3D Modelling Ideas 1 - Enviroments: Level Skinning

[Robbie]

Better not let Popo & Lns have all the fun

Well.... I finally managed to work out skinning... models (not the cat)
Still haven’t got anything to show for it yet though .

I’ve been really impressed by the models put out by our dedicated team of in-house (unpaid ) designers and have been wanting to contribute for a while now as I’ve had some brain activity on the matter – not enough movement up there to call it a storm.

A big thanks to LnS for some very helpful info esp the bit on dead spot placement which has revived some hope I had regarding some ideas I through around a little while ago over in the general forum

See – (link)... oops, found it http://pcpuzzle.com/forum/viewtopic.php ... ght=robbie

In lieu of any real models, I’ve attached some doodles of ideas that any & all are more than welcome to take up & try out before I (eventually) get to it


1: Introducing...
The first idea is that of an introduction area.
As we don’t have an intro spot for our levels apart from the level title that shows up then vanishes again, I thought it might be nice for people to have the option of unleashing a little artistic flare into a little area that Stinky would first appear on showing
*** a title
*** the author (you!)
*** maybe some pictures relating to the level
I don’t know how big an area would be adequate 6x6, 7x7, 8x8 ??? but it would allow also for placement of a teleporter which would take you to a “start” area.

This may not be appropriate in levels where you need to get moving to a task or avoiding nasties right from the word go but there’s plenty of levels a little more laid back that could incorporate this feature.

The size for the 3DS file is pretty much negligible unless you want to build a little model up over the teleporter square – click on the link above to see some of the ideas I jotted down. The bigger file will be the jpg file depending on the level of detail you want – you might need to play around with this to get some sort of balance between clarity/detail & file size.

The dead spot would need to be outside the perimeter or at least not on the teleporter square.

Also for consideration when using certain backdrops (like Warp) you will need to add an equal no of “empty” rows/colums on the opposite site of the level so that it still sits in the middle of the background.


2: Level Enviroments...
The second idea related to skinning an entire level !

Before our modellers (LnS, Popo,...) pass out, again it’s more a matter of skinning. In showing this I had our 14x14 ladies in mind with their small levels.

It would involve putting up walls around the level & make them available for skinning in much the same vain the Pat has done with the custom housing.
A few different options would include:
*** 3 or 4 walls (including the front)
*** putting the walls on a slope – back away from the play area
*** not only skinning the walls but also the floor
*** eventually different sized levels

In the example below I skinned my paper (ha! easier than doing it on my computer) with a Jungle theme in mind.

Again the dead spot would need to be outside the perimeter by at least 2 squares.

Other themes might include
*** Outer Space (rocket ships, aliens – Bigzips area51)
*** Kid’s Room
*** Beach
*** City
*** Lollypop Land
*** Lava Land
*** Winter Wonderland
*** Raceway
*** Haunted Mansion/Graveyard
*** Theme Park
*** Big Brother (oh please!)
*** Library
*** Restaurant/Kitchen
*** Playground
*** Minigolf
*** Village Life (Jungle/Resort)
*** Wild West
*** Pirate Ship
*** Ancient City (Greek/Roman/Egyptian etc)
*** Under Da Sea!
*** Mad Scientist
*** Seasons & Holidays
*** Mario!
*** Tron
*** Maybe an ode to your favourite Anime, cartoon character, computer game
*** or to your favourite movie/music star – for our Grandma’s their retro cars

3: Custom Walls/Teleporters
The third (related to #2) idea would be skinning building blocks & teleporters related to your topic.

As an example I’ve thrown in a couple of Jungle type blocks with a little variation for the walk-through one, along with a pit & some nasty spikes (and the remains of some poor unfortunate) for a teleporter.

Now for these, the dead spot would need to be at least 18-20 squares (say) behind the model. The reason being that with walkthrough blocks & teleporters you would not want a dead spot appearing anywhere on the 14x14 area for the sake of making the blocks & teleporter squares available to anyone who wants to use your theme. While the “solid” block doesn’t need a distant dead spot, for ease of level creation, each of the 3 types should be set with similar dead spots.

