Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: Nuke on July 06, 2004, 05:23:57 pm
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so what to you find the most difficult task in making a mod. pe personally i hate naming things, but lets see what the community says.
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I voted for modling. Mainly because I can't and without models (or people that can work on them) your mod is basicly screwed before it begins! Substitues can work if your desperate but in the end you NEED models and MODLERS. No ifs, ands, or buts!
In second place I'd say getting turrets to work CORRECTLY as well as placing them (but I'm only guessign from the posts people make about it)
Third problem but also a biggie is mapping, (as once it's mapped you can spend how ever long it takes to find a texture look that works) but you cant experiment till it's mapped! It took me about 4-5 hours to get a decent texture scheme for Lar's model that I use as a generic White Base (Gundam) due to his raw model already being mapped! (thanks again to Lars for that!)
[EDIT] I can see Tin Can put much thought into his post :P
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Modeling, simply because I can't do it! ;)
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For me it's texturing - I can't do it for ****! :D
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UV mapping. While I can do it, it's taxing at times. But naming my ships is hard too. I can think of individual ship names, but not ship classes.
That's why my latest project was a mesh Aldo already UV mapped. Drawing the textures was easy enough, but naming it was hard.
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i take uv mapping and texture schemes into consideration when i model my ship. i used to be, before htl anyway, a bit less considerate as to how i made my geometry look, causing the textured ship to look abit off. with the insanely high polycounts of htl i can create geometry that helps bring out testure features. so i consider moddeling, texturing and uv mapping all part of the same process. when you hand off untextured models to someone else they might not come out as youd like. i learned this with the first release of my chaos assault fighter which i handed off to be textured. i ended up redoing the whole ship from scratch doing the texture myself. the first few ships i did have all been redone to improve polycounts and texture quality. im getting to where im only limited to a lack of new ideas for ship concepts.
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UV Mapping, Textures and POFing...
Because they are the ones that I can't do.
Out of those though, I have the least idea of how to UV Map, so there you go.
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That's another part... inspiration. I lack that, often.
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Ah yes. I can model, but all of my 'good models' have never been completely of my own design.
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Almost Ditto. Some of mine are, but people keep telling me they look like some other ship... :nervous:
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im still no good with missions. sexp logic drives me quite mad. my capship battles look dull, missions are boring, its just not something im good at.
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I don't do FRED. I do MAX.
*Waits for KT or DC to say something about that statement...*
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Meh. It kind of kills itself.
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Modelling for me,havn't got a clue on how to do this.
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-@- == can do
-@- == can't do
-@- == So-so...see comments for more
[-@-]moddelling
[-@-]uv mapping //I can sorta do this. It's very taxing and I don't like to do it
[-@-]textures and other bitmaps //same as UV mapping
[-@-]animations //I've somewhat delved into this. Stills are easier
[-@-]fredding //I've FREDed some with FS1, but not FS2/FSO
[-@-]table editing //more then my fair share
[-@-]sound effects/music
[-@-]pof editing
[-@-]finding time to mod
[-@-]naming your ships, wepons, ect.
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Converting to POF. It's complicated, has many more rules than the other areas (thanks to FSO) and requires truespace. Ugh.
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texturing......I mean GOOD texturing
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Gathering willpower and pofing :p
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ive done some sound editing. i pulled a little gunshot sound off the net and sampled it a bunch of times to get my gatling gun sounds. reminds me of a nicholas barker drum solo :D
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Texturing. Not because it's hard, but because it takes a ****ing age to do it.......(i.e. measured in days or weeks rather than hours)
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Really? If I have a decent UV Map, I can do a ship up in a few hours... Granted they're not the top quality, but eventually I'll learn enough to get up there...
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Originally posted by Raa Tor'h
I don't do FRED. I do MAX.
*Waits for KT or DC to say something about that statement...*
What if I said FRED was tighter :p
Oh, how I love puns. :p
And I say textures because I believe it to be the most difficult and time-consuming process of the entire model.
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Takes me about, i dunno, 8 hours to do the basic hull detailing - I've started adding noise & grit on what is pretty much a per-pixel basis. Plus i normally do the shading 2-4 times (initalliy, then when the hull lines are drawn, then to accentuate details). and there's also a few hours detailing - especially the machinery details - and also in adding decals. Plus i need to modift each individual decal - triangles, labels, warning strips, etc - by burning, corroding or simply erasing parts of it - before I can finalise the bmp. And then I also need to do shine & especially glow maps, which is often a pain in the arse as I have to select parts of the glow map to create a proper light-=cast effect. Plus I've shifted back to 1024x1024 maps, which makes it a massive job. And my last map I restarted twice because I wasn't happy.
so, overall, i'm guessing it takes between 12-24 hours concentrated effort to draw the maps, depending on size and complexity.
