Fantastic 3D Caves In Only 10 Minutes!

I made a test piece of track to see if I could get the process down for making good looking caves. It was way easier than I thought and produced fantastic results. And the best part is I did it with no textures at all!

A simple and easy to make cave.

It was easy to make and the process is simple. I took a cylinder and cut off most of the bottom half of it. Then extruded it several times and angled the joints correctly. Then I smoothed it once, and hollowed out the center with a simple command in Wings 3D. I hid all the parts I didn't want to work with and selected all of the horizontal lines of the inside of the cave, then cut them all into 4 parts and connected all the dots. This makes pretty much all of the polygons more or less square instead of really long rectangles. I then hid the floor since I wanted it to turn out more smooth than the walls. I then use a command to select 20% of the edges of the cave walls and moved them all a little bit to make the cave look more rough. I then smoothed the cave walls again. After that all I had to do was unhide the floor and select 20% of the vertices and move them a little bit. This made the floor look a little more natural. It looks pretty great and the polygon count isn't as high as I thought it would need to be. With todays average hardware a computer can be expected to display at least half of a million polygons at once. There is even a scene in Oblivion that shows nearly two million, and my computer never even skips. The simple piece I made is larger than the player will usually see at once and is only about twenty thousand polygons. Of course I'm not going to make anything like this in an outside setting, but for a tight corridor this really works well.

A second look

Completed Racer

I finally decided to work on my game again. Here is a picture of a completed racing vehicle. I decided to use only material colors on it so the player can customize the colors very easily. There are four customizable colors on this racer. The two primary colors of the racer, a single color for the cockpit, and a metalic color for the details. It kinda looks like a mouse head if you look at it the right way. I'll call that an unintentional cute side effect. Some of the racer designs will look like animals intentionally, like the sea turtle racer I designed a few months ago.

A fancy new racing vehicle!

One thing I really enjoy is when a game can pull off a good atmosphere. I strongly believe the best way to do that is with good lighting. In this case I plan on having a lot of dark places in tracks where you would depend on your own headlights. But also a great feature would be to have tail lights too! Of course the most important lighting will be proper lighting of the levels.

This racer even has headlights and tail lights!

Unfortunately because of time constraints and lack of intense will power I will probably be relying intensely on material colors for most assets and use very few textures. But this makes good lighting much more important. If its done right I can still make the game look fantastic with very few textures. I will likely have to use a lot of textures on the race courses though.

The design for the Sea Turtle Racer I mentioned earlier.

I may need to redesign this Sea Turtle Racer a bit though. I think its arms turned out way too large and its midsection way too skinny. But its a neat first draft and something fun to think about.

Finished Models for Earth and Mars!

I've got more buildings done! I tend to pull my inspiration from anywhere I can find any. For instance the large twisted building is based off of a building in Sim City 2000 Gold edition, only available in a futuristic texture pack.

Finished models for Earth

The Large Twisted Apartment Complex was made with 19 pieces. I started by modeling the first floor and then I textured it. Afterwards I copied it 14 times and shrunk each floor a little more than the previous floor. Then I rotated the floors to give it a twisted look. I also experimented with UV mapping tecniques with the dome which allowed me to make a dome shaped house you can see on the bottom right.

I have also finished a couple models I plan to use on Mars!

Finished models for Mars!

The larger building is the corporate headquarters of Mars Manufacturing, the biggest company on Mars and one of the manufacturers of the parts and upgrades the player will be buying or winning throughout the game. The player will also be able to win them as a sponsor to recieve bigger rewards from winning a race and possably a discount on their parts. The building is kind of crown shaped and is larger at the top than at the bottom which will make it look like it is towering over you and is an impressive sight to see. I may change the name of the company to something more edgy later and give it a marketing campaign so players may see their advertisements in the game on bilboards or on jumbo TV's.

Mars Manufacturing, Solar System Heavy Weight

Its looking quite fantastic! I would have to say the art style is about solidified. It takes about 8 hours to make a building from start to finish because I make the texture by hand in a pixel art style. Here is the texture for Mars Manufacturing. I used some tricks to make the curvy parts straight on the UV map. I also make all the faces that are the same shape use the same part of the texture.

Mars Manufacturing Texture

Textures!

I took some time today to UV map and texture a building. Afterwards I transformed it into a couple other buildings so I could reuse the texture. Honestly I am quite impressed with how it came out. I really didn't think it would come out so well half way in. The texture is very simple and resembles line art or pixel art. Putting in small highlights in the right areas really made it all come togeather.

Kerkythea rendering of 3 futuristic apartment complexes

Building Assets

Many futuristic buildings were modeled by RemixedCat and I today. We went wild just playing around with neat building shapes and kicked ideas around all day. I would have to say it was all quite fruitful! We came up with a pretty good style and the buildings we modeled look great! Usually what we do is model most of the assets and come back and texture the ones we decide to use. So I will show some textured buildings later when we hit that step.