When it comes to creating a level using themed blocks & teleporters, you will need to create a level as normal but then 18-20 squares to the north, layout these custom blocks so they will appear within the 14x14 play area. It may take some fiddleing & playtesting to see exactly where the placement needs to be. In this area you will also need to set the floor type to ‘empty’.

On the squares where there will be “solid” custom blocks/walls appearing you will need to set the floor to not walkable (the big X thing), and all other walkable blocks (walkthough & teleporters), put your teleports/coins/$$$ as per normal.

In effect you will have the ability to fully theme your level without worrying about deadspot mania.

If you are skinning a model with a floor as well, obviously you’ll need to give consideration to placement of nasties like electric floor tiles, floors with limited life expectancy.
While this may give more to the look of a level, without these considerations you might end up with a level more frustrating than enjoyable. It may be better to leave this up to the more advanced who can create their own floors – rather than having a whole floor skinned, creators might want to skin certain area of the floor of a level & leave the balance empty. Besides there’s plenty of good in-game flooring.

Again, you might need to consider adding rows/colums (make them empty) to ‘centre’ the level over a background...

So what do you think guys (looking over to the faithful few)...


Robbie

[LinkyNStoof]

I'm well aware of the possibilities you've outlined in your post. The only real problem is, most people already have enough trouble downloading custom models just for playing advanced levels. I think most level creators would avoid having to mess with 3D modelling programs themselves if they could help it. So to implement your ideas it would fall upon people like me to make it for them, either per request, or make a large batch of models in advance (to accomodate for different level sizes etc.)

The other issue is that each such idea by themselves take up a custom model, and since we're only allowed 4, this can place a severe limitation on the number of custom models left that are used as an object rather than as environmental effects. Yes, I'm obviously aware (since I told you) that you can merge models together to get around the 4-model limitation, but again that would require either the level creator to mess w/ 3D modelling programs themselves, or have it done by someone like me per request.

That being said I'm definitely up to it, since this sort of thing is actually very easy for me to do, given that things like floors, walls and blocks are very simple geometrically and therefore takes almost no time to make.

Just one comment: I'm not sure how well your "wall around the entire level idea" will look. It definitely will look just like that, 4 walls around the level with 2D background graphics from the skins. It might not look very natural with Wonderland's 3D environment. I'll also need to experiment to find out how high I'd have to make the walls so that they can actually cover up the "real" background in Wonderland (unless you want to make it even more obvious that they're just walls around the level.)

Also keep in mind that the wall idea works best if your level is laid out as a rectangle. That's not necessarily the case.

Ah, I just remember the other thing I forgot to comment about.

Skinning custom walls and custom floors is easy, the problem is, the Wonderland game engine has a limit of 100 objects. For custom models I think it's 100 total (actually I think it even counts trees and other non-custom type of ornamental objects), not 100 for each type. So unfortunately you could very quickly run out of objects if you were to skin custom walls and floors. (Using more than 100 might be okay or might cause the game to act funny--Patrick will have to comment on this.) When you run out the only solution is to either only use custom walls and floors in parts of the level instead of the entire thing, or to merge models together--the latter will require the level creator to either make a request for help or for them to mess with a 3D modelling program themselves.

[LinkyNStoof]

[edit: I've fixed my models to avoid the glitch seen by janetgalle and others. If you downloaded this before 7/29 4:15 GMT-5 please redownload.]

Well, here's a proof-of-concept of Robbie's "Intro" idea (or at least as best as I can understand it). Here's what a 6x6 intro area would look like. My only comment is that 6x6 might be a bit too small.

I'm lazy so I just reused Robbie's concept art , obviously you can edit the skin file to have whatever you want to show up.

If you're going to use this, please look at the included level in the level editor to better understand Robbie's concept, as well as to understand how to place the model. I set it up so that the deadspot is positioned like this:

I'll make a 7x7 and an 8x8 at some point. If you want other sizes make a request.

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[janetgalle]

I'm lazy so I just reused Robbie's concept art , obviously you can edit the skin file to have whatever you want to show up.

