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accapulco

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Everything posted by accapulco

  1. Hello everyone, thought I'd start a thread on my own so I can get some feedback and tips from the community. I've never used PS or modelling programs before so it's been a rough week but I'm enjoying it very much. I settled on Sketchup for modelling and 3ds Max for textures. Maybe some of you will hate that but SU is just too comfortable, fun and easy to use compared to the other stuff I tried although it does have several flaws, but I won't get into those. I got a lot of help from Ronyx69 so a big thanks to him first most. I've written everything down and am now able to produce assets, slowly mind you but something that works does come out in the end (can't make any promises about it's beauty but you gotta love your children ) I can start to experiment and learn about more functions and other methods if you recommend them so I'll be posting things here as I make them to get your feedback. Hopefully with your help I can become better and maybe start making some things that are worth publishing. If you also model in sketchup your knowledge and tips and triply worthy so please bestow upon me thy knowledge I've put a stop to Columbine, it's gone forever but it has taught me a lot about what I like and want to do and it's just not that. I thought the workshop could use some more rural and low/mid density buildings so I set out on this path with that in mind but everything isn't set in stone. I have an interest in making some Balkan and Mediterranean assets as I felt that most European buildings on the workshop are very German, big dark buildings which you don't really see that much along the Mediterranean. I wanted to make some buildings that represent those found around Albania, Bosnia, Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey and maybe I could go into North Africa & Spain later. I'm starting to make some small rural buildings but hopefully will get into 4-5 story apartments and more unique buildings like mosques, churches and bridges in the future but I'm not even going to think about those until I have 20 assets or so made and finalized. So that's just my vision, it may or may not go that far and all depends on how things go as I'm still a total noob. Here's the first building I made. It's a.. thing to learn how to model and texture. It's technically the second but we don't talk about "Project Alpha" 200 tris 512x256 tex And here's the second one 452 tris, 512x512 tex, added color variations on the stucco wall. I'm just experimenting with different things to see how they go and how necessary each detail is. I think I need to get better at textures for now I'm just using them as is with minor changes for objects such as stamping to remove things and outlining parts, very simple stuff. A "stylized while still realistic" theme may fit better than just using these textures outright and I hope I can make something like that in the future. It would also make things a bit more crisp, I feel these might lose detail as they get bigger. I think I will try to make one with windows on the texture as I'm losing tris for nothing for these. It's probably fine for small things but I need to know how to do it when I make bigger stuff. That will be after a while though since I modeled a couple more already.
  2. Hello forums posts.. my old friend. I finished about half of that last project then realized the textures were really crappy and I'd have to re-do them so I kind of quit on it. Since then I've been on and offing a bunch of stuff, all un-released of course, also have a bunch of un-textured models just sitting all over the place. Not really feeling like it ATM but maybe some time I'll get to it. Anyhow I did make a map, my first and I think it's pretty cool. I'll be starting a city on it in mere moments and I hope other people will like it although it's kind of the only map that requires a large setup to get it to look as intended and might end up getting completely ignored by most of the community. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1132067400 Anyhow here it is, if you want to play a small Mediterranean Island town with super detail, this is THE map.
  3. The next project is coming along, I'm in the process of cleaning the last one before texturing so I thought I'd share what's to be expected. Taking a break from industry and moving on to some residentials and props now. I made a "template" building and just work off of it so they're very similar. Here's 4 + 1 corner building, each is basically a facade with empty sides and back weighing around 600-1k tris. The balustrade and the roof is continuous so you can mix and match and it'll all look like one project. You will see some anomalies in the preview such as one having an extra floor but I've changed it since. Sketchup keeps a secret save of your files and when you "import" into another project it uses that instead of the actual thing you saved resulting in an earlier version showing up. I wanted to get these textured and see them in game as well as get some feedback and then decide how to continue. I could add more to these or call it a wrap and make more 5-6 building projects that fit together with different number of floors and roofs.
  4. It's out yaaa....aaa...aayy (kill me..) http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=912461966 I have a couple more industrial complexes planned but I'm not sure if I'll get on them next since I don't want to stress myself out with another big pack like this and I also want to start taking some more time to do individual assets instead of rushing through trying to get it all done. There's also a list of planned props piling up so I may go nibble on those for a bit.
