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    posted a message on Create model of the bridge?

    Since precisely which race's bridge is ambiguous, I'll assume you are referring to modern bridges, which are close enough to Sc2 Terran designs that you can surely explore a bit of creative dexterity to make the two meet.

     

    A simpler bridge, such as this one will require ample preparation in figuring out the scales very precisely. If you don't plan to model the rest of the scene then you don't necessarily need to be concerned about the electrical systems and ensuring they meet some form of realistic standards, but it always helps to figure out exactly how your bridge is actually functioning beforehand, like any scene.

     

    Personally, I find details like chairs and other scale-dependent conforming objects to be really hard to model. So, good luck on that one. It might help to find an orthographic reference of each object or at least multiple shots of the bridge in question so you can create your own ortho reference or at least mentally quantify the scales accordingly. Since you'll want to animate those chairs, ensure each part is actually modeled to be functional so you can avoid clipping. Consider how you'll be texturing them as well - in an engine with a material system like Unreal 4 you can definitely cut a lot of corners in terms of creating texture assets and rely largely on the same maps, breaking them up with masks for various color variations. In an extremely limited engine like Starcraft 2, however, you'll probably need to make most of the texture assets object dependent except in some cases, like with various nuts, bolts, and other small details, where you can easily recycle generic metal assets.

     

    For the console buttons, you have a few options. If you'd like to replicate the "button in a glass" object you'll probably need two actual objects, or at least an object with two material portions. In an engine like Unreal 4 you can also kind of replicate this appearance with pixel depth offset/displacement mapping, but it's probably cheaper to just model it. Sc2 will have issues with multiple transparent objects since it's Dx9, but you can try to cheat your way around some of it with the Priority setting on the material (this is how I got an acceptable middleground with the Nuke explosion in Starcrafts).

     

    Screens can be an animated material in Unreal 4, and you could just use a flipbook in Sc2. It might help to have flipbook animations for every possible variation of what you want them to depict beforehand, so you can call those animations during your cinematics.

     

    Materials for things like cloth on seats is going to be tough, because Sc2 can't do that very well. You're always going to end up with something that looks really glossy and icky, so it's probably best to use leather, metal, plastic, or painted finished for the upholstery whenever you can. Gloss maps can kind of help you keep the slimyness of Deferred under control, but the outdated technology is definitely working against you here. Fresnel can be used to help creative fake velvet-kind of effects if you really need it, and it might help create the illusion of backlit screens on monitors as well. Carpet will be extra tough in something like sc2, so I wish you luck.

     

    Some bridges like this you could get away constructing modularly if you plan out your layout to suit modular pieces. The consoles and chairs in particular are objects you can instance to help speed up the initial phases of blocking out, but as each station will likely have unique tools at their disposal, you'll either want to break down the modular components so they can be instanced but take unique additions to them, or break away from instancing entirely once you have the base assets you know won't change textured and planted into the scene. It will depend on your workflow, I suppose. Kids these days probably sculpt the entire thing in a half-hour anyways.

     

    Next comes your Lighting.

     

    I'm a proponent of realistic lighting, so no satanic witchdoctor devil-summoning backlight for me. Consider each screen and illuminated keypad is going to be producing a light, and if your exterior scene is visible through windows that will also be casting lights. Photo references might be tough (like this one) because auto exposure is aids and makes photography a little unreliable if you're looking for realworld values to base off of. Again, I think finding multiple references of the same material can help you figure out a middleground that works for you.

     

    I know it isn't much of a guide on modeling the actual bridge, because that subject is just way too big. Start off small with sculpting a few simple shapes like a Jellyfish or Atlantis, and move up from there when you've got grip on the rod. I can't sculpt, so I did things the old and inefficient way - extruding everything bit by bit. I first started with an inversed box kind of shape and just tacked crap onto it as I went. It didn't really turn out too well in my opinion, but I never really considered it finished, either. This only took about an hour or two to cobble together (minus the railings - I couldn't model that kind of an object so I had to call in for help from Australia). The most annoying part was how Mirror'd objects in 3ds max turned up backfaced in Unreal. How odd!

     

     

    Good luck!!!!!!!!!!!!!

     

    /w 2016 and Mapster still doesn't know what to do with bbcode xDDDD

    Posted in: Artist Tavern
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    posted a message on [Showcase] Taylor Mouse's Models

    You'd never be banned for this, haha. There are sites who distribute ripped assets and have done so for years and years. Now if you were selling them... well, that would be a different story. (Edit - Also, I would never put them into an Arcade map. But, I never make anything for the arcade, so that part is just a given for me.)

    And I have been to Xentax - I've PM'd you on there before! :3

    Posted in: Artist Tavern
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    posted a message on [Showcase] Taylor Mouse's Models

    @TaylorMouse: Go

    Let's say it's for academic purposes. Which parts are not working correctly? I assume it's some stuff that relies on engine technology like some of their ribbon-like effects and such. Are you considering releasing the plugin?