I am too, but I gave it a shot................and this is what happened.

jg


It was easy enough to do (Pretty much like repainting the house template)
Easy to orient.
Why does it look so wierd?

[LinkyNStoof]

(message removed by poster)

[LinkyNStoof]

Here's a different style of level intro that some might prefer.

This one is quite interesting. It will actually cover up the entire screen, and it will look 2D (no perspective transformation like the intro I shown earlier where you basically skin the floor). Because it covers up the entire screen, you won't actually see Stinky at all, just the intro screen itself (Stinky is basically behind the intro screen). As such, you probably want to include some instruction of what keys to press to get out of the intro screen. What I did in the test level is to place a teleport directly one step up from Stinky, so the instruction in the intro screen would say "Press Up to begin."

The best way to understand this is to play the included test level. No screenshot attached because it basically looks just like the skin file image.

There's a very specific model placement required to make this work. Look at the test level in the level editor, and use the relative positions between the custom model and Stinky when using this in your own level. The absolute positions doesn't matter, but their position relative to each other must be exactly as shown in the test level, if you want the intro screen to cover exactly the entire screen.

Included in the zip file is 2 variations. model1.3ds just covers the entire screen. model2.3ds actually covers the entire screen plus a little bit more beyond the top of screen. This is design so that when you press up to teleport out of the intro, you won't see the boundaries of the intro screen showing. To see what I mean, edit the test level to use model2 instead of model1 and compare. If you're using model2, remember to leave a margin (about 7.5% of the skin's total height) at the top in your skin image to account for this (see model2.jpg which has the margin area marked).

For those who makes/edit models, you can open the file in Milkshape to examine how this works. Basically I tilted a rectangle 35 degrees from Wonderland's ground level. This angle will cause the rectangle to be parallel to the camera view, so the rectangle will look perfectly 2D. The rectangle's then moved and sized until it covers the entire screen.

[When I have time, I'll probably make some variations of intro screens of this style that doesn't cover up the entire screen.]

[LinkyNStoof]

Just one quick note: with models like my billboards and these intro screens, the exact dimensions of the skin file does not matter. You can replace the image with one that's smaller or larger than the one I included, and they'll be automatically stretched or shrinked to fit the model itself when it's displayed. However, you should consult the skin file's dimensions to get an idea of the proportion of width to height, otherwise your image will be stretched/shrinked by different amounts in the 2 different dimensions.

[popo]

I've already been playing around with walls and floors. I've made 3 walls that go around the room with tiled textures to fit the height and width, and a floor that you can skin with sand for a beach, or carpet for a room or something else entirely (which is what I'm working on at the moment). The good thing about the floor is that you can conceal switches and teleporters so that you step on them accidentally, for instance, a rotten floor board would hide a teleporter so that you fell through the floor.

I hope no-one else gets this going before I've got mine finished cos I want to be the first.

But don't forget that you can only have four models in any level, and using one to make an introduction screen would mean one less in the level itself.

[popo]

I think this might be what Janetgalle thought was weird.


Linky's full screen intro looked fine though.

[popo]

I think what's wrong with the above picture is that the floor is showing through the jpg. I've edited the 3ds file and lifted it a tad so it's above the floor now, but not enough to notice.

Now it looks fine.

Janetgalle, replace your model2.3ds file with this one and see if it works for you.

[janetgalle]

I think this might be what Janetgalle thought was weird. Linky's full screen intro looked fine though.

Yep, thats what mine looks like. I will try the new one. Thanks!

jg

[SharonM]

Mine too, jg. The new one posted by popo fixed the problem. I'm having the same thing with LNS's first one too. The full screen works just fine.

I'm totally in awe of you model and house creators. I'm having trouble keeping up with all the new levels. Haven't had time to even think about making my own level or working on custom content! Thank all of you for the great work.

I almost forgot to mention Robbie. I didn't totally follow everything you said, Robbie, (probably because I haven't gotten into the making of the new deluxe levels and models yet) but I am totally in awe of your reasoning power and conceptualization. Well done!

[LinkyNStoof]

I think this might be what Janetgalle thought was weird.