  5. Well.. probably not a "couple" of weeks Made the main building and I really liked the way it turned out so I just kept on going. I Haven't made the LODs yet so those will take several more days but you can probably expect this sometime during the week. I had some issue with the conveyors, making them props destroys the model and gives me... I don't know what to call it but it gives me something ugly. It works fine as a building so I'll fiddle with them a bit after making LODs and worst case scenario make them parks as I did here. I've given them a color map too, just have to figure out how to use the script so I can make all of the pieces use the same colors. I tried a new way to make some details so you may notice some things like windows being flat. Zoomed in like this you do notice it clearly but from regular distance it looks fine although I won't make this a standard, don't worry. I just wanted to try the "floor texture" method for windows for when I make larger buildings and I already know I could've done some better modelling to put some indentation details so I'll work on that next time but I want to keep things simple like this and not go crazy mode either. I'm against super detailed and nice looking assets that you look at 2 times and then never again but end up taking 1fps just to run in the background. I don't think any amount of awesomeness from a building will ever just build your scene for you, it's all about your layout, decals and prop details that make a scene which means the total "score" on tris and texture is always going to be high and it's better not to throw more wood into that fire. That sluggishness which creeps into your map after a while slowly cripples my desire to play. That's why I'm trying to put motion/fun elements into these assets, to make it look like things are alive and interesting so you can prop it up to make little scenes which look cool. Here we have all the works. I threw this together in 10 mins just to take pictures but I think it'll look pretty nice when properly decorated. Made custom railings instead of using that derp one over and over and they turned out much better I think. Took like 3 hours to align the faces perfectly so the sides and top matches down to the pixel since it's just an alpha *cries.
  6. The next project has been modeled, I give you the sugar mill =) Some of the faces don't appear or are broken when sketchup imports things because it's retarded and erases them so don't worry about those. I'm trying some different things on a couple so I might have to go back and tweak them a bit and I'm also feeling a bit down and will take it slow so don't expect these for a couple of weeks. In this mill are: - Main Building - Diffuser Building - Concentrator Building - Crystallizer Building - Small warehouse - Sugar Silo - Bunker Silo (prop) - Elevated covered conveyor prop, comes in 5m / 15m / 90d corner / intake building, will be bundled together and I'll give them color var. - Sugar Beet pile S and L - Smoke Stack prop
  7. I figured out the blender way too now. I needed to be in solid view to distinguish them from regular edges since textured rendering shows them as flat for some reason. After looking around for 20 minutes entering every combination of the phrase "how the f** do you make group in blender" in google and watching a bunch of guides by 8 year old kids, on the 22nd page on some random forum buried somewhere I figured out P makes your selection into a new object, which you can then apply modifiers to, yay. Of course I immediately used this on the new water tank thing next to the barn and it turned out pretty nice, not amazing I mean you can still see the edges but at least it's not the Lego version of a potato. Didn't want to make it green since most of my stuff uses that texture already so I used the red version in hopes that it would go along with Beardmonkey's farming assets. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=906377094 Not going to publish the fence since I consider it sub-par, the mesh part cuts off half way on the LOD so I may play with it a bit later or not. If someone has a trick or suggestion for better alphas on LODs I'm listening.
  8. Well I tried to do smoothing in blender before and it's literally 2 button presses but it doesn't work for me, pressing smooth faces/edges does nothing. I hadn't thought to do it in sketchup so I did that and it carried over in the export. Had to re-do UVs but I think it was worth it so thanks for the idea you two Kind of wish I'd done this before with previous buildings. Polygonal Cluckaroo's facing off against the Smooth Beaks in a garden brawl! Also the chicken fence is done, now to texture the coop.
  9. The biogas plant has been released. Makes around 50mw if fed enough garbage so it should go nicely with small towns or to decorate agricultural areas. I gave it a wide collection range so the trucks can get around all the fields. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=905041302 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=905043354 Some new agricultural stuff on the way, first up is this chicken farm. It's free range so there's little doors for the chickens to get out and run around. I'm also making a fence prop to go along with it and I also made a chicken. On the very left is a real size chicken at 40cm which is barely visible then 1.5x and 2x. The one on the right is one from the workshop, it looks great but it's 4,044 tris on 1024x1024. Mine are 108 tris on 64x128 so you could make fill a whole scene with them if you wanted to without any issues. I think I'll use the 1.5 or 1.6 since I want it to be visible enough so it's not just a dot from regular playing distance but it's also not as big as a dog.
