Post by linolafett » Fri, 17. Oct 14, 11:07

bluish

I model and texture my assets in Blender, before exporting them to 3dsMax, as all our tools work with this suite."Give an artist a concept art and some time and you will be awarded with some pretty polygons!"In a later post, I will show in more detail how such an asset is created. So do not worry about thatAfter creation, the asset is given its working name, in this case "units_size_m_ore_collector".Its an medium sized ship, which will (surprise!) collect ore.In 3DsMax I use vertexcolours to colour the ship, as our textures are all grey.By doing that, we can use the same textures on different ships, but have a variety of different colours on our assets.We also use a new UV Layer (This tells a Texture where it should be) to place the "paintoverlay", so all the small details such as coloured stripes, numbers and decals of all kinds are placed in this way.Setting up the ship with lights! These are placed in the 3D viewport.I start a game viewer, where I can see how the lights look on the asset.I can adjust the lights in realtime and don't have to export the asset for this step.Now I add connections. These are used later on to tell the game where to place things.For this ship we will need connections for: Engines, shieldsgenerators, the mining laser, a drone dock and a cockpit (invisible, as one is modeled into the ship)For example the shieldgenerator connection is displayed with abox.Our setup is now ready to be exported!Sadly our work doesn't end when we hit the "export button".We have to set it up in the database to give it all the necessary information to work in the game.In the database we also use the connections placed in 3DsMax to connect the missing parts to the ship.Ship descriptions are added and balancing will be done there too. I may show some more detailed information later about this process.Our ship asset is now ready to be used in-game.Some additional steps are needed to make it usable by NPCs, but the work for me as an artist is over at this point.