Linky's full screen intro looked fine though.

Oh how odd, I did lift it up by about 0.001 tile units or so. I guess different computers render it slightly differently? How much higher did you lift it up to get rid of the glitch?

Thanks for fixing it.

[edit: huh now that's weird, I checked the model in a different program and apparently I haven't lifted it, even though I swear I remember I did. Oh well ]

[popo]

I don't know how much I lifted it cos I dragged it just a tad.

You can use model2.3ds to replace model1.3ds too if you change the filename, it's the same basic model.

I've just finished a level using a custom floor, you can adapt it to make any sort of floor just by changing the skin file.

[Robbie]

Great thoughts guys!

Obviously as LnS has mentioned there's limitations not only regarding what can be done but how easy it will be to pick up by the regular Joe/Jill.

Merging is definitely an option for making more complex custom levels but certainly not for the fainthearted - I haven't gone there yet

I still like the enviroment idea but it needs a little (lot) more time & playing around with & of course with just 4 custom models to play with each level it'll be a matter of pick & choose what you want to include/leave out.

Thanks for putting the intro area to the test too all you lovely people. I'm looking forward to seeing your "room" Pauline. I had this in mind a while ago too where you enter one of Pat's houses & it teleports to a "room" as you've planned - is that what you had in mind???

I've played with doing some custom blocks but just with the pictures I doodled above. Maybe this weeked I'll get to & do some more serious doodling to fit the blocks & post something maybe Sunday/Monday...

Gotta get to work now!

Thanks guys (not forgetting our gals)!
Robbie


... but before I go, I was kind of excited to read Pats posting on the modifications to model storage. I got the impression he was considering a future rewriting of the engine. Obviously a little while off yet but think of the possibilities ... ok ok calm down... we've got enough challenges here...

[Robbie]

Great thoughts guys!

Obviously as LnS has mentioned there's limitations not only regarding what can be done but how easy it will be to pick up by the regular Joe/Jill.

Merging is definitely an option for making more complex custom levels but certainly not for the fainthearted - I haven't gone there yet

I still like the enviroment idea but it needs a little (lot) more time & playing around with & of course with just 4 custom models to play with each level it'll be a matter of pick & choose what you want to include/leave out.

Thanks for putting the intro area to the test too all you lovely people. I'm looking forward to seeing your "room" Pauline. I had this in mind a while ago too where you enter one of Pat's houses & it teleports to a "room" as you've planned - is that what you had in mind???

I've played with doing some custom blocks but just with the pictures I doodled above. Maybe this weeked I'll get to & do some more serious doodling to fit the blocks & post something maybe Sunday/Monday...

Gotta get to work now!

Thanks guys (not forgetting our gals)!
Robbie


... but before I go, I was kind of excited to read Pats posting on the modifications to model storage. I got the impression he was considering a future rewriting of the engine. Obviously a little while off yet but think of the possibilities ... ok ok calm down... we've got enough challenges here...

... oh & thankyou for the kind words Sharon... I'm a little scared of going into the Custom Levels too... I am so far behind it's not funny. Just have to pop in though to see what Pauline has done with the custom floor thing... I'm kind of anxious - just checked it out - all I can say is WoW

[Robbie]

... don't know how that happened... I went in to edit & it reposted

[popo]

Merging is definitely an option for making more complex custom levels but certainly not for the fainthearted - I haven't gone there yet

Merging is not so difficult, I've done it on a small scale with a vase and a plant. On a larger scale I think it would be possible to take a selected part of one model and merge it into another. You can move things about by dragging so you get them in the right place. You would have to keep an eye on the file size though, it's easy to end up with it too big to post.

I'm looking forward to seeing your "room" Pauline. I had this in mind a while ago too where you enter one of Pat's houses & it teleports to a "room" as you've planned - is that what you had in mind???

It's roughly like that yes, but it's a custom building. I'm still working on a storyline for the level. The custom building is awesome, it's not just a buiding, it's got extra bits (it's one of the things on your list of themes). Can't say much, I want it to be a surprise. But the room just consists of 3 walls at the moment, and possibly the floor, which I will merge with the walls if I use it. The walls are only 4 tiles high and 10 tiles long so you can see over them, I might have to make them higher, I'll see how it goes.

