drake power-ups HD

[talisa]

thats a very interesting mod JD
however.... it seems half-broken in DP?

models which keep randomly going invisible when firing, keys which get re-binded constantly,
weapons which dont seem to do any damage, or even dont seem to do anything at all beside have an animation?

.

also, another update on the mirv-launcher!

added the trigger, plus the part which i guess prevents your fingers from accidentially slipping off trigger (dunno what its called)

decided to go with a more oldschool WW2-style trigger-construction

[talisa]

decided to play around a bit with the arm for hud, adjusting pieces of the model rather then purely only the model in its entirety.
mainly adjusted the rotation of the hand to be more better


hows that JD, better?

[talisa]

randomly remembered i never updated the cross of deflection with better cubemap.
while i was busy anyway i also added ambient occlusion to the texture so it looks better,
and i noticed the texture originally had some ugly artifacts, fixed that by blurring tex a bit


DOWNLOAD NEW UPDATED VERSION OF CROSS OF DEFLECTION

[MadGypsy]

What a silly, obstructive weapon. I don't mean your version. I mean the actual weapon is silly to me. That's why I have been so quiet. I have only one suggestion and it is not a productive one so, I just wait for your next model. I read your thread everyday though.

[talisa]

@gypsy
yeah i can understand, its not exactly the most fancy or cool looking weapon,
but i thought id make it cuz ironwarfare asked for it and its a simple model

[talisa]

BOOM!!!

UV-mapped all parts of the mirv-launcher

.

next and last step is texturing

neither ground nor hud-versions have any animations,
so that'll save me one extra step and means once its textured it'll be done

[talisa]

and yet another small update:

baked AO-maps for all parts

which will be used as overlay over the actual texture to add shading to it,
saving me the effort of manually having to add fake shading,
and creating for more realistic shading cuz blender calculates proper shading and i cant

so now lastly to create the actual textures which the AO-maps will be overlayed on top of


.


PS: for those who dont know what ambient occlusion is,
here's some examples of what ambient occlusion does:

[MadGypsy]

Instead of "overlaying" the AO map, why don't you do a full bake with the textures and AO. I know how to do this in 2.49. I do not know how to do this in more recent versions. I'm sure the process is really similar, maybe identical.

For that Ranger-inspired model that I made. I used vertex groups and assigned blender materials to the groups. By "blender materials" I just mean that no outside images were used. [edit: I did use some noise textures on top of the blender materiaals...I forgot] I then unwrapped the model, organized my UV map and then did a full bake with AO. Voila, no real UV mapping to do because the bake created the entire texture (materials and AO) according to where my vertices were already placed in the UV map.



I'm not saying my model is perfect and awesome or anything. There are definitely some problems with a bit of the AO (among other things), but that is all one texture (final bake). No "overlays".

[talisa]

i dont know how to do a full bake yet in blender
but i will soon, ive downloaded some great tutorials on shadow + AO-mapping which i think also show how to do a full bake

but for now manually overlaying the AO-map on top of texture in paintshop will have to do

.

also... big update!

the mirv-launcher is done!

GET THE MIRV-LAUNCHER HERE

.

long live ability of baking AO-maps in blender
the automated process saved me a lot of work id have to do otherwise and makes for much more realistic shading

[talisa]

just a bit ago i looked at the gems again, at their transparency.

the transparency didnt seem to work anymore after i got the cubemaps to work on them.

did some reading on DPwiki on shaders and after some trying out i managed to restore transparency
to the gems by adding a couple lines to shader and changing one line


find links to new updated versions of all 3types of gems which have the transparency restored in first post of thread

[MadGypsy]

Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Bake - BlenderWiki

[Phenom]

talisa, I just want to say that your work is inspiring to me. You definitely keep trying/making and improving. I always check to see what you come up with next and it's always something cool... and I like that.

I myself am a "novice" 3D modeller/programer and you're work really does inspire me to keep improving my own set of skills you among other very talented people here.

Just wanted to put that out there.

[talisa]

thanx phenom for the compliments, really appreciate them

i myself am just a beginner modeller too, nearly all my models are made by modifying the standard blender primitives, and extruding and moving around face, vertexes, edges and loops and such.

thanx for thinking i am talented, i dont tend to think my works are anything special or such.
what i do is nothing amazing, these are all just basic models made only with the most basic of tools of blender

and texturing i seriously suck at, 99% of time i just use google images to find a fitting texture for an item and then modify it a bit in paintshop to make it perfect for the item

.

modelling isnt hard, especially if you use blender. blender makes modelling really easy.
all it takes really is just sitting down taking the time to do it. its not hard, but its a time-consuming process still, so you just need to find the will to sit down and just do it.
also, just practice and dont be afraid to just try out what functions to find something usefull or till you find the function that does what you wanted blender to do

and one tip i always give people who wanna model with blender: "spacebar is your best friend"
use it, cuz trying to memorize all those quick-keys is just crazy imo.
spacebar brings up a little window in which you can search functions and use them.
and its also really handy to discover functions which might be usefull

.

also, lastly, theres tons of tutorials everywhere made by people to do things,
which are really helpfull if you are trying to do something but cant figure out how to do it.
i often look up tutorials when i want to know how to do something myself,
cuz some things you just cant figure out by experimenting,
so luckily the blender-community is super and there are lots of people who made great tutorials

[MadGypsy]

I disagree about not memorizing kb shortcuts. Not that your way is wrong or bad. I'm not saying that, at all. Memorizing the shortcuts saves time though. I haven't messed with blender in a minute but, I also believe that spacebar does not have the full set of options listed. I might be wrong about that though.

certain shortcuts like loop select(alt+right click), add edge loop (cntrl+r) increase edge loops (mousewheel scroll after cntrl+r), center edge loop (mousewheel press after cntrl+r) recalculate normals (cntrl+n), extrude(e {menu}), box select(b), switching between solid and wireframe (z), rotate/slide edge (cntrl+e {menu})

are invaluable to know

Then there are shortcut tricks. 1 example is: assume you extruded along the x axis and the extruded face was rotated a bit but you needed it to be flat (like along the grid) s+x+0 (scale + axis that travels through the face + zero). Or what if you wanted to grab but only along a certain axis (g+axis letter). These things are definitely not on the spacebar. What if you want to snap to grid while you grab (hold control while moving the mouse). What if you wanted to rotate exactly 20 degrees on the x axis (r+x+20) or scale something exactly double the size (s+2) triple(s+3) 150%(s+1.5) 10%(s+.1). Grab in the z direction exactly 2.2 grid units(g+z+2.2)

What about rip(v) and merge (alt+m)? Switching between vertex, edge and face mode (cntrl+tab+(1,2or3)) or changing orthographic views (numpad 1, 3 or 7), switching between orthographic and perspective (numpad 5), switching to camera mode (numpad 0). How about orbiting the model with greater precision than the mouse provides (numpad 2,4,6 &

Learning the keyboard shortcuts really is pretty necessary. I could actually name a bunch more but these are the ones I used most often.

[MadGypsy]

object mode

every other mode