http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/index.xhtml?c=15&p=1 Copyright mindalex 2012-2015 3d-Modelling http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=91 While not trivially achieved, the main dragon body modelling offered quite a bit of improvisation base. Time had come for the head and the tail to be attached to the winged dragon body. The rough preview of the two pieces was reasonably easy to put in place, with just a few... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=90 With the end of the year dawning upon my hobying experiences, I decided it was time for something a bit less targeted at programming applications. So I decided to park my current hobby programming efforts and leave them as possible further directions for next year's hobbying. I decided to go for... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=77 So the modelling is done, there's one more detail we need to take care before jumping into XNA asset pipeline and game programming, and that is a general material scheme. The animations can wait, and to that respect more refined textures can emerge from asset skinning, but we definatelly need... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=76 After the last post, it was time for some last minute fine tuning and rounding off. At least that was the plan, before that last minute ounce of creativity kicked in and produced quite an intensive last pad modelling session. It all started simply by thinking about the cannon's loading mechanism.... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=75 With the base design all set, it's time to get the pad design to a working state. The final design decisions still had to be made, before a clear modelling track could have been followed. Most decisions revolve around the positioning and the motion possibilities of the power cannon of course.... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=74 Oposed to my primary instinct of just texturing up and 2d-transforming the already made 3d assets, I decided to continue the 3d-modeling track on the Pong Revival Project. With the main scene setup in place, it was time to build the pads. This is the part where not going too fast... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=73 With the introduction of the base animation mecanic of our Pong Revival project we have been presenting in the previous post, one major issue still remained untackled, and that is chain motion realism. The chain system itself is built around a pretty good realism-fantasy compromise. That is to say the chain... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=72 It's time to take the Pong Revival Project one step further. In this session, we'll model out a chain to go with our wheel system. This chain system will form the base for all our user controlled game elements. The Chain I think I had given a glimpse of the initial chain... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=71 With the start of the Pong Revival Project, lots of modeling needs to happen in order to create the game environment and game elements. As we mentioned in the project anouncement post, our game development approach revolves around building everything in Blender, and then rendering everything to 2D sprites. This... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=62 This weekend has been marked by a great milestone in material technology for project Optimus. After quite a bit of tweaking and tinkering with the Blender Material editor, watching node editor tutorials, which I might add was a very entertaining activity, I finally stumbled on a nice plastic recipee. The uv... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=61 And yes, I am prowd to present what looks like the final Optimus Prime Transformer Model. Legs and Arms, joints and all the neety greety detail work has been done, now it's just materials and getting it all nice and shiney in game. Here are some renderings of the robo mode: And... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=59 Entering the last few modeling miles for the Optimus Project have boosted understanding of Blender Meshes and combining primitives in single meshes. While the in-game result doesn't look impressive at all without propper materials this time, playing with the model in Blender itself has given me quite some joy. Here we... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=58 And it has been another busy hobby-ing session over here on the Optimus Prime Project, which is taking shape quite nicely. As expected modelling speed is picking up, though here and there normal mistakes slow down progress. All in all really good progress has been made, which lead to the... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=57 Yes, as expected, the scene composer has boosted activities around the optimus prime project. Modeling in Blender is taking off a bit as well. This time a lot more mesh modifications without the use of any external plugin scripts which made me prety happy. Getting used to checking mesh normals... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=53 It's been an interesting hobby week to be sure. Started working again in getting the modeling right for another piece of the auto-bot, namely the jet wing setup. The modeling part was by far the nicest of the whole adventure, and resulted into some nice reactors and wings. Getting the models into... http://www.mindalex.com/MindAlex/article.xhtml?a=50 It's been a long time since the last time, and that's only because all my hoby time was filled with Blender tryouts. And it's about time. The engine has enough code to hold us for a while now, the interface skinning will not pose much more difficulties and of course...