Ludo38

Thanks Dolomiti for starting this thread. New screenshots are very useful to show the game around. @NotASpartan : wow, yours are really super cool !! Well, we are not supposed to show the game from that point of view (the camera is up in the air in the normal gaming), but anyway it's still good to see how some moments in the game can look that good. I don't understand how you got this dark and misty atmosphere in the first screenshot. How did you get it ? What's the map ? You seem to have some great savegames and as you produce lots of screenshots, could you next time provide us some normal game POV shots of your battles ?

Hi all, Blender Guru just made a cool contest for artworks on the Ancient Civ topic, and some of them are worth looking : http://www.blenderguru.com/ancient-civilization-results/ I especially enjoy these three :

Excellent work Enrique. I just wonder about the cow skull... It evokes american westerns a lot, and I'm not sure if it suits the Celt world... Maybe having it as a metal statue instead would increase the Celt idea.

The Horse is now digged into the ground. Next, I'll have the texture to fade from the white to the green and I will characterize the shape of that hill a little more. Can someone give me a link to the ground textures of the Celt maps ? I'd like to look at them closely to create a hill texture that fits on it correctly.

Yes, that's what I want to reach next. I think I know how to do it rather easily. Thank you. Yeah, I'm finally feeling at ease with it. That said, building slightly more complex structures and dealing with tricky texturing still needs to be done. Soon.

Now here comes the White Horse! This is a first draft. I already have ideas to make it better, especially to give some lower relief to the horse itself, making it look a little sunk into the hill. For now, I am using a basic repeated texture, but when the hill and the horse will be shaped right, I will build a UV skin to give more character to the wonder and improve the transition between grass and white gravel. Critics, comments and Blender advices are much welcome.

Welcome Victor !

Nice topic! Good idea indeed to produce a 3D and HD version of the game's logo for new uses. I'm fond of its design, so, personally, I would really keep 0 A.D.'s logo just like that, elegant and simple as it is, with the gold color that is the best way to express this sort of "golden age" we all want to find into the game. Nonetheless, I am curious to see if there are ways to improve it if someone's got ideas. Anyway, I think we should stick to this "graceful design", theses thin lines. A heavier and thicker design could make sense in the 2nd edition as the theme of "Empires Besieged" calls darker times, a "fall from grace" somehow.. The Pyrogenesis logo could be improved. The flames/bear claw is an excellent idea and should be kept, but it could be redesigned with more character, maybe a texture or a slight 3D feeling instead of a flat drawing. As it is the game's engine logo, its mission is to represent the power and the beauty the engines does allow. Well, I'm not among those who know the engine well, so, question : what characterizes Pyrogenesis the most? What makes it different than game engines?

Good work Lordgood! I'm so glad to see you're now so at ease with Blender! I don't regret having invited you to participate to 0 A.D. !

Welcome Aleksandar !

Thank you my friend ! I couldn't resist to point you to this very funny song about Stonehenge :

Lordgood is an epic guy in every way !!

Hello Jānis, Welcome to Wildfire Games! Your references are very good, and as Enrique said it, especially in term of texturing. I also enjoy this curvy building you did. I am new on Blender and am looking forward to modelizing similar shapes. I'm on my way to master the program's toolbox. I like how your first 0 A.D. model is going. Keep it up, and feel at home here !

Can't wait to see it coming to life.

For the Horse, yes, I have ideas to experiment, it's going to be rather fun.

Unless someone is already working on it, I'm about to make the Uffington White Horse on Blender. I see the wonder like that : a hill with the horse at the top, slightly oriented on a side of the hill, so that we don't see it equally from every directions. What 0AD grass texture can be used ? I have my own stock of grass texture but if the horse's hill must connect seamlessly to the rest of the map, it's going to need the map's main texture. EDIT : my Stonehenge model has just been baked by Enrique. He's going to make the normal and specular map for it soon, and it will be commited. Soon coming to a map near you ! Here is how it looks for now, without the normal and spec maps :

Good reference work Lion! Enrique has helped me to export and test the Stonehenge model. (it's my first 3D in-game import experience!) and it worked, the model opened in Atlas, but there are a few texture issues to fix. No big deal. The model might be commited in about 2 hours.

@Mythos_Ruler : here is the grass texture : It's tileable.

I like the idea of a natural sanctuary for the Celts, at least for one the Celts tribes (Gauls ?). The trees were divine symbols to them, and a giant oak would have been a kind of Wonder to them. Of course, you don't build an oak, and anyway, an oak takes ages to reach a massive size. But why not trying to design a unique kind of Wonder : instead of building a structure, the builders could shape a ditch around a mound, and at its top, they would sow seeds of (or plant young) oaks and we would have one or several oaks (an oak circle ?) growing (accelerated, of course) and becoming pretty massive (as a big building) and the Wonder's finishes would be a myriad of relic-kind of stuffs and colorful ribbons hanging in the branches, that the builders would put on the trees, like what we can see sometimes on sacred trees throughout the world (we see that in the Pagan culture). It could be completed also with a few statues or small standing stones. I acknowledge the game's economic and constructive logic doesn't allow the planting of trees with the ressources aimed for a Wonder (stone, wood, gold, etc), but such "natural" wonder would be the closest representation we could get to what the Celts really worshipped, and it will surely give a unique sense of wonder in a Celt settlement. Also, if we consider that the biggest structures in the game are sometimes the kind that actually took years to build (temples, hanging gardens, etc), then the growing time of a tree seems almost acceptable. Even more if we imagine a little bit of Celt magic that could have make trees grow faster... The destruction of such wonder would be as possible as for the other wonders : trees burning and falling + collapse of the mound, back to original ground shape. I admit this idea is pretty difficult to put into the game, but well, I share it anyway. Here's an interesting page on a similar kind of ancient sacred site, mixing tree with land shaping. And here's the kind of oak I think of :

Yes, the ground texture can be used for 0 A.D. I have to leave in 20min and will be back tomorrow mid-morning (french time I mean), and I will probably have the time to do all the things to have it in. As it's my first 3D work for 0AD, I don't know much how you proceed to have it working fine in-game. I'll need some brief. If I end up meeting too many issues, I will post the model and texture and will leave the last details to an expert, to be sure it's done tomorrow.

Hi all, I've spend the day improving a lot my Stonehenge model, by making a more realistically scaled texture (still 1024px wide) and by making the profile of each stone random as it should be for a megalithic structure. It was a lot of work to get this all looking real, but I'm, well, very happy with the way it looks now. And as always, I've had some fun with warm light atmospheres. For the next post, I rescale the model to the size of the wonders. For what comes after that, I'm going to need some help, how to test it into the game and how to deal with the texture skin file, shadow map, etc.

Wow, beautiful work!

Thanks Lion!

Alright, I've finally been able to tame the UV mapping ! I've build a large texture image with many actual Stonehenge surface photos so that I get a wide surface on which I can dispatch the several blocks without losing too much of the rock's real texture scale. But still, the texture is a bit blurry. I'll maybe try another way to have it even sharper. For the use in Blender, I've resized down the texture to 1024x1024. The model is still not scaled to 0AD's, because the array modifier didn't allowed me to rescale the model properly. I'll do that next, now the array is applied for good.

Hi, Just wanted to say that I am now working on finishing my model of Stonehenge. Enrique, thank you very much for the advices, that are really helpful in the process. I think I post you an update before tomorrow.