To start off modelling, I am going to try and make a turret since it looks like the easiest thing to model and animate. I have a few questions before I delve into the project though, since I barely have any modelling experience (I made a keyboard in Cinema 4D) 1. How are bones involved and how do I get the unit.json to use them as the... bone? Do I name them something in Blender and just specify it inside the unit.json? 2. Animation... Is there some kind of technique used for this, or some kind of program to get the model to move? 3. Making textures is the one thing I have no clue where to start with. I'm not sure if I just paint them somehow, or make them in photoshop... but how would those square .png files get mapped onto the unit? So thanks for taking the time to read, I would really appreciate some links to tutorials or some kick-starting tips for each question since I want to be a game dev when I'm older, and I reckon it's better to start early than late.
Hmm, so does that mean I have to use existing animations and bind them to models, if I don't use 3DS max?
If you name the bones accordingly it should work, but the only units with animations also have rotated bones... Which sadly don't export correctly with @raevn's .Papa importer and exporter. :<
Unless your turret does something fancy, it shouldn't need animations. My suggestion would be to load one of the existing laser turrets into blender, and have a look at how they are setup.
Yeah most units aim by the engine, and don't require animations. Though don't use a double or triple turret as reference as they're weapons are bent slightly and so have rotated bones. Use the single.
Moddeling has 4/5 steps.. Moddeling, UV-wrapping, Texturing, Rigging, Animating. Moddeling is the first part. Make sure you remove unseen polys, dont create N-gons and make sure you have a nice polyflow. Also Cinema4d uses a lot of nurbs.. game engine dont like nurbs Than You start UV-mapping. This is laying out your Model on a 2D plane which gives you the ability to texture it. here is a cinema 4D tutorial: Texturing... When done with the UV-wrap open it in photoshop and paint your texture. save as png and make sure its the right size (dont know PA's texture resolution but along the lines of 512x512) (Tip: Work on higher res to get more detail than downscale it to your wanted size) Rigging.. Setting uo them bones in your moddel. Along with this comes weightpainting. what this does is you tell how much influence a particular vertex has on a bone. I don't have experience with this in Cinema however. I do have that in 3Ds max and Maya. When ur Rig is done start animating away. However a turret most likely doest have bones. It does have animations in the form of objects within the mesh moving individually throught script (turning towards a target for example) Global overview hope it helps.
Thanks for the post... but is this basically the same process in blender? I know there's no way to export Cinema4D models into .papa's.
The good thing is.. This is the same process for every moddeling program. its the basics of modeling. The only thing that other programs do is having buttons on a diffrent location. Some have a couple of better tools than others but all in all they all do the same thing in the same way. About exporting it as .papa. I really don't know how to export it as a .papa. you will need a costum script of somesort as it is unsupported by default on all modeling programs.
Blender has an amazing feature called limited dissolving that 3Ds Max doesn't seem to have. It's soooo helpful at reducing poly count on models that have more polys then required.
I personally want to have control of that.. especially when making low-poly moddels. Its a diffrent story if you making holypoly models (couple millions) but at that stage you just go and use Zbrush which is by far supperiour than every other 3d moddeling program for that. Also if you know what you are doing when low poly modeling you will get a better understanding of propper poly flow. The tool is great and all.. but i'm sure that a person can do it better.
Not really it's just for simple things, here I'll draw a little picture. Let's pretend this is a flat surface; the red dots are polys. You don't need those extra polys between them, it just means you'll need to texture more/render more polys. Limited dissolve automatically removes random polys like those, and only of the polys you select too, so you don't need to do it on the entire model all at once.
Those red dots are vertices, no? As I recall, limited dissolve removes edges joining coplanar polygons, provided the two polygons would be valid when combined. It's probably the best you can get for not reconstructing the geometry, but if your geometry is already tidy to begin with then there's not much to gain.
Alright thanks for the feedback guys. I am almost done my turret model (this is the general idea of what it's supposed to look like) I made a very rough bone structure and labeled the parts here. This part i have no idea what to do, generally because I don't understand how this will get the turret to move and shoot. I'd appreciate some help with each number since I don't know what to do with them. Bone structure was taken from the double laser turret, i removed the left side bones. 1 = socket_rightMuzzle (I rename to socket_centerMuzzle?) 2 = bone_rightRecoil (I rename to bone_recoil?) 3 = bone_pitch 4 = bone_turret 5 = bone_root Thanks for helping I really appreciate it
At a glance, 3 (bone_pitch) shouldn't be needed, as both the horizontal and vertical rotation in your model appear to be at the same point (bone_turret). Otherwise this looks right. You need to make sure that all vertices are assigned to their correct vertex group (and only 1 group). Also, it appears you have multiple objects in play; the entire unit can only be one.
Ok the model is finished, for now. I think the bones are setup correctly, but when I go into pose mode, only the root bone moves the base (the default stand, like every other turret) of the turret. I just want to see if the bone tree is correct, because there are really no tutorials on this part and if something goes wrong I won't know what it is. For example, how is recoil determined by that one bone? How can I specify how far recoil goes back? And about the vertex group... idk what that even is, nor why there is a "DiffuseColor" in a vertex group. Help is appreciated as always. Numbers are shown on the side^^^vvv
