Help me choose (please)!
WsCG
Posts: 391
So, gathering reference images for a scene.
The theme is going back to my old 'tabletop PnP gaming days' (haven't been able to find or assemble a stable group in years), and I'm going to set up a little scene from a could-be session.
Can't seem to find my own dragon dice at the moment, so I went googling for some reference images. Saw several that I like, and decided to ask the community here to help me decide which "look" to go for... Whatever the result, it'll be a fun and challenging learning experience in the shader room. If you'd like to give a reason for why you chose what you did, such as a particular challenge it would present, or that it would be a bit more realistic for a Carrara novice like myself... etc, go for it!
I've attached the options I'm choosing from. There's something I like from all of them, hence my indecision.
Anyway, thought I'd see if y'all would be interested in offering a suggestion. Thanks!
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Comments
the purplish ones look like my r/l dices
I'm stuck with the same issue of not having a group to jam with around here.
For a while there I'd travel an hour (each way) to the nearest group I found, and really had a great time. The DM didn't even have any books or a screen... he did everything out of his head and was fairly strict with dice rolls - he knew the rules inside and out and was absolutely awesome! But I just couldn't keep up the traveling. But in the process, I did end up getting some nice new dice. I keep my favorite set in one of those travel chess/backgammon cases - they're tiny brass, along with more tiny d6s to go along for the ride.
Hmmm... I'm with Misty on this one... but I see the dilema. They're all very nice! Whichever you choose will be great!
Mine are easy. As long as I have a full scene I can just toss the Brass preset on them and... Bam!!!
My Digital Painters shaders from Ringo would look awesome on dice as well! He's got some really exotic ones in there.
Yeah.. it's a dilemma lol.
I like the 'icey' blue ones because of how the light plays off and through them. I can work out in my head how to get that effect, just a matter of making it work in Carrara (which is part of the learning exercise).
I like the purple ones because they have a kinda spacey look to them, glitter kinda reminds me of stars, etc. I think it would be interesting to try and capture that effect via materials (or maybe in combination with other means).
Third is 1.jpg which has that cool kind of pearlescent metal look. Not sure if/how that would be achieved in Carrara, but it would be fun to figure it out.
The weakest one of the 4 is the Blue Marble looking one (4.jpg). It's the least interesting of the 4, but I like the marbled looking material.
Eh.. who knows. Could always try to create each of them, since each would be a unique challenge for using the shader room in different ways.
My best days of table-top AD&D were with a group of friends who'd meet up every Saturday at one guy's house. It was straight out of ET lol.. pizza, sodas, chips, etc. No alien, though. We couldn't find one of those. But it really was a good time. That's kinda the setting I want to try and recreate for this scene.
Wow. I feel the same. Icey blue keeps capturing my interest. Argh!
Have you ever played Neverwinter Nights? More specifically, have you ever played it multiplayer with one or more Dungeon Masters? It's almost as cool as the really thing. Yeah... the actual meeting up is missing, but the miniatures are animated, which helps make up for it! Plus, nearly every D&D creature was made available by the time the community got done building for it. Heck, there are probably still people creating stuff! ;)
I was messing around with making custom textures for the game and got offered a (non-paying) job helping a team make the Spelljammer stuff for it. So I joined and helped do some textures and made some custom outfits for them. Eventually their modeler, the guy that offered me the position, and I became good friends. he, his wife, and I would play modules together and that's how I got my first multi-player experience.
He taught me to use GMax (Free Max for game support communities) and the 3DS Max. That's how I got interested in 3D.
I eventually made a name for myself - or rather, Rosie, my call sign was Rosietreats
I held a small, fun seminar for my stuff at NWCON 4, which I've also designed the poster for - Rosie fighting a Blue Dragon - my first forays into Poser! LOL
I like clear glassy most off all
I like the purple ones, followed by the icy ones and the beat up ones. Blue swirlys come last, I'm afraid.
I think I like the purple ones best myself. To be completely realistic though you should probably make them all - I've never met a long-time tabletop rpg player who didn't have a collection of several sets of dice. I've got a chainmail bag a jeweler friend of mine made for me that has about 5 different dice sets in it and have a box somewhere that probably has 50 more dice (some complete sets, some partial) in it.
Yeah I think I'm going with the Icey Blue ones first. Once I get the dice modeled and everything, then I can just focus on working out the different materials, but I feel like the ice blue ones will be a good first option.
I started bringing together the basic props for it - going to just use some of the ready-made stuff with Carrara for the table and such. No need to spend a lot of time on that, since it's not going to be the focus.
