The Vega Strike game engine won't like these triangles

But first some procrastination. What does Google say about the fine art of losing tri’s in Blender.

As usual the first hit I found giving advice about Blender issues was a post on BlenderArtists.org. It contains a couple of useful hints on how to kill tri’s. I also found a general discussion on Blender Newbies. It blames the subsurf modifier for the need to get rid of tri’s, and my spaceship is intended to have subsurf. This other Blender Newbies thread has a cool tip for slightly modifying tri’s that won’t convert into quads. You change their mind with the smooth command. Cool but too destructive my finely tuned spaceship model. OK enough of that. On with the job.

now one quad has replaced the two tri's

Two tri’s right next to each other was an easy win. I simply highlighted them with face select in edit mode and pressed ctrl J. Now as you can see above my spaceship has a quad that looks a bit like a necktie instead of those original tri’s circled in red in the first image in this post.

I hoped they were all going to be this easy – but…

I had two triangles at the mirror seam which refused to play nice and turn into a quad. I tried pressing ctrl j, I tried pressing F – and nothing. They just sat there.

So I deleted them and it turns out there was no edge at the mirror axis. I solved this little problem by selecting the two “hanging” vertexes and pressing f to draw a line. Then I switched to edge select and selected the four sides of my new four sided hole in the mesh. I then simply pressed f, and a quad was born.

No triangle could resist the power of my logical and spatial mind.

I did have to chase some triangles all the way to the mirror edge of the model on the central axis before I could merge two vertexes and finally get them to disappear, but even the most obstinate triangles could finally be squeezed out of existence at the mirror seam – leaving hopefully a spaceship model that will behave well and not throw up too many shading artifacts once it is in game.

OK, on to the next job in getting this model ready for baking.

The ugly black hole made by flipped normals

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Screenshot.png

Instead of posting about it i should probably be getting on with it, but what I’m doing is painstakingly – and over a period of days – tidying up my spaceship mesh in Blender.

This spaceship is intended to eventually be the Franklin, a unit used in the Vega Strike, open source space trading, combat and exploration game. I’m following a lot of advice I’ve been getting at the Vega Strike forums and step by step bringing this model to the point it needs to be to be added in game as a unit.

Lots of detail, this might take some time

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/17_franklin_render_back2.jpeg

All this detail in the image here needs to be sharpened as explained in this Vega Strike forums post written by Chuck Starchaser. I’m beginning to wish I had added these seams before duplicating four guns for the wing hard points and attaching them. Oh well.

Hard to forget which edges are done

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Screenshot_wing_edge.png

Once the edge is marked as a seam and sharp it glows a bright radioactive orange in the default Blender theme. I was worried that I would forget which seams were marked. it turns out that i was worrying over nothing.

A tricky bit

It’s not all plain sailing though. There are quite a few tricky seams to mark, like this one which is a circle with a bit hollowed out of it. it’s hidden away under the spaceship’s wing and buried underneath a pipe. I’m not sure how often it’ll even be noticed in the game, but I guess if a thing is worth doing then it’s worth doing right.

Once my mesh was looking a bit better I added the subsur fmodifyer as suggested, but it tore a bit of a hole in the nose of my spaceship model.

Now why on earth did it do that?

smooth

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/franklin_render_action_with_subsurf1.jpeg

I moved some edges of the mesh around and managed to get rid of most of the holes. So here are the latest renders.

the spaceship nose is all mended

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/franklin_render_action_with_subsurf2.jpeg

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/franklin_render_back_with_subsurf2.jpeg

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/franklin_render_side_with_subsurf2.jpeg

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/franklin_render_top_with_subsurf2.jpeg

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/franklin_render_under_with_subsurf2.jpeg

It’s interesting seeing this spaceship model evolve step by step through the various 3D Blender processes toward completion, isn’t it? Hopefully you’ll be able to follow the progress all the way to it’s eventual appearance in the game.

Here’s the blend file. it’s getting quite big with all these quads (and some tris still).

http://www.starbrightillustrations.com/blends/franklin_wip10.blend

There’s been progress on the spaceship mesh. It might not look like much, but a lot has been going on underneath. I have alerted the community at the Vega Strike forums about my intentions of doing 3D stuff, and have received a cautiously welcoming reception, and a lot of good advice. You can read the tips for spaceship modeling I was given in the second post of this forum.

I am really into the idea of getting some professional grade 3D stuff done for Vega Strike, even if it doesn’t turn out to be my own spaceship designs, and I have already started incorporating their advice into the model I’m making.

To summarise what I think they are saying;-

Point one would be that I should stop worrying about how many polygons the model is made up of. Apparently the sky is the limit, numbers like 150,000 being bandied about for a space station. This is a great relief. I’m sure I had read that the number of polygons had to be kept down, but apparently this relates to old technology and I’m probably showing my age by even mentioning it.

I think the number of polygons has already doubled in my mesh.

