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

Creating Internal Environments: Part 2 Catacombs

Detailed Catacombs

In "Creating Internal Environments: Part 1" I discussed how I developed all of the parts to make my Catacombs for my game "Lost Kingdom". Now its time to put everything together! First I had to make sure all of my parts fit together seamlessly and looked good. Fortunately all it took was five walls and one pillar repeated over and over.

Catacomb Wall Pieces

I also had to make a bunch of caskets to fit in the walls and to scatter around. The idea is that a necromancer took over the city's catacombs and made a big mess wile creating a legion of undead. So some of the caskets are broken or opened.

Big Mess of Caskets

With all of the pieces and major decor finished, I had to make the level out of all of it. First I put all of the walls up where I wanted them and then put the floor in. The floor is just a block underneath each room. It took a long time to find a good texture to put on the floor. Nothing seemed to go with the walls and decor, so I severely modified a decorative floor I had hiding away in my texture collection. Gimp did wonders with it and with color correction and contrast enhancement I had the floor that I wanted.

Catacomb Walls and Floor

With the level layout done, I had to put in more detail like all of the caskets that need to go into a crypt. I have more stuff to put in such as lights, candles, and dead bodies. But those are not done yet and the bodies may not be put into the level until I am ready to put in the monsters.

Catacomb with Caskets

Filling the level with caskets took about five hours. Some are pulled out of the walls and some are broken all over the floor. Im quite happy with their arrangement, some of the rooms are such a mess that a player would walk in and go "OMGWTF happened here? And where are all of the bodies!?!" And then run around the next corner and get swarmed with zombies and skeletons.

A Big Mess of coffins!

It looks like something out of a Silent Hill game. Extremely creepy and satisfyingly dark natured. What will really set it off is proper lighting and some good creepy sounds and music! Another thing I will likely look into is making some blood to splatter on the floors and walls. I also need to place the light fixtures and candles around the level, but I will do that in IRREdit.

Wings3D is spitting and sputtering trying to cope with the size and complexity of this level. It has 211,888 polygons when it is triangulated and this is only two thirds of the level. You won't have to worry about that being high in the game though, IRRLICHT can handle that like its nothing. The last third of the level I will have to make in its own load cell, fortunately this layout makes it easy for me to do that. Once you have completed the first part of the level and have found the key, just find the right door and enter the second part of the level.

This is the first time I have made an internal environment and there are a few things to remember when making one. Scope is important. I would love to make a HUGE level completely full of details, however I don't want to spend a month on one area. When I do make a gigantic level I will use simpler pieces where I don't have to go back and put caskets in every wall recess. The more you componentize things, the quicker and easier the level will be to make. If you have an entire room completely predone it is easy to copy it and paste it somewhere else, then mess around with the decor or replace one wall to make it look different. And lastly keeping the polygon count of all of your objects low allows the level to load quicker and your 3D Editor will have less of a problem handling all of the geometry.

Wings3D: Modeling a Ruin Entrance

An entrance to some ruins. The model may be used in my game later. Modelled by RemixedCat (me) in real time with no alterations.



This may be the entrance to the catacombs andrakon showed here on this blog. I did this in real time to the song that was playing in Windows Media Player 11. I used FRAPS to capture it while it also recorded the song. It was very hard to do that before the song was over! it was very fun to do this and I will feature more videos like this later on. I will make some more improvements to this. This was just a base design that I will improve and enhance later as we need it. I hope you enjoyed this! :)

Wings3D: Modeling a 2 Story house

Time has not been altered in any way, the video is raw and unedited. Modeling done by Remixedcat (me). Porch columns were added later.

I did this in real time to the song that was playing in Windows Media Player 11. I used FRAPS to capture it while it also recorded the song. It was very hard to do that before the song was over! it was very fun to do this and I will feature more videos like this later on. Porch colums were added later as I could not decide the design, plus each porch with that house is going to be different to give the homes a custom touch! :)

Wings3D: Modeling a small Building

This building was modeled by RemixedCat (me) in about three and a half minutes.

I thought it would be very nice to show you that a small building can be done in as little as 3 minutes and 30 seconds in wings3d. I did this in real time to the song that was playing in Windows Media Player 11. I used FRAPS to capture it while it also recorded the song. It was very hard to do that before the song was over! it was very fun to do this and I will feature more videos like this later on.

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!

Wings3d: Texturing a model with the Snap Image tool

Here is a time lapse video of a small tudor style apartment building being textured in Wings3d. Each video is a little over 7:30 mins long. This took about an hour however.

Part 1

Part 2

In the video I am texturing in Wings3D by using the Snap Image command in the tools menu. I used 7 different textures on this building. Most of them are 256x256px but the two wood textures are 128x128px and the iron texture is 64x64px. This method is a bit unusual but yields great results. I will be using the same textures all over my town for most of the buildings so this should be more efficient than using one 1024x1024px texture for each building. With the snap image tool I can get a very high quality look because I can scale the image to be as small as I want. It does take a wile to do however.

The trick is getting the correct camera angle. This is especially tricky when your wood texture is horizontal and the wood beams are vertical, this is why I sometimes tilt the building on its side. Also to ensure the texture is applied uniformly, it is best done in Orthogonal view.

You can change the color of the images after you have applied them too. You can see this done at about 7:00 mins into the second movie. It is done by editing the material the image is linked to and changing the diffuse color. This shows me making the chimney bricks slightly more red.