I have got some models of entire scenes, eg an Aztec village, but making them look ok in the game will be very difficult, and, again, the file size may end up too big.

It's more or less a case of experimenting and seeing what will work and what won't.

[LinkyNStoof]

I'll leave Robbie's idea of "walls around the level" background for Robbie himself to test out.

In the meanwhile, I've been experimenting with a different way to use custom models to customize a level's background, in a manner that's more literal to how Wonderland does background.

Attached is a custom model and its all-important skin file that allows you to create your own backgrounds, in the style of Wonderland's default "Star", "Forest", "City" backgrounds. Those 3 build-in backgrounds works by basically having a huge rectangle about 50 tile units underneath Wonderland's ground level, then tile a skin repeatedly on that rectangle. My custom model basically just overlay another rectangle a little above that default background rectangle and tiles it with the included skin file which you can modify.

In my opinion, the experiment is about a half-success. My main complain is that it seems like you need a fairly large (dimension-wise) skin image if you want to avoid a somewhat blurry-looking background like the one I ended up with. The template skin image here is 384x384 pixels, you might need to get up to like 512x512 for better results.

To use it, just stick the model at the level's upper-right corner tile (see included test level as a reference). Then make sure you set the level's background style to something like "stars". This custom background model wlil work for levels of any sizes. Also, keep in mind that because the skin image will be tiled across the background, if you don't want people to notice the "seams" between two adjacent instances of the skin image, you'd need to find a decent enough graphics program to help you create "seamless" images (Adobe Photoshop probably has something like this; Windows Paint does not), or find something on the Internet that's already processed to be seamless (sometimes called "tileable").

My one critique of custom backgrounds (whether my style, Robbie's, or anyone else) is that it's probably the most "wasteful" use of a custom model. The reason being that in most levels, you see far more of floor tiles and wall tiles than anything else. The level background only becomes prominent on the level's boundaries. As such, you've used up one of the four custom model types for something that's in some sense not very noticeable most of the time.

Still, the option's here for you to consider.

(When I have time I'll create similar backgrounds that tiles differently. The current tiling does about 2 times horizontally and 1.5 times vertically.)

[Robbie]

LnS wrote

I'll leave Robbie's idea of "walls around the level" background for Robbie himself to test out.

Thanks Lns

Love what you did with the background idea - and yes, I have to agree that it is a waste (in a sense) when you consider there's heaps of great models available as well.

... did I say Sunday/Monday I'd get back with some preliminary models??? It's Monday night here in Australia just after 8... keeping company with me are 24 tax returns, 1 audit & timesheets I still need to throw into the computer before I go home

(sigh) Oh well...

Pauline wrote

Merging is not so difficult, I've done it on a small scale with a vase and a plant.

I haven't tried it out yet but in the meantime, if you have two models that you've made & skinned (or if at some point you wanted to add another one), when merging do you need then to re-skin them to finish with a single graphic file?

And before I forget LnS, as resident AC3d expert did you find that repeating textures (you know taking a texture & tiling it on a surface 3x3 4x4 etc) doesn't carry over to Wonderland - you just end up with the single image...

Robbie

[popo]

Pauline wrote

Merging is not so difficult, I've done it on a small scale with a vase and a plant.

I haven't tried it out yet but in the meantime, if you have two models that you've made & skinned (or if at some point you wanted to add another one), when merging do you need then to re-skin them to finish with a single graphic file?

If they are different objects eg a vase and a plant, then you don't need to reskin them, just put all the graphics files in one folder with the new model. If you were adding bits to a model that you wanted to be the same texture, say something made of wood or stone that you wanted to embelish, then you would need to assign the current texture to the whole model. Of course if you're talking about texture mapping, like the cars, that's something different and I haven't done any of that.

