lighting fires at night to keep warm, but perhaps for the second half this could be something to consider.
I' leaning towards using a pre-defined day night cycle for the first half of the game, so that the storyline and progression for the first half can unfold with a little more drama. If this was the case, then Anne lighting a fire to keep warm would be a scripted event and purely for realism. To keep that realism up though, players would probably expect to be able to keep lighting fires at night time to keep warm while sleeping. This process could be simplified by making towers like these actual sleeping locations, and the fire lighting process automatic when you sleep in one. If your not within range of a tower when night falls, you need to get in a car or building to be sure of your safety. Sleeping out in the open is quite unrealistic unless Anne found a swag or a tent with some blankets, so i'm going to have to do some serious work on the sleeping element to come up with a good solution. Any if anyone has any suggestion, feel free to share them.
My radio tower is a pretty light on detail, because i actually made it using Worldcraft! I had an idea to use it ages ago when i was playing around with another game engine that used a Worldcraft style of editor. Its pretty limited, but easy and fun to use. I was surprised i still remember a lot of the short cuts. Man, i used to use this program almost daily for making quake levels.
Anyway, send me an email to s13n1 at hotmail dot com and ill send it to you. Just as a reference though, your work is great as it is.
It's really not hard, it just looks hard... I'm mostly self taught. I did take two Max classes in college, but for most of the projects I already knew what to do and thus passed really easily.
I learned using gMax, it's a freeware modeling program that's based off a stripped down version of 3ds Max (what I use now). It was meant to be a game creation focused version of Max but development on it ended when Autodesk bought Discreet. You can still find it around on the net if you look for it, though I had to edit my registry to get it to work.
Oh and there are TPM import and export scripts for it as well.
Some of our newer members, though, seem to like Blender, which is also free. I tried it once about 10 years ago and didn't really find it too easy to get into, but idk things change a lot over that amount of time.
Actually, I already have gMax, Blender, and 3DS Max. And it's not so much the actual modeling I'm worried about, it's more like all the things that come with it, texture making (even though I could make a texture quite easily), texture wrapping (no idea how that's done), physics, troubleshooting, dinosaur rigging, making it Trespasser-compatable (T-script), and the general time to learn to do all that.
I learnt using lightwave, making everything one vertice at a time. Create three points, select and make a triangle, repeat.
This is a great way to have absolute control over your poly counts, as making models using subdivided shapes can lead to excess poly's and the need for lots of optimizing later. There are some very good scripts for optimization these days, but they cant be trusted for maintaining proportions properly. If you used a script to lower the poly count on a high detail hand, you might find the shape of the fingers varies too much, so optimizing by hand is always a proven method.
I would recommend learning to model both ways, as it will come in handy when you need to optimize a model.
I was never big on creating U.V's for my models, i was always just interested in modeling itself. I learnt to make U.V's using Blender, and i found it a pretty nice program to use for that. It really depends on what kind of tutorial you get too, because the easier the tutorial is, the more likely you are to learn that particular program. I've come across some shocking tutorials that skip over some very basic steps and they ruin it completely.
Watch some vids on youtube, and when you come across one that makes sense to you, give that program a try.