Neverwinter Nights! Ahhhh yes. I spent the better part of 2 years in the early 2000s playing that, pretty much every day, every minute I could. I was pretty well hooked. I never played through the single-player campaigns, though. I'll still reinstall it from time to time and see what's going on. It still has a pretty active community, with a number of PW's still live and running.
I originally learned about it from a friend whom told me he was playing it on a Persistent Server a friend of his had set up. He explained how it was a RP server with some cool custom scripting (random quest generator, etc), and it sounded like a lot of fun. So I picked it up, started playing, and was hooked. I played on a couple other servers over the next few years as well. I've always said that was my "gateway drug" to MMORPGs, and it (that friend's server specifically) is the origin of a few of the characters I've used in most every RPG I've played since with a character creator.
My main character was originally supposed to be a male Elf (since I'm male, etc), but if you recall back then, male characters ran like they had a board up their rears, or were in serious need of a bathroom. Either way, it was awful to look at. At least for me. Meanwhile, female characters were animated much better. So, since I knew I'd be spending a lot of time playing that character, I figured it should be something I could stand to look at for hours on end. They eventually upgraded the male animations, but by then my characters were pretty well established. It made RP a bit weird at first, but I decided to just stick with gender-neutral behavior, and put my own personality/sense-of-humor into them, rather than trying to portray someone else.
Good times and awesome memories for sure. Miss those days.
In fact, here's a screenshot of that very character (well, a recreation of them) on a PW I was checking out not too long ago.
I intend to create some stories around one of those characters in particular, which means I'll be doing some character creation/customization in Carrara, and will likely need to do some shopping from DAZ (it's an Elven female character with very specific features, so I'll want to make sure I get it right).
Sweet!
Yeah, I made a custom head and torso model combination to make a cool "Rosietreats" character, and set it up like a product pack folks could easily install - so my groups could add that to their list of HakPacks needed to run the game ;)
The hair worked like a ball-joint. If you've ever seen the custom Long Hair models people made, it was all on the head, so if the character looked up the back of the hair would come out the chest! LOL Mine wasn't like that. I spent a lot of time setting the torso and head parts of the hair to work in all extremes.
Then I set about building "Cormyr" from the Forgotten Realms in a scale that worked beautifully with the horses. It would take several game-hour days to cross the region on horse back - much longer on foot. My horse menu was a freaking awesome set of scripts that I tweaked for months! I still have Cormyr saved on a few hard drives in case I ever feel like working on it more. I love the toolset! Paint down a stream over a cliff and get an instant waterfall right there in the toolset! So cool.
I have all of my original discs and their original packaging, but when I saw the whole works at GOG... I had to grab it. I have it installed on this computer as we speak! I enjoy the single player games and have them all tweaked to have my Rosie character and horses! LOL
Adventure Gear brought me Hall of Fame status on the Vault! That blew my mind! My Rosietreats character files all came with that.
It contained a whole slew of custom armor, leather and clothing as well as various backpacks and weapons packs (strictly visual) which could be put on and taken off in-game, making it a really simple system for the casual gamer to work with. The 'fallen friend' (female character in the heore's arms) utilized version 1.67's new Robe System. The script made the actual character's arms and hands disappear (visually only) and were replaced by these, which held the unconscious female for roleplay purposes. The hair on that female was dynamic and moved with the wind and while moving around... pretty cool for such low rez. The feamle Hero in the Advenutre Gear promo is my Rosie character. The original game's female belly button was in a funny place, so these are the ones I made ;) There was more to the kit than what is shown here.
I was also a part of the C.E.P.(Community Expansion Pack) team and C.R.A.P. (Classic Roleplay Adaptation Project) as well as the aforementioned Spelljammer team, which is the team that got me into actual UV Editing for the first time ever. I never worked with computer 3D objects before... it was a whole new realm for me.
Before this game was the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale series, which were pseudo 3D - 2D games. This was the dawn of a new era - and I was just learning how to be on a PC!
Oh... but I should add that I didn't do much of the mapping of the models in the above image. Actually I think I only did a little tweaking of the Elven Man-O-War ship. They taught me how to edit though.
Excellent! So you got pretty deep into editing/creating stuff, then. Very cool! Yeah, I was always interested in that. I think I was just too much into playing to spend any time creating lol.
That's a very good point!
That's always the best solution for something like this, isn't it? Can't decide which to go with? Go with all of them!
I've settled on doing the icey blue ones first. Then I'll see about setting up the other versions.
I didn't know you were going to model the dice yourself. Very cool! The timing was so perfect that I thought you saw my post in Misty's thread:
Ha! No, I hadn't seen that!
