Here’s the first NPC in the maze game I’m working on:
I created him with MakeHuman, which proved to be easy. Achieving a clean seated pose in Blender (and providing him with a skirt) proved to be the hard part. He’s a scribe, and once he joins your party, you get a mini map showing portions of the current level which he’s seen. The mini map updates as you explore, and you can click on it to navigate.
The screenshot also shows the five-button GUI and a tooltip, all created with tonegod GUI.
I almost always have issues with joint bends as severe as sitting cross-legged, etc. And, of course, my models are usually close but some feature/proportion always comes across looking not quite right to me. I seem to be a little better at animation (which makes up for the model).
Is MakeHuman something you purchase? Or?
Any chance you could also post a user project post with a more indepth description of your project/goals/etc?
@t0neg0d said:
Any chance you could also post a user project post with a more indepth description of your project/goals/etc?
At some point I’ll create a forum thread for this project under User Code & Projects. Stay tuned.
The short answer is that it’s an skill- and tool-building exercise. Originally it was about app states, but I got into random level generation, model-view-controller architecture, mini maps, and navigation. Later it became an excuse to try MakeHuman and clean up my utility libraries. Right now (as you know) I’m experimenting with tonegodGUI. I plan to add a configuration screen with the capability to (re-)assign functions to hotkeys.
The game could serve as a sample project for demonstrating any of these tools/techniques. It might also prove useful as a starting point for someone writing their own game.
As I mentioned last month, I also plan to open it up for loose collaboration at some point.
were you able to bring the makehuman model into blender and animate it? someone in the irc channel was talking about it one time and he said he got stuck on skeleton related stuff on getting it into blender (and ultimately into jme). Ive been wanting to check it out but I’m also kind of waiting a little bit because the impression i got is that its still quite experimental (atleast with its exporting capabilities)
@icamefromspace said:
were you able to bring the makehuman model into blender and animate it?
Not quite. I exported a MakeHuman model to Blender, posed the armature, baked the pose, and spent many hours cleaning it up the resulting mesh/mess. Admittedly, the crossed leg pose is a toughie for any CG model. But more generally, compared with the human figure models I’m used to (such as DAZ’s Victoria) my first impression of the MakeHuman model was that it didn’t pose well, at least not in Blender. Which means I definitely wouldn’t want to animate it there.
But MH is free and I expect it will improve quickly. (Or maybe it’s Blender which needs to improve. I don’t know.)
@sgold said:
Not quite. I exported a MakeHuman model to Blender, posed the armature, baked the pose, and spent many hours cleaning it up the resulting mesh/mess. Admittedly, the crossed leg pose is a toughie for any CG model. But more generally, compared with the human figure models I'm used to (such as DAZ's Victoria) my first impression of the MakeHuman model was that it didn't pose well, at least not in Blender. Which means I definitely wouldn't want to animate it there.
But MH is free and I expect it will improve quickly. (Or maybe it’s Blender which needs to improve. I don’t know.)
Sorry if this is off-topic. does the model have a skeleton already? Or is this something you need to do yourself?
And when you say mesh/mess… are we talking 3DSMax import mess? Or something a little easier to fix?
@sgold said:
But MH is free and I expect it will improve quickly.
More so if you send them your feedback! ;) Maybe they've encountered this before and can tell you about a workaround. We really like what they're doing so the more tiny ties between us the better ;)
That Cthulhu game looks promising (very nice art too).
I would avoid having cult members in ceremonial clothing roaming around… in Love’s world, cults are secret, hidden, in backwards and hard to reach areas.
Allows to grow the horror up to a paroxysm. Also, like in most horror movies, the viewer doesn’t see the monsters until very late because our imagination is usually more scaring than anything that can be shown. Dagon (awful movie though) is a good example of how to proceed.
I know you were probably just testing, toying around. But just wanted to highlight how HP mastered the art of building the horror and how much it was center to his art. Which is great for you, because it gives you pointers on how to proceed and be coherent and keep the player on it’s toes.
I hope to be able to show something decent in a week or two, apart from the art that is really mostly placeholders. How should I proceed? Make a thread for my project (with a video) and have a link here to that thread?
@loopies said:
I hope to be able to show something decent in a week or two, apart from the art that is really mostly placeholders. How should I proceed? Make a thread for my project (with a video) and have a link here to that thread?
Implementing physically based shading and modifying the shadow renderer.
I’m basically doing my shading in the post shadow renderer pass with RenderState set to Blend Additive. that way i can avoid the double shading artifacts.
Finally having something to show
This is a simple prototype spaceship, that is capable of autoconfiguring it’s engines. Eg to compensate the loss of the left main engine in battle.
As usual I’m my greatest enemy to get something done.
-> I want my spaceships to be really steered by the engines, so that they can also be properly crippled in fights ect.
-> I need a mapping from user input to enginepower for each engine
-> Making these by hand is quite time consuming, this should be done by a Support Navigation Computer (SNC)
(eg how much power to wich engines to maximize z+ but keeping all other movements and torque minimal)
-> Great this is actually an NP problem with and O(n^n), but I need at least 20 Engines for a acceptable ship size.
-> Finding an alternative Algorithm that can compute this in a better time (still O(n^2), but this works fast enough for up to 25 Engine now.
And now I understand why so far no other space Game had actual engine physics.
…I hate math…
Now I can hopefully do something about this horrible placeholder models and stubs ^^