The real difficulty is balanbcing detail, natch - it's dead easy to add too many details and decals, so you end up with something stupid looking. And the problem with HTL ships is that every bit of detail - i.e. little panels or vents on the hull - can look odd in contrast with the extra modelled details.
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Originally posted by Nico
Gathering willpower and pofing :p
Originally posted by aldo_14
Texturing. Not because it's hard, but because it takes a ****ing age to do it.......(i.e. measured in days or weeks rather than hours)
they speak the truth
I'd add unwrapping when the model is complex, and lodding too (but that's included in willpower:p )
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I don't mind pofing. I just do it while I'm watching TV so it doesn't bother me to do it :)
FREDding it the thing I have to concentrate 100% on.
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I should probably pipe in and mention how much I ****ing loathe TrueShi...Space, especially when it comes to turreting.
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UV-mapping. Not that I can't do it, but it's annoying as hell.:D
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Originally posted by aldo_14
I should probably pipe in and mention how much I ****ing loathe TrueShi...Space, especially when it comes to turreting.
I really don't mind hierarchy work... when I'm interested in the model I'm working on. It's the main reason I keep stalling for AotD. I'm not so enthusiastic about the few models neding work. Not that they're bad, bt I'm bored with them. That happens quickly sometimes.
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Don't blame me, blame Raven. :p
BTW: I'm actually working on a new set of something you might/should/will be interested in. :)
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Modeling lods..its very annoying
UV-mapping I can do it but this is hardest part of work.
Tables editing well..I love it:D :D
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i hate doing lods and dibrits. out of 18 ships none of them have any detail levels. its hurting my framerate real bad and making ships blowing up kinda dull. ive been making hi poly versions of my pre scp models. my seker, phoenix, and chaos and valkyrie mkii (now known as dcf vulture) have all gotten remastered to one degree or another. i probibly could get away with using my old versions as the second lod
anyway i tend to find turreting not as difficult as most people do. mastering autogen is key. i just wish it worked on more stuff. id like to convert my ship and be done with it, that way if i make a minor revision in truespace i dont have to bother importing from the old pof becaus its part of the truespace scene. certain chunks have import issues, like the ones that reference submodel numbers and stuff like that. and moving glowpoints to another pof usually always crashes pcs.
i find the model quality goes up the longer i spend working on the ship. my shivan fighter took me weeks and it is by far one of my better models. my photoshop skills are alot better than they used to be. im now fully using the layering system and blending options because it makes the whole skin easyer to tweak and fine tune and it makes doing shine /env/glow maps a bit easyer because i only have to change around a few blending options. im also becomeing more comfortable with truespace 6, though i still wish i could figure out how to use max.
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? Modelling lods is easy - just weld vertices and correct the odd UV map glitch.
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not THAT easy if you have an high pcount, or at least not too fast. I find it pretty boring, as for reuvmapping lods
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i know how to do lods, some of my early ships had them however at the time the mod tools were still in their infancy. so i simply quit doing them because they almost always used to cause conversion errors. i guess il just import em into max and do a multires or optimise or whatever.
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(http://www.3dap.com/hlp/staff/setekh/gtd.jpg)
I say modelling. :p
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As for me, I think texturing is the most annoying part (not that hard,
but as Aldo said, it takes ages until you satisfied, and it is as funny
as going to the dentist :)
Also I have real problems in naming things (ships, weapons, star-systems people etc)
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Getting the bloody hierarchy working :(
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Texturing is pretty hard. Sitting in front of some empty file and trying to imagine how it should look like, is not easy.
I can't model (tough I made some big things for the Starfox mod).
Tables don't like my. I can't help it, as soon as I touch the table, I'll break the pharser... :(
Yet I voted for uv-mapping. I'm trying to understand it, but I just don't get it.
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UV mapping is annoying as hell but I do like doing the texture, It great seeing the model after the texturing is finished.:yes:
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Originally posted by Flipside
Getting the bloody hierarchy working :(
Hierarchy is not hard at all...
[+] Hull
|--Hull a
|--Hull a light
|--[+] Detail 1
|--Detail 1
|--Detail 1 light
|--[+] Detail 2
Etc...
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I voted UVMapping. It mentally tires the modder.
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Originally posted by Raa
Hierarchy is not hard at all...
Etc...
In theory, yes, but theres always something. things like grouping the lights in the wrong order, or forgetting to move the axes on turrets, or worse still, putting all the lights in place for turret points etc, and then realising you haven't sized up the model, and you can't hook the mouse on the bloody 'expand all' tool in the corner of the bounding box for love nor money :( And even if you do things perfectly, you can practically garuantee that at least one rotating turret is playing silly buggers :(
Hierarchy is full of these little frustrations ;)
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TopAce
I voted UVMapping. It mentally tires the modder.
I agree with you there, tires me out after awhile.
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one thing i have problems with is getting smoothing to work properly. now that i figured out how, i need to reconvert everything. thank kazan for global data import!