    I've never heard of anyone reverse engineering the animations before besides those model viewers on that site, so I guess that will probably remain the only route for extracting that kind of information.

    Reverse engineering is one of the things I would love to get into because it's such an immensely useful and critical skill. Alas, I have no programming knowledge to speak of, so I'll just have to focus on the remastering/fixing the results parts.

    Interestingly enough, there's actually a huge reskinning community for the game. But it's mostly texture mods I think.

    Posted in: Artist Tavern
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    posted a message on [Showcase] Taylor Mouse's Models

    @TaylorMouse: Go

    Wait, are you saying you can get animated League of Legends models? Please, tell me much more.

    Posted in: Artist Tavern
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    posted a message on [Showcase] Fire Effects

    @Caevrane: Go

    When it comes to particles, I find understanding methods becomes the most important thing, more important than understanding realworld objects you are representing. I am an analyst, so I broke down what I wanted to recreate into defining motions and reconstructed those motions and ignored everything else. Everything to come after was just yolo.

    Technology is only as good as its master. I can walk into something like FumeFX and sc2 particles with great confidence because I have been working with this specific nature of subject since 1999. All of the applications and methods homogenize in a way that lets me apply methods I learned in Brood War and Age of Wonders 2 to Sc2 or Unreal 4 in this very specific area. I know precisely what I want because it's what I've wanted since I began. So I have a good idea of what I need to reach that point, just not a very good idea of how to actually make it (there's millions of things I want to make in FumeFX I have no clue how to yet).

    I don't read into buzzwords like "Triple A".

    @Zolden: Go

    These are a good start. I would look into drag effects for the smoke and such. It will be quite some time before I get into really major scale particle work in Unreal 4 but maybe I will revisit this later down the line when I do, because the shader control in Unreal 4 makes Starcraft 2 look like a bad joke and the effects I can achieve with material manipulation alone are innumerable.

    Posted in: Artist Tavern
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    posted a message on [Showcase] Fire Effects

    Yup. The FumeFX stuff I made from scratch. I did similar with Armageddon Onslaught in Brood War, though I used Afterburn for those.

    I don't know Photoshop, so I only used it to composite the frames.

    Posted in: Artist Tavern
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    posted a message on [Showcase] Fire Effects

    I was able to achieve some good results in the hour or two of experiments I put into the game.

    Keep in mind Gifcam doesn't produce smooth results for me.

    http://i.imgur.com/p3Aq80f.gifhttp://i.imgur.com/VUmnw5q.gif
    http://i.imgur.com/kQpFf1K.gifhttp://i.imgur.com/vpDwXNA.gif
    http://i.imgur.com/QHvsN5z.gif

    Conversely, I did no research at all for Starcraft 2. I just winged everything from rendering the frames to the effects and everything shown here is just a first time dry run, so it's unpolished. I was aiming for an Anime style. As I was replacing every particle effect in the game I had no attachment to the existing art style or appearances. Since I was building the particles for weapons I was intently focused on them being concise reads (like they are in asian MMO's or shmups) rather than realism. My rule of thumb was for general weapon impacts (all of the above) to be <1.5 seconds in length on Normal Speed.

    Some of the FumeFX systems I made for the particles.

    http://i.imgur.com/PbSZU2W.gifhttp://i.imgur.com/eMelRuS.gif
    http://i.imgur.com/cSrHEt5.gifhttp://i.imgur.com/je0FY9K.gif
    http://i.imgur.com/6wGSj5z.gifhttp://i.imgur.com/CsH044O.gif

    Posted in: Artist Tavern
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    posted a message on [Showcase] Taylor Mouse's Models

    Nice to see you still updating this TaylorCutie.

    I have a question.

    Can this import m3a?

    Say I want to import the cinematic marine and twiddle a donkey. I believe many of those animations if not all are in m3a. Is it possible to pull them out or should I try to learn rigging to animate it (any good references for that?)

    Posted in: Artist Tavern
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    posted a message on Leaving Mapster Open

    I seek guidance from my spirit animal during such troubled times. He is a Walrus named Ted. Ted is very strong and brave, unlike me. He can benchpress a car, like inControl, but win homeland tournaments, like Jaedong. He has an outrageous mustache, like Braum, and rolls a nat 20 on Charisma every time it seems like some half-orc might plant a silvered axe into his snout, like Lavarinth. He wears a tightly knit set of blue overalls woven out of sinew from orphans that always seems to struggle against his surging purple pecs but never have I seen them fray, plastic crocs he probably stole from Tyrone, and a straw hat baked in an oven heated by no fewer and no greater than one thousand albino Armenians. He has something of a pot belly, but he uses it mostly as a form of transportation, merrily bounding between hot spots in the middle east as he plunders oil for Trump's next golf cart.