Point two is that as many polygons should be rectangular as possible. If possible, every polygon on the model should be a quad. My model had a lot of triangles, but I immediately started turning them into quads. It’s not that tricky, and once you know that this stricture exists it shouldn’t be too much trouble to keep to it. Here we start with two triangles, ready to cause all sorts of problems in the rendering process.

Now they have been deleted and a nice new rectangle is sitting where they once were.

So Like I said, it might not look like much has changed in this render of the spaceship, but a lot is going on beneath the skin.

I’ve been modeling spaceships in 3D again, to add to the huge gallery of spaceship art here at Starbright.

It’s not just about expanding the gallery though, playing around with the capabilities of Blender and GIMP is also a lot of fun. I’m working in a style right now that takes advantage of the 3D capabilities of Blender, but then has a lot of work done in GIMP to produce a 3D image that looks like an illustration.

In the illustration above the planet in the foreground has had a lot of GIMP work done on it and looks very painterly, and the planet in the background is straight out of Blender. It has that shiny chrome appearance of a render. It’s going to be the very next element to get a working over as I take this image towards being a completed illustration.

I’m also working on floor plans to go with the spaceship illustration – I know how everyone loves them. I suddenly realised that if I did a screen grab of the top view window in Blender and chose wire mesh as the view option I would have a nice technical drawing of my spaceship without having to do much extra work. So floor plans coming soon, but in the mean time what has been happening with the illustration, well…

Last time we saw the spaceship illustration it looked like this. Just a mesh with the default skin, and not a very complex mesh either, but it is already beginning to suggest the completed spaceship. It’s a simple cube cut in half and mirrored with a few simple transformations; subdivide, extrude and grab.

After just a few more extrude operations the spaceship mesh starts to look much more real. I’ve also changed the colour of the skin that the mesh receives when it is rendered.

Another bump extruded and scaled has been added here to be the cockpit. I’m now very happy with the camera angle and I haven’t fiddled with it for a while, I am still fiddling with the lighting though. I want it a little more dramatic so I added a second light source to brighten up the foreground edges of the spaceship.

More and more detail and complexity being added to the mesh. Even though there is a lot of complexity, it has almost exclusively been achieved by simply extruding and grabbing surfaces I also added a cylinder right at the front of the spaceship.

It’s a tiny detail, but like a cherry on a cake it makes all the difference. I had to join it to the original spaceship mesh to get it to mirror properly. With that little touch I was finished with Blender and it was time to move on to GIMP.

I rendered a nice big jpeg of the finished mesh and dropped it into GIMP. Because I chose a jpeg as the format I had a lot of white background to get rid of, but cutting out a spaceship with hard straight edges is no problem in GIMP. I just held down shift as I used the eraser and GIMP kept my lines nice and straight.

Once I had my spaceship cut out I started to add some details to it. Abstract spaceship details are called greebles in the business and you need to add an awful lot of them before the spaceship starts to look good.

This spaceship has only a light dusting of greebles – an airlock and some windows – it’s going to need a few more.

I also went back to Blender to make a couple of planets – just spheres set smooth with textures chosen from the presets that come with Blender. The foreground planet uses “random noise” and the background planet has the “marble” texture applied.

I’ve made a good start with this image and I have high hopes that it’s going to be my most professional looking spaceship illustration yet, when I eventually get it done.

I zoomed in on my spaceship mesh and the first thing I decided to do was punch a hole in the wall so you could see the planet outside. I immediately came across a problem however, I wanted big friendly windows with circular edges to the 3D mesh, but  how would I make the edges of the mesh a perfect circular curve. I was Googling around thinking that weight painting might be the answer, when I encountered this great idea of simply using a guide and moving the vertexes by hand in 3D Model – Sports Car – Alex Salters Profile. I immediately gave it a try, and it worked like a charm, although it was quite fiddly and time consuming, it got good results.

With the new improved windows, and raising the floor of the spaceship mesh the room started to look a little more like the sort of space where player characters in a science fiction role playing game, or strange little space monsters might like to spend some time. There would be some places to play strange alien card games and listen and dance to alien music only just heard at the edge of human perception.

And it hasn’t deviated too far from the original concept sketch either, at least not yet, and that’s pleasing because it’s often very difficult to get a collection of 3D meshes and textures to produce just the effect you’re looking for.

I’ll be posting the completed Packard spaceship here, both interior and exterior, as soon as it’s done. And probably a few more in-between stages as well.

As I was trying to turn a 2d sketch of a spaceship into a beautiful 3D image I ran into a couple of problems. One problem was that the mesh I was projecting my 2d image onto was becoming more and more complex as I tried to distort it – to add interesting lighting to the finished render.

So I looked for a way to make the poly count on my 3d shape lower. And I think I found one…

The Decimate modifier will do two things for us. Its primary job is to reduce the poly count of a mesh. A pleasant side-effect for our purposes is that it will begin to rearrange the topology into a more manageable heap of triangles and quads. Keep reducing the Ratio slider below 0.5 until it becomes as coarse as you can stand. You want the lowest polygon base you can have that still maintains enough detail in the limbs and shapes you made…

Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Making Your Creation Smoother – Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks

But as I simplified my 3d shape, and then made it more complex again in a repeating cycle of faffing around with the image my the renders got stranger and stranger. The mesh seemed to disintegrate.

