A blender user introduction

[Shadosk]

Hello everyone,

I'm a french R&D engineer working in a laboratory named Inria, I'm also a 3D hobbyist with few years of experiences with Blender.

I have been contacted by Ludo38 and we discussed about this ambitious project. As a big fan of the first Age of Empire and loving history of ancient civilisation, I would be glad to contribute to the artistic assets of this game.

I recently participate to a challenge organized by the site Blender Guru and my contribution (babylon gardens) has been posted on this forum, you can have a look of my skills on my Deviant art page (http://shadosk.deviantart.com/).

I can work on modelling buildings and units with rigging and skinning, textures and eventually animations, I would like to know where to start.

Shad

[Lion.Kanzen]

Check forum art, we have a deviant page.

[Gallaecio]

http://shadosk.deviantart.com/art/Hanging-Gardens-of-Babylon-402346009

Looks awesome!

[Lion.Kanzen]

Incredible. Wow. Spy teak with Enrique Ludo or Pureon even with Michael(mythos)

[Enrique]

Hello Shadosk! Welcome to the forums!

Impressive portfolio! I love your characters design and models!

Which is your primary interest in modelling? organic/nature assets? hard-surface buildings?

We've actually paused work on renewing our unit meshes due to some problems on blender's collada exporter with bones, but we'll need new meshes and animations eventually, so if you have animation experience will be very useful in the near future.

We're currently developing the Ptolemaic kingdom faction. We need buildings models and unit textures. I've started some of them already, but there's a lot of them left to do if you are interested. There are a bunch of sources and references in this thread: http://www.wildfireg...showtopic=16960

Here is the thread of the buildings I started, so you can see the direction we're aiming: http://www.wildfireg...showtopic=17296

Here's a list of the buildings that nobody is working on yet:

-blacksmith

-docks

-corral

-library

-market

-lighthouse

-military settlement

I recommend you to download the game and check it out to get the feel of the general art direction (if you haven't done that yet ). You can use the map editor (called Atlas) to see all the buildings and units currently in-game. We're looking to have similar building layouts for each building type, but different style for each faction. If you want more info, here's the (outdated) Art design document: http://trac.wildfire...tDesignDocument (things like polycount are really outdated)

Some tips/requirements of the engine:

- The engine does not render double-faced polys, so if you want a polygon with both faces rendered, you need to duplicate it and flip the normals.

- The engine do not tile the textures like blender does, so when UV mapping, keep the UV islands within the texture space

- We use two UV coordinates, one with overlapping UVs for diffuse, normal/parallax and specularity and another non-overlapping for AO maps

- Building models need to extend below the ground (-Z axis) because it can be visible when the building is constructed in uneven terrain

- Triangle count for big buildings should not be higher than 8k-9k, and around 5k-7k for smaller ones

- To get the correct scale is very useful to import a building from the game into blender as a reference.

I think that's all for now. Once you know what you want to do, you can open a thread in the Art forum starting with "===[TASK]===" There you can post any questions, WIPs for critique/review, etc.

Looking forward to see your work!

[Ludo38]

Here is a recent forum thread about the Blender Guru "ancient civ" contest that Shadosk's mentioning.

Bienvenue Shadosk / Romain !

[Shadosk]

Thanks

Which is your primary interest in modelling? organic/nature assets? hard-surface buildings?

To start I would like to work on hard surface buildings, I currently play with the map editor to get a good overview of the style and level of details. I there a repository with shared texture, model templates and models in DAE format?

[feneur]

Thanks

To start I would like to work on hard surface buildings, I currently play with the map editor to get a good overview of the style and level of details. I there a repository with shared texture, model templates and models in DAE format?

They're all in the SVN, please see http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/TortoiseSVN_Guide for more info (it does mention a specific piece of software, but if you're e.g. on Linux and can only get some other SVN software it should still be possible to follow most of it). If something is unclear please ask here or in the IRC channel: http://webchat.quakenet.org/?channels=0ad-dev and we'll try to help you. I don't think there are any model templates though, I believe most modelers simply import an existing model to get an idea of scale etc.

[Enrique]

As Erik said, you can access to the SVN online version (or downloading it), but you also have them in the game's folder:

The game's buildings are usually divided in different .dae files (one per diffuse texture used)
Usually, they consist in one main ".dae" file located in the game's folder "binaries/data/mods/public/art/meshes/structural" and one or more ".dae" children (props) that are attached to the main file, this "prop" daes are located in "meshes/props". (this is not always the case)

You can find the textures in "binaries/data/mods/public/art/textures/skins/structural/" and ".../skins/props/". We normally use two 1024 textures for each civilization structures called "struct_civname" and the props textures are for any other kind of textures for props and such that we want to use.

[feneur]

As Erik said, you can access to the SVN online version (or downloading it), but you also have them in the game's folder:

The game's buildings are usually divided in different .dae files (one per diffuse texture used)

Usually, they consist in one main ".dae" file located in the game's folder "binaries/data/mods/public/art/meshes/structural" and one or more ".dae" children (props) that are attached to the main file, this "prop" daes are located in "meshes/props". (this is not always the case)

You can find the textures in "binaries/data/mods/public/art/textures/skins/structural/" and ".../skins/props/". We normally use two 1024 textures for each civilization structures called "struct_civname" and the props textures are for any other kind of textures for props and such that we want to use.

In the game's folder the textures aren't available as PNGs though iirc? Also, the building meshes are not available as .DAEs there, so the SVN is a much better place to look (And really more or less necessary if someone is the least serious about being a part of the development )

[Shadosk]

Ok,

Check out in progress

[xan2622]

Hi Shadosk.

Do you have another portfolio somewhere else? (artstation.. ?) It seems that your deviantart account has been deactivated.

[feneur]

27 minutes ago, xanax said:

Hi Shadosk.

Do you have another portfolio somewhere else? (artstation.. ?) It seems that your deviantart account has been deactivated.

Considering that he hasn't logged in to the forums for four years, it's unlikely that you will get a reply