    Ted is a haughty traditionalist who speaks in honeyed words with a southern twang accented by his Korean heritage. He tries to keep his cat feasts to a minimum when he's in town, though, because he knows I make a living out of cat-powered rocketry. Most of our discussions revolve around his time in Vietnam as a farmer who plowed the many fertile fields of the Dear Leader's once-virgin daughters. The Dear Leader learned of his infiltration and sentenced him to fifty thousand years hard labor inside the hyperbolic time chamber, which Ted willfully submitted to because he had tarnished his own honor in allowing himself to be discovered and saw the punishment as genuine repentance. Ted's pride means that the taste of defeat is all the more sour to him than the average Walrus, like biting into a moldy sack of tofu cleverly disguised as newspapers. As a result his statements are always laced with a nature of boasting and worded in an overly flowery manner, like how he described the process of summoning his Stand, Fanny Trample, in a fifty-page poem in Chinese characters written using only his one tusk. Beneath all the semantics is an abundantly clear ode to dedication, however.

    Despite his countless accomplishments and years of brutal warfare in the trenches of North America during the annexing of the last Liberal stronghold, Mount Cuckistan, Ted's face furrowed with a truly alien sense of horror and disgust when I first spoke to him about Starcraft 2. I had barely explained to him the most superficial intricacies of Raynor's thousand-point arc about how he loves tentacles and horses when he asked me if I ever intended to plant a cat rocket in its backyard. Which is to say, Ted wanted to know if I was ever going to dig for oil. Ted sees things as kind of a prospector, and his eyes can notice so minute a detail that he can fish out an oil well from a thousand leagues away. Such skills are necessary to fuel Trump's golf cart legion, his most powerful armed forces, you see.

    I reasoned to myself that Ted's inquiry was a humbled but unmistakable criticism of the fertility of the fields within Starcraft 2's bossom. Surely he already knew that drilling for oil in a field drenched only in tears was simply going to lead to springing leaks all across my third Dirigible (known as the "SAFE SPACE COWBOY OF COLOR"). The previous Dirigible had been lost during a chess game against a stupid Elf possessed by Satan, but Ted had managed to save me from the scuffle with a moving performance of his Wonder Palm Death Buttsmack Attack, a special move that takes precisely five episodes and a prelude to power up. With the devil's ass firmly slapped back in place, that meant the third Dirigible, a most valued vessel, could only find ill winds by sailing into a befouled land.

    Befoulded indeed were the lands of Starcraft 2, laid barren by Raynor's lust. For so pure was his single-mindedness that he had forgot to flush the toilet, unsealing the innermost pits of heck and flooding a once promising land with unspeakable evils like bandwidth caps and heat-sealed cereal bags. Scoundrels!

    Ted told me to look away from Sodom and Gomorrah, else I would turn into a mound of ferrets. I did not listen. In my arrogance I believed I was capable of beholding the dark secrets of Starcraft 2's abhorrent failures. For so many aeons I had crafted aught of cat hair and formulated science beyond the wildest imaginations of my shroom-addled crow companions, but truly I had scarcely scratched a tiny filament of dead skin from Jay Wilson's thirty-seventh chin. Just as my Walrus patron had warned, upon gazing into the infinite well of grape drank that Starcraft 2 had collapsed into I felt my consciousness split apart into a thousand incomprehensibly furry and irate mammals that washed across the rapidly descending Cowboy craft like a furry convention that had just announced its first yiffing contest.

    For the next hundred years I had to find each and every last one of the damnable Schrodinger's Ferrets and off them using a spatula carved in pentagrams, and for every one I returned to the quantum goat I recollected a tiny portion of my sanity. Only at the end of my grand journey could I again hear Ted's voice, whom of which patiently awaited me at the end of the fermented yellow boat road. He didn't need to say anything - his expression was more than enough. A scar remained with me from that day onwards - a scar only Starcraft 2 could give. An emptiness that had drained all the blackness out of my coffee, all the cat hair out of my GPU fan, and all of the light from day. I walked with the living again but only as a shadow, lost amongst the endless mire that was despair's thorny coil. Again, Ted would prove to be an unmoving pillar of confidence and hope, and with a single statement he again changed my life.

    "Ye dun gone slipped up yer own posterior, mate. Within the gap ye gotta find anotha goat. Open yer lower to the higher 'n in the void find enlightenment."

    Ted was a monk of sorts. An individual who followed a secret Freemason craft known only to the most devout of atheists. The truth of the universe could be found within an ominous "void", which one could peer within by "expanding the ring". Unfortunately for me, hearing the word "void" was now a trigger because of Starcraft 2, so I had to construct a "safe space" under my bed of herrings and very carefully expose myself to it one syllable at a time. Though... I often wondered if it was really necessary to keep disrobing myself.