First it twisted like it was going through a space warp, and then it broke apart all together.

I decided to go back to a simpler shape as the base mesh for the spaceship sketch to be projected on. It worked pretty well, but it still looks like a 2d image floating about in a 3d space.

I’m losing faith in this whole process and might go back to sculpting a 3d spaceship, and only using these 2d elements as decoration. I could use this technique to add airlocks, logos and such like to the 3d model that eventually gets produced.

I’m actually quite looking forward to sculpting in Blender again. It’s the most enjoyable part of the whole 3d process.

I’ve been experimenting at the interface between 2d black and white sketches, and full-colour 3d images again – this time with one of my cute little spaceships. I had had a sketch of a small elegant little spaceship hanging around for a while, here’s that spaceship sketch as if first appeared on Spiralcat, but when I saw that the word on Illustration Friday this week was “fast” I decided to work on it a bit more – and maybe turn it 3d.

On one of my many photosafaris I had taken a picture of a corner of a train corridor which I thought would look very nice as a high-tech background to a 3d image. The spaceship sketch cut out and made 3d by laying it on a mesh in Blender was already starting to look more effective – but I wanted it to look even more 3d illustration like.

I spent a few hours messing with the placement and intensity of the lights and sculpting the mesh that was supporting the spaceship sketch. I think the image is going in the right direction, but it’s far from complete yet.

I need to add a lot more 3d detail to the corridor that the spaceship is flying through and to the spaceship itself. Then the final touch will be using Photoshop to add some motion blur to the action in the background of the illustration. The whole thing has already come a long way from it’s individual elements though.

Spaceship artist out…

I decided on something simple that told the story as directly as possible. So America’s anger is represented in the illustration as a big nasty 3d eagle with red eyes. As Europe is the backdrop to the story, we have the simple blue flag with stars in the background of the of the image, actually it is more accurately an image texture on the floor of the 3d space of the illustration. But…

How to represent the Tory party was a little more problematic, their leader David Cameron is a bit bland and hard to caricature, but I couldn’t think of a better option. I gave him a very dubious looking arm band in the European colours to signify the bone of contention in our story and there you have it, done.

From initial sketch to completed illustration the whole image with 3d elements added in the ever reliable 3d workhorse Blender and a few tweaks done in the more jittery and expensive, but still useful, Photoshop took about three hours. The picture isn’t perfect – and there comes a time when you just have to call it done – but the huge advantage of this illustration technique is speed, it allows you to add colour and interest even to something as fast moving and ephemeral as a blog post, and that can’t be a bad thing.

This is the original sketch I did, well not quite in it’s original form, it has been scanned into a computer and I used Photoshop to colour it and turn it into a png 24. I wanted the sketch to have a really raw hand-drawn feel because I knew it was going to be part of a 3d illustration produced with the Blender 3d suite and that would add a nice counterpoint of glossy mechanical accuracy.

I think this comes across very nicely in the completed illustration, it looks like the sketches jumped right off the page of the sketch book and started hopping about in an empty studio as a photographer tried to capture the action on a really fast camera setting.

This idea of action really fits the feel of the image, which is to do with all those tempting files out there almost downloading themselves onto your computer. I mean even if you watch an episode of your favorite show on YouTube, in theory, your computer has to download the file – and some people even capture these files and keep them.

I don’t think this is particularly the type of  file sharing that is always making the news as the industry futilely tries to stop it, but it’s probably just as illegal, and I think this dangerous tempting territory is what is invoked by the illustration. I wonder how many of us can claim that there are no pirated files of any type on their computer?

The illustration was quite quick and easy to make, with the usual png on a mesh plane technique, but I really like the results. Now I’ve just got to finish writing the article.

The titles of my animation were moving a little slowly, see last post, they should jiggle, not sway. I’ve noticed that the graphics in a lot of cool edgy stuff jiggles about as though it is on an old-fashioned reel of film going through a badly adjusted movie projector. I can’t actually think of an example right now, but it’s still a cool effect.

But because I hadn’t the slightest idea about how to go about this – except perhaps to delete the frames I had already done and start repositioning the mesh anew – I as usual turned to the internet for advice, via my trusty steed Google, and found > Animating the Time Ipo | Blender Underground’s Video Tutorials. Very interesting, apparently I just have to add a time curve to the blend file.

I gave it a try and it does work, now my titles flicker like butterfly wings instead of swaying about like a pendulum. Here.

Much nicer I hope you agree. But it is a little complex to use. While I was experimenting in the ipo curve window I found I could resize them in the x axis just like a mesh, and that sped things up nicely without having to do the mental gymnastics required with a time curve.

Now the next step is to get that cat doing interesting and fun things.

I’ve settled on the idea of getting the cat to blink and keep time with the music by tapping its paw. The eye blinking is simple, but getting the paw tapping to keep time is proving to be a giant headache. Well, nobody said it would be easy.