Creating Internal Environments: Part 1

Its getting closer to that time of year again! One of my favorites! HALLOWEEN!! So to keep with the holiday spirit I thought I would make a Catacombs for all kinds of undead to hobble around in. I'll be documenting my process to reveal it to you as your trick or treat candy! Enjoy!

First I started with an idea and a simple story for it. The idea is a Catacombs behind the Church in my first city I'm making. The story for it is a Necromancer broke in and started making undead from all of the corpses laying around inside. Your job? You guessed it! Go slaughter some zombies and skeletons, and kick out that Necromancer! So before the player gets to bash in their great great grandparents' skulls, I have to make the level.

First I sketched out an idea for a layout. Because its easier for me to model in standard sizes and re-use parts, I thought it would be best if I made the level out of several of the same size parts. I color coded which rooms are the same size and labeled a few things.

Catacombs Layout Sketch

After the sketch is done I decided I should refine the idea and make it with squares of equal size. So in Wings 3d I made a 32x32 grid and colored where I wanted the floors. I then refined the layout and added some elements to enhance flow. Things like locked doors and closed gates are different colors and labeled in their material names. I then extruded all of the walls to make it look 3D.

Catacomb Layout in Wings3D

At this point I have a layout and an Idea but I needed to refine the idea and decide what style I wanted to make the catacombs in. I spent some time looking at pictures of real catacombs to get some ideas. I decided apon the look of all of my pieces such as columns and recesses based off of those pictures. To make sure I kept true to those selected elements and to make sure they looked alright together, I drew a quick sketch of all of the parts I wanted in it. I did this for each different wall. This is the wall with three casket recesses in it.

Extremely poor sketch of a wall full of caskets, scary!

Armed with a sketch of all of the elements I needed to render, I am now ready to battle my way into Wings3D! I will be putting the dungeon together in pieces, so to make things easier I proceeded to make a plain empty square wall to make all of the various walls and doorways from. This way, once I have modeled and textured all of the different walls and doorways, I can say a room is three walls by three walls wide and everything will fit together.

Untextured Model of a Catacombs Wall

Staying true to the elements I drew out, I easily completed a few walls and doorways. I had also drew out some of the things you would find within the catacombs like coffins and light fixtures. I modeled these as well and made several variations such as broken coffins or coffins with their lids off. With that done I had to go on to the hardest part of making my catacombs, texturing! Usually when you see a picture of a catacombs, the walls and decor is worn off and the place is falling apart. Thats usually because its several hundred years old. But this catacombs is a bit newer because the game is supposed to take place in a past setting, those several hundred years haven't happened yet.

Textured Model of a Catacombs Wall

At this point I'm pretty well tired out for the day. I modeled five different walls, an arched doorway, a gate, several caskets, and some light fixtures. I still need to texture most of the items but at least I textured all of the walls. It took me at least two hours to decide what textures to use on them and I had to make a couple new ones too. Fortunately since the game has more of an overhead view I do not need to make any ceilings.

I will show you the rest of the process in Part 2 once I have gotten that far. Mostly it will be about putting all of the pieces together and adding in more fine detail. Part 3 will be about importing the scene into IRREdit and adding proper lighting and lightmaps!

Realistic 3D Rendering

Sometimes I like to see the final product of my work. Wings3d does not have realistic lighting built in, but I can get photo realistic lighting and affects by rendering my model and a scene in a rendering application like Kerkythea.

Georgian Townhouse

Hey that looks very realistic! This is a Georgian style townhouse I made wile trying to emulate the 1700's Georgian style. It is actually one of the first buildings I made. My goal for that model was to see how realistic I could make it, and I needed to figure out a good work flow and process to make buildings. It was made in several pieces on purpose so I could fit them together to make a two story or two window wide version. I also made it so I could easily switch out the front door for some variation. A funny feature in this model is that you can actually open the windows!

Honestly the features of this model are overkill. It took me an entire week to make correctly but I learned a lot from it. A modular design is often used in games nowadays but it is very difficult to get the pieces to fit together. The hardest part is to get the textures to line up so it does not look like there is a seam. If I made this two stories I would likely have to reapply the brick to make it seamless. Fortunately Wings3d has a Snap Image feature that makes it easy to re texture a model like this.

When I made the Georgian Townhouse I reapplied the texture several times throughout the modeling process. Every time I changed something I reapplied the texture to see if it worked right. That was the reason it took so long for me to make it. I now complete the model entirely before I texture it at all.

I no longer use this process for the most part. Sometimes I will reuse windows or doors across several models but beyond that I make the rest of the building in one piece each time. The models I am making now for my first town are made with my own version of the Tudor style. They are architecturally fairly realistic, however I do not plan to make the next super realistic game like Crysis or Oblivion. Usually they take about an hour to make and an hour to texture. I plan to make a slightly stylized game that is intentionally slightly unrealistic, that way its not unusual to see crazy environments or neat and fun looking towns.