And yeah, aside from background things that won't be key in the picture, I prefer to model things myself. Best way for me to learn, personally, is to try and build something from scratch. If I have a specific end-goal in mind, it really helps me learn and remember the tools as I figure it out. I've never been good at learning to model by following someone else's steps, etc. Plus, there's a kind of 'pride', I guess, in knowing something is entirely your own effort.
Fortunately, I've had enough experience with 3D modeling "in general" (but by no means advanced or professional) that it's more learning the software, than learning how to model.
I'll typically give myself little "test projects" to learn something. For example, I'd wanted to dive into Blender3D's material and rendering systems a bit more deeply, so I gave myself a challenge of recreating a coffee cup I own in real life. The modeling part was pretty straight-forward, and wasn't really the point of the exercise. Creating the materials (all Blender generated, no textures, etc), took a lot of trial and error, and I had to ask for some help from the community for one bit, but I got the result I was after...
So, yeah.. I want to learn to model and texture the dice myself :p.
Easy part's done! Well, with the dice, at least. That 10 sided die was interesting to put together. Had to dig into some tools I hadn't used yet, which is exactly what I was hoping for :p.
I have a few more props to create, but those should be easy. Then it's on to material creation, which I think is going to be the real meat of this project.
Awesome!
You're going to love the Texture Room. Even though you want to make the shaders yourself from scratch, don't hesitate to open up some of the examples that come with Carrara for some inspiration. That's actually why I buy or otherwise collect shaders - to learn from. At the end of the day, my shaders are often my own even though I've come to now several of the presets that I'll often use as a starting point, since I already know exactly how they're built - and I know they get me closer.
Still, it's awfully fun to just start from scratch too. So I do it both ways.
I love to buy and use content. And those shaders I just build. As soon as I load in a new piece of content, I consolidate duplicate shaders and then get to work. First stop - the texture map folder included with the product so that I know what I have to work with, like tranparency maps, possible glow masks or maps, Specular, Bump or Normal, etc.,
Anyways... Even though I have a LOT to still explore in there, I really love the Texture Room. As limited as I may be, I'm amazed at what I can come up with using a touch of imagination ;)
BTW, since we started talking about that here, I went back into my latest adventure and continued on, as well as downloading a bunch of new content and stuff for the game. What a Blast!
But anyway, I knew that Morph3d was coming, but I wasn't very clear on what it really was. I did have a hunch that it involved a store for game-resolution content to be bought by game developers to use for their games. But it seems to be going way beyond that! I guess with this new information age of collaboration all across the globe, everything can and will evolve - all it takes is an idea.
Well here is a playlist of YouTube videos for game developers to add Morph3d content into Unity: MCS 101 It's really cool how easy it is - even later when he gets into scripts. I used to edit scripts to make certain things happen in NWN using NWscript, which is a version of C++. It becomes really easy after a while because the major formats and syntax can be saved in notepad for making templates to start with, then just fill in the blanks and get help where needed. If I could do it.... LOL
This video kind of sets us up for better understanding where this is all heading, at least at first
So then this one shows the basics of the Ready Room at Morph3d
Just create an account and we get enough free content to make a pretty cool standard persistent avatar, with more goodies we can buy at the store - pretty cool how it works. So it's going to be interesting to see how far this goes - more partners allowing our persistent Avatars to enter. One Avatar for all of these different environments, so other people will likely be able to recognize us for who we are on the fly, from a distance even.
Now even onboard with High Fidelity! This is getting cool!
All very exciting! I'm getting enthused to start creating assets! ;)
So, about that dice/D&D project...
Got sidetracked for a while, lost the original project file and had to start from scratch again.
Good news is, I got the dice re-modeled pretty quickly, though. So that's good.
Unlike last time, though, instead of using pre-made props, I'm going to model the table, chairs, etc. myself. Y'know... for the experience.
Here's a pic of the new dice in my spiffy newly themed Carrara. That blue on gray is just so easy on the eyes.
So, decided the edges on the dice weren't quite rounded enough, so I remade those. Also got a basic table created. Next up chairs! Then all the various, typical tabletop gaming type stuff.
I'm thinking of building out an entire kitchen scene around it as well, because I intend to create that kind of a scene anyway, and because it will be necessary for an animation I intend to do at some point anyway. May as well kill two birds with one stone! Perhaps I can continue to build on to the overall 'setting', creating a kind of universe for some of my various projects to take place in; could provide a fun kind of continuity.
Anyway... just a quick shot of the new dice and table. Getting some nice use of the different modelers for this so far. Need to get started earlier in the evening so I have more time to work on this stuff!
Chairs!
The chair has proven to be the most challenging part to model so far. Can certainly do a lot better, but then this is as much a learning experience as it is a project, so... I can always return to them later if I want, and do them more better-er.