I've also merged a table, a loaf of bread, a bottle of milk and an Edam cheese, that were all single models originally. When you click 'merge' all you are doing in importing another model with all it's skin files and groups, then all you need to do is move them all into the right positions. You can move, scale and rotate them all seperately by selecting the groups, or all together by selecting all. It helps if you get them all roughly the right size before you merge them.

[LinkyNStoof]

Merging is not so difficult, I've done it on a small scale with a vase and a plant.

I haven't tried it out yet but in the meantime, if you have two models that you've made & skinned (or if at some point you wanted to add another one), when merging do you need then to re-skin them to finish with a single graphic file?

Despite what Patrick's tutorial said, it seems that you don't actually need to put all your skins in a single graphics file. Wonderland seems perfectly capable of handling multiple skin files per model just fine, as I've discovered in one of Popo's early models from the Internet.

Instead, it seems that whenever your model uses a skin file named something like "model1.jpg", then if you later decided to rename the model itself as, say, model3.3ds, Wonderland will substitute in "model3.jpg" for "model1.jpg" when looking for skin files. Meanwhile for skin files the model uses that are not named like model1.jpg, Wonderland will always look for the exact name of that skin file, no matter how you rename the 3ds file.

And before I forget LnS, as resident AC3d expert did you find that repeating textures (you know taking a texture & tiling it on a surface 3x3 4x4 etc) doesn't carry over to Wonderland - you just end up with the single image...

Yeah, if you're talking about the "texture offset and repeat" options in AC3D, that doesn't work in Wonderland. But tiling is still possible by texture coordinate mapping. What you do is to map the surface you want to tile the texture on, map it so that it's bigger than the skin image. For example, say you want to tile a skin image so it repeats 3 times horizontall and 2 times vertically on a rectangle. What you do is to set the rectangle's texture coordinates such that they form a rectangle 3 times the width of the skin image, and 2 times the height of the skin image. That's how I've been doing it in both Milkshape and AC3D.

[TheoX]

I don't understand any of what you guys are saying, cause im not nearly as computer saavy, but all this looks really cool!

[Robbie]

Hi LNS - sorry I couldn't PM this

All this for under 100K & the detail is good (100 x 100 - 30 down [you mentioned 50?])

Plenty of leeway for larger levels & even so, the file size required is still pretty good. Just pop this in your LnSbackground1 directory (backup your other files first) & load up your level. Use the one you posted - I didn't modify the level itself at all - just tried replacing the model & jpg.

Robbie

PS Haven't played around with Winzip for ages now so you might have to just manually copy them into the directory.

[Kaboom!]

GREAT BACKGROUND!

[SharonM]

Hi Robbie,
Great space background. Just a quick question. Will this one replace the background I already have in my LNSBackground folder? If so, I would rather rename it so I don't lose the first background. Have any suggestions?
Sorry to be so dense, but I'm only about half computer literate, so I have these big gaping holes in my know-how. I know enough to know I should ask questions when I'm not sure. Thanks for any help you can give me.

[Robbie]

Hi Sharon,

No Problem
Easiest way to go would be just to rename LnS's Model1 files (3ds/jpg) to say Model2, then copy the new ones in.

This is still a little experimental - I threw the idea by LnS as he came up with the background thing and as he(she?) was pretty busy I spent all of 4 or 5 minutes putting this together to pass back. Couldn't PM the image/file so posted it here.

Still need to look at ideal model sizes etc for different level sizes & detail/image size things. Basically the idea was for space themes - it's then just a matter of getting an appropriate image & replacing the jpg file - heaps of great images over at the hubble web site (www.hubblesite.org) but really as I was thinking about it, you could use any sort of image for any style theme.

Still going...

Pauline, did I ask how the rooms going? ( )

Robbie

[SharonM]

Okay, thanks Robbie. I didn't want to make a mistake and lose LNS's great background. Then I'd have to redownload it and possibly lose your space background and have to redownload..............Oh no, what a vicious cycle. Anyway, thanks and I will follow your suggestion.

[popo]

Pauline, did I ask how the rooms going? ( )

Yes you did.

Have you been drinking from the billabong again?

[Robbie]

Uh huh... you know it's all good stuff

Robbie