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 :

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.

Blender levelup

Hey!

I took some kind of holidays last few days and didn't really worked on Alone in Space. Rest is as usefull as coding nights. Leave your project as it is for a few weeks and then come back with fresh eyes and ideas.

To be honest, last days I was very unmotivated by this project, repeating to myself that I would NEVER be able to go ahead and make this dream come true.

The amount of work to do on this project is... huge. And I have to learn everything but programming. As I have no money to spend in hiring a 3D artist, I have to create my own assets. Lucky me, I'm very creative, and tenacious.

I worked the whole afternoon and night in learning how to create spaceships in Blender. Thanks to Blender Sensei for his amazing tutorials. In about 6-7 hours I learnt enough  tips to create my first spaceship model.

This is exactly what I wanted for this ship so I'm particularly proud :

Front view

Rear view

 

Side view

Bottom view

This space ship is a Shuttle. With this kind of ships, the player will be able to move resources between colonies in the same region. Notice the jaws under the ship : this ship will be able to carry 2 containers.