FreeOrion

hello everyone.
I have been following free orion for a few years now (3-4 I think) on and off waiting to see how the project progresses. Well, now I have decided to offer some of my help. I can do 3d modelling in blender, both for icons and 3d models. I am doing this in my spare time as a hobby, and I am not a full time artist, so the work may not be perhaps to the highest of standards, but I am improving continuously. At the moment I am working on the Galactic Armory mod for Star ruler, and I have done nearly all of the new icons for the 1.9.2 GA build. This of course would take precedence on any work for orion, but I think there may be a long period now where they might not need me, as most of the development for 2.0 is coding. So.. yeah I decided to offer my help to you guys.
Sorry for creating a new topic for this, I tried following the links on wiki and on forums, but there is so many links around I got lost. I am sure someone can direct me to the right place and then you can delete the topic.

For reference, check out the Star ruler GA forums to see my icon art. >> http://forums.blind-mind.com/index.php?topic=5290.0

Welcome!

The main 3D thing we need right now is ship models, a lot of what we have right now in the game are placeholders.

It is fine to start a thread. Feel free to post whatever questions you have.

Excellent. Well hold tight guys, I am in a texturing boot camp. Icon art is all fine, but we cannot quite have models of 25 000 polygons flying around the place. I am at the moment doing some work for Star ruler and I can say I am levelling up my texturing skills quite nicely. Right now I was making a megastructure for a planet. It is sort of a orbital base that goes all around the planet, and I have already learned crapton about texturing low polygon meshes. See I have started with the blender modelling suite only few moths ago, so it was very much a learning process until now. All I can say hold tight, I have not forgotten you guys. Here have a look at the base I have been working on. Its a render from Blender, not actual in-game screen, as I have yet to set up the model and material files for the game. The mesh is 896 polygons and the texture is 512x512. I am trying to keep the RAM and CPU loads of my models on minimum, as already our mod is taking around 2 GB RAM when playing the game.

What format do the 3D ships need to be in? I can produce the temp 3D ship icons I have.

Dart00_Tech wrote:What format do the 3D ships need to be in?

See: viewtopic.php?p=30231#p30231

Oh my god, I have just saw the ship reference picture from the guides and contributing topic. That is far beyond my skill at the moment. I think I will need few months to get anywhere close to that level of detail. Can you please point me to some ship set concept art, so I can maybe model a few ships and try to hone my modelling and texturing skills a bit?

I have been steadily working on some projects for GA, and improving my skills. Its still a total far cry from the required quality for orion, but it's now good enough for some ships in SR. Here is one I have been working on. Its a spinal mount/glass canon.

Edit: I know the texture looks quite bad, but resources in SR are at a premium. this is 890 polygon model, 512x512 texture. Its also missing speculars and glow maps on those renders.

George453 wrote:Its a spinal mount/glass canon.

It could easily be used as a ship model, I'd think...

George453 wrote:Can you please point me to some ship set concept art...?

There are numerous threads in the Graphics forum with concept art... have a browse through it.

Geoff the Medio wrote:It could easily be used as a ship model, I'd think...

Like this( ingame screenshots) ?

Yeah I will browse around, like I said its still not good enough quality, but I aim to improve...


... gah, had to resize them to 50% as they were too big

George453 wrote:Like this( ingame screenshots) ?

Pretty much. I think I see my confusion though; you called it "a spinal mount/glass canon" which I thought meant a weapon part, rather than a full ship model.

George453 wrote:I have been steadily working on some projects for GA, and improving my skills. Its still a total far cry from the required quality for orion, but it's now good enough for some ships in SR. Here is one I have been working on.

While we have some very high quality ship models we have very few of them.
New content doesnt need to be as good as the best-- it just needs to make FO better overall.

eleazar wrote:

George453 wrote:I have been steadily working on some projects for GA, and improving my skills. Its still a total far cry from the required quality for orion, but it's now good enough for some ships in SR. Here is one I have been working on.

While we have some very high quality ship models we have very few of them.
New content doesnt need to be as good as the best-- it just needs to make FO better overall.

I have my doubts about this kind of design philosophy, as stuff that's "good enough" is less likely to be replaced than stuff that doesn't exist at all. If we want to have high quality standards, we need to be very clear about what is good enough, and what is just a placeholder.

Bigjoe5 wrote:

eleazar wrote:While we have some very high quality ship models we have very few of them.
New content doesnt need to be as good as the best-- it just needs to make FO better overall.

I have my doubts about this kind of design philosophy, as stuff that's "good enough" is less likely to be replaced than stuff that doesn't exist at all. If we want to have high quality standards, we need to be very clear about what is good enough, and what is just a placeholder.

Granted the better quality a particular piece of work is the less likely it will be replaced.

This design philosophy aims for the benefit of the overall project, not the preservation of an individual piece of art.

At Wesnoth we went through several cycles where what was considered "highest quality" eventually became standard, and then sub-standard, and then was replaced by better art. Granted we don't have Wesnoth's manpower, but in the early days of Wesnoth it would have seemed equally unlikely.

In other words, i consider everything potentially a placeholder, and will replace it if something better comes along -- evening if it is something i slaved over for hours. Art that improves the look of the game, even if it only remains for a couple years, elevates the whole.

eleazar wrote:Granted the better quality a particular piece of work is the less likely it will be replaced.

I would also suggest (but not in reference to any particular example) that the worse quality a particular piece of work is, as long as it actually exists, the more likely it will be replaced. Art that doesn't exist can't be seen by a potential artist and offend them enough to motivate its replacement.

If we cant get models fast enough for the development of the 3D battle system, I could provide the model files that I used for the Design Side views. Just not sure how to get them to .obj just yet...But I could give what I got....