Still alive

Hey!

Quite a long time without any communication about the projet... sorry!

First, the project is not dead. Well in fact it died. For the 2 time. But it came back to life as it did previously, long before the creation of this dev blog.

The project is now taking a new direction. Up to now, i used to code the entire game using a simple (yet powerfull) engine : Yna. That was a great journey. With this engine I could learn a lot of things about 3D. But Alone in Space requires a huge amount work. And it turned out that Yna was too much "simple" (no offense here) for my needs.

So i did my mourning. The last months of work were not lost at all. I learn so much things with this game engine (thanks to +Yannick Comte) that I'm now much more comfortable with 3D programming, management, etc...

Some people I know are using Unity to create games but I never really listened to them (yes, i'm completely stubborn). I watched some tutorial videos. Then tried the editor and... mind blowing fact : it took me about 3 hours to get the same result than after about a month of work previously. It was settled : I will use Unity.

Here is a quick wallpaper made with a new 3D model for the Anti-matter Accelerator to celebrate this new born. Cheers!

Texturing vs 3D details

I wasn't very involved the past days weeks. I had to work on another game project and also do things i never did before. And everything new to you is very tiring... The new routines are on the road. There is still a lot of work to do but it will be usefull for Alone in Space in the future so... That's not a time waste!

As I could enhance my 3D skills recently, I was adding more and more details to my 3D models. More and more faces for better rendering. Things like my last spaceship. But hey, I have to create 3D models for buildings, and there will be a lot of them. So If I continue to add details, the game will be unplayable because of big lags due to excessive details.

So I though about how I could get betters visuals without adding details. The answer is simple : textures and shaders. Up to now, I was using plain textures on faces. That's nice but huh... May be too much simplistic. Working on textures is the first step.

The guinea pig for this experimentation was the Command Center. I restarted something weeks ago but that was crappy. I started from 0 and here is the model without textures :

That's really simple. There is a lot of faces as it is a half sphere like shape, but the overall structure is quite simple. From this, I worked on texturing it to add details. Here is the result :

That's very interesting and also satisfying : not a lot of polygon, but still a nice looking structure. I'll have to gather more detail textures so this will be quite hard (I only use free textures for now).

Hard but not impossible.

Hyper Spaceship

Big work done on the Hyper Spaceship lately. If you follow the Google + page, you could see the work in progress during the few last days. If you didn't, well, you can go there and see it afterwards!

Making this ship was great. The more I use Blender, the more I love it. And I'm definitively sure that I only use 1 or 2% of the software possibilities... As I learn how to use it, models get better. That's nice! Here is renders of the new Hyper Spaceship. They're in high quality (1920x1080) so enjoy!

Things are getting epic

My 3D modeling skills are getting higher and higher each day. I had ta make a better model for the Hyper Spaceship... The spaceships models will not be used as is but will be rendered into simple 2D textures for use in the game so I was completely free to make them very detailed. Here is the first attempt :

And to get an overview, this was the old one :

The new model is completely epic compared to the first one!

Metal Plant blue prints

The Metal Plant is now ready to use! Textures used are simple and it looks nice. When all structures will be redesigned, I'll adjust colors for them to be easily identiable.

On and on...

3D, again and again! Still not boring (luckily!). The Carbon Mine model is now textured.Yellow and black are getting well together :

And I also could work on the Metal Plant Model which is very nice now :

And I started working on the Solar Plant as well :

Work in Progress

Nothing really interesting to show these days. I worked a lot on YNA to improve the GUI system. That's not direct work on Alone in Space but not useless. I'll need these improvements in order to create the UI.

Anyway, I'm still working on 3D models. Here are the 2 I'm currently designing :

First, an advanced one : the Carbon Mine. I really love this one. The model is ready for cleaning and texturing.

And the second one is a Metal Plant. It's an early preview, the global architecture is not done yet :

Texturing

Texturing is important in games. I played so mush games with texture glitches that I just cannot allow myself to do crappy things with my models. Even now, when I play games, I take a look at textures in search of some defect in alignment or anything else strange. I often find some and It make me smile.

I want it perfect. No defect, correct alignment. Perfect. And to get perfect I had to practice. As you could see in previous posts. I made a lot of models getting more and more complex. Creating a 3D model is not as complicated as it seemed first. However, after creating the model, the next process is to cut all faces to make the UV-mapping.

And then, you have to say "Hello" to a bunch of conception problems. But that's not problems you can anticipate at first. You have to try, get stuck in glitchs, and understand the whole mechanics of unwraping. For example, I had to create the Shuttle UV texture 3 times! I created the UV mapping and started to apply textures. And then notices there was some faces overlapping. This is how I reacted (really) :

- So I hade to make the UV again an move all textures... And repeat! I got it a second time with a freaking small bunch of crap due to cutting misplacement. To be honest, I insulted Blender. I also insulted myself for not being rigorous enough. But I learnt a lot during this long day. Some simple things that you can only learn by failing :

- Take your time to create the model. Don't hurry or you will loose a lot of time afterwards fixing all mistakes. Start to think about how it will look like in the end. Think about the textures you want to apply. This will have an impact on how you'll add faces on your model to get a better final result.

- Start creating the UV mapping only when you're sure that you will no more modify the model. Otherwise you will have to recreate the entire mapping or do it by hand and adapt all other elements for your new faces to get inside the mapping. The second way is suicide. The automatic UV cutter is powerfull, so use it.

- When the first UV mapping is done, iterate unwrapping/marking seams until the base unwrap has no more overlap and seems easy to add textures on. Then you have to clean it. The cut is never perfectly aligned. The more your model will be complex, the more you will have to clean the UV. This part of the work is important to get the mapping as clean and orthogonal as possible. Simple fact : rotating a texture reduces it's quality. So having vertical or horizontal blocs is perfect for applying textures.

- When the UV is done, the last part is just fun. Add textures and test how it looks like.

This is the kind of experience you can only get by :

1. Trying new things
2. Failing 
3. Thinking about why you failed
4. Going to step 1 until you get the trick

This is a simple cycle but most people stop at the second one and give up. I didn't. Like I said in a previous post : I'm tenacious! So here is an example of UV mapping I'm now able to do, and I'm proud of it, event if I can get it better (I'm still working on it) :

Warehouse v3

Shuttle ready to go

Hey there!

Just a little drop to show advancement on the Shuttle : that's done! This time I used real textures (instead of plain colors) and the result is nice. I'll may be change my mind about doing some cell shading rendering...

Shuttle

To learn how to create a spaceship with Blender I followed some video tutorials like said in a previous post and created some visual prototype of what I wanted for the Shuttle space craft. I had time to kill so I recreated it withy all things I learnt. Here it is :

This model is highly detailed. It will be used in animations or rendered in 2D images. Next step is UV mapping and texturing.

3D improving

Hey!

During the last days I could train and improve my 3D skills. Now that I know how to create better models, I started making new assets. For now, I created only two models but more will come later.

No tease this time, here are some images :

Old warehouse

New warehouse

Old antimatter accelerator

New antimatter accelerator

Models are getting more complex and more colorful. You may notice that textures are juste plain colors with simple shapes. I want to test rendering a whole colony with this style. If the result is great, then I'll create all 3D assets like that.

Stay in touch for another assets.