    The Goat I was familiar with, though.

    During the time of the Jewish Inquisition I learned of The Goat, or rather, of the one called He Who Sees Goat. I was only able to speak to him for a few moments before his castle succumbed to the Christian siege lead by Sir David Manning, but it was enough to convince me that, somewhere, a great yellow Goat watches us all with a vacant, potentially malignant, stare. Like you had accidentally mooned him when performing a swan dance and he thought you were really trying to exclaim that your butt was nicer than his. The Goat in question is something of a spiteful fellow who doesn't easily let down grudges. I would later learn that the many cases of "human combustion" were really the Goat's machinations. Those who particularly irked him were set aflame by their buttcheeks vigoriously rubbing against each other until they produced a vacuum. The Goat cannot traverse physical space, he needs a dark matter singularity to manifest, which is allegedly possible through vacuum. Thus, when a butt's cheeks rub each other hard enough, they can momentarily create a vacuum that allows him brief access to the world of men. The side effect is, of course, the friction setting their bodies and anything within a few hundred kilometers on fire. The Freemasons control the media, though, so you never hear about the tremendous loss of life that comes as a result of The Goat's manifestations.

    The tenuous relationship between The Goat whom of which many religions would consider a deity of dubious intentions at best and the few monks seeking wisdom from him was outlined by Ted as being more of a business transaction. When a monk sought enlightenment from The Goat they had to make an offering in kind. These offerings were extremely specific to The Goat's demands at the time, and could range from a crimson spinel to a slab of microcline carved in the shape of a crooked dong. The most relevant part of these revelations was that Starcraft 2, the endless darkness that had nearly put my cat rocketry in recession, was in fact an extreme act of violence to come from The Goat in retaliation for America's invention of the Mobile Phone. The Goat despised the Mobile Phone so hotly because of its rounded edges, which is seen as an attack on Godly entities as a body. Though The Goat doesn't hold water in man's laughable conceptions of deities or their worship of such creatures, rounded corners nonetheless are an affront to supernatural entities because they represent unsavory acts. In retribution, The Goat created Starcraft 2 to act as a catalyst for The End Days. I questioned Ted on the legitimacy of this rubbish and if he was simply trying to make me feel better about spending a hundred years swatting ferrets with a spatula, but he retrieved an ancient bible from his overalls and handed it over.

    Surely enough, In Jordan 42, a prophecy is declared by Jisos that Starcraft 2 would be released by an ancient evil and bring about the end times. No mention of a chosen one to wield a magic sword to defeat it, just reducto ad ferretum to all who dared gaze in its general direction.

    The moral of the story is that unless you want to spend the rest of your silly mortal existence chasing the tails of your own ferrets with a rusty spatula you'd best spin your own Dirigible wide-wise, turn 360 degrees and walk away.

    Posted in: General Chat
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    posted a message on IskatuMesk's Sound Showcase

    lol I made a post on mapster xD

    some trash from earlier this year. I don't do VA anymore though, other than a one-shot dry run every x months, so it's just that - random trash.

    https://soundcloud.com/iskatumesk/tech-doc-malash-test https://soundcloud.com/iskatumesk/cpga-lord-of-the-cranks https://soundcloud.com/iskatumesk/acro-t-new

    blazeit

    Posted in: Audio Development
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    posted a message on Recommended games to play

    Awesome Possum (genesis) Tongue of the Fat Man (Famicom) Cheetahman 2 (Famicom)

    These are all Good Games and you guys would really enjoy them.

    Posted in: Off-Topic
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    posted a message on Fix StratosTygo's Battlenet Account 2016

    neat thread xD

    Posted in: Off-Topic
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    posted a message on InsaneAI Library

    @InsaneMst: Go

    Nope, all of my work is private. And yeah, it's been abandoned for a while.

    Posted in: Trigger Libraries & Scripts
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    posted a message on InsaneAI Library

    @InsaneMst: Go

    The AI supports per-mission builds, compositions, attack behaviors, group sizes, etc. and can still benefit from triggers. It's just it also functions like melee where a lot of things are handled under the hood for efficiency. My campaign was rather large, so avoiding repeat work where possible was going to be necessary to see it complete in only a few years.

    As an example of its flexibility, I am certain I could tack it onto your AI as-is and get benefits from both.

    Posted in: Trigger Libraries & Scripts
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    posted a message on InsaneAI Library

    @InsaneMst: Go

    Sounds a lot different than anything I was looking at before, I'll definitely need to check the map at some point. Were I ever to work with sc2 again, there's quite possibly something I could gleam from the source to improve my own project. Expanding was the weakest part of my AI - attacking, defending, building and everything was entirely automated and worked extremely well, but they were very lax in expanding in particular.

    Posted in: Trigger Libraries & Scripts
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