  10. The next mini project is almost ready, I've just finished the mapping but haven't made the LODs so that should take a day or two and then expect to see these dropping in the workshop. First up my first tractor shed got a bigger brother. Made a bunker silo. I didn't want to make people download 3-4 variations just for one little scene so I just made this one in the hopes that it alone will suffice. I will make more bunker silos soon, not this silage type though. Well silage.. or... biogas. This little biogas facility will collect garbage and produce electricity. I usually find myself with a town that doesn't really justify a big power plant so this will be somewhere between a proper plant and spamming a bunch of those 5mw assets here and there. This is the main building, it will output a low constant source of energy just to top things off. The digestion tanks are separate for now but I might integrate them as a sub. This is the part that will act as an incinerator and be the main power producer. This kind of biogas facility collects leftover food, garbage and other organic material from farms and commercial areas and turns it into methane which the little generator behind the main building burns to produce electricity. The alpha on the rails derped out because something just had to go wrong. I think it's got to do with the scaling issue this one is having. No matter how I export it scales it up by 100ish for some reason so I'll have to play around with it for a bit.
  11. Suncurb Station - Made by Curb & Sons
  12. Huzzah! http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=901106860 That was "fun". I feel like I learned so much from this although I didn't really implement everything I learned. I think I "get" things now. I had some trouble with the lods and a couple are a bit high and all of them are kind of ugly, not auto ugly and too noticeable but there's some derpyness here and there. Given that this whole complex is going to cover a larger area I'm not too worried as I've seen regular buildings in the 100's-300's that will be jam packed in cities. I may add some extra props in the future as I did have a couple more I wanted to do but I just wanted to get the "main" of it out first and take a small break. Do leave me comments on what you like or dislike if you check them out and I can improve on those areas. Also I ditched the color var approach for a themed one since I couldn't really come up with a double color version that made sense. Green and orange is the theme, I hope you like it. Didn't have the energy to really detail a fake one but I'll share some pics of something I threw together for the photos.
  13. Got a little distracted on the dairy and started making some forestry assets, will go back to agricultural after a bit. I Modeled a modern lumber mill and I'm about to move into cleanup and texturing so I wanted to share that as a little preview. Don't know how long the texturing will take but they will come out all at once so expect that in a week or two. I will try to make these a little nicer and use my best texturing so I'm going into full focus mode now I wanted all the buildings to follow a similar style and I think I got that so hopefully it looks like one big compound with many pieces. I'm thinking about giving them color variations so you can choose if you want your mill to be green, orange, brown or white. This way maybe some of the buildings can be used for other stuff as well. 4 of them have some unique elements so those should take the longest, for all the little warehouses I'm thinking of using the same diffuse. Those 4 have around 800-1400 tris, everything else is 400-700, though that's their dirty export numbers, I'll shave off quite a bit in blender.
  14. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=894116409 Made a conventional silo or as I like to call it, a sildo. Thanks to Beardmonkey for the cool barns as well, agriculture is love, agriculture is life. 265 / 512x256 with custom lod LOD 59 / 128x64 Tell me if you think this kind of roundness is okay or if it looks too edgy and I can make some changes in the future.
  15. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=893538481 Made a little fertilizer spreader today. It's not the prettiest thing, that tank could been much better had I bordered it with some metal but I didn't want to bother for such a small prop really. I was using this before, those are Kingleno's balconies
  16. @Mr_Maison Thank you! Don't look too long though, I try to keep detail to things you will see at a glance if you look around in enhanced zoom and make sure nothing broken pops out. A lot of bottom faces and things behind don't exist though, I'd love to leave them but only 1% of subscribers would actually see it so I don't bother too much. @Ploefke Thanks, I got a couple more planned then I might move to some forestry. I will eventually get back to the town homes but I want to get some easier stuff for me to do and much needed empty spots in the game filled out first. You guys like cheese right? http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=893222059 A tractor dump cart you can load with stuff. The wheels are small now that I look at it.. Anyhow, I could make more but I don't think variations are really necessary for something like this.
  17. Get your moos a nice little shed here http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=892834092 Happy moos produce happy milk!
  18. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=892268600 Made a little shed. Finally learned how to make LODs thanks to Jerenable so I might go back and add some to the cultivator since the auto one has half of it disappearing. This one's 101 tris, 256x256 textures with a 67 LOD and 64x64 textures, maybe a bit high but the interior has walls and roofs of it's own and I didn't want the walls and the orange columns to magically appear as you get closer.
  19. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=892123926 Made a little cultivator thing and have some more farming implements coming up next. Was going to make red/blue variations but couldn't get textures that had both or neither and I wasn't feeling up to fiddling with it so this is what it is. It's 101 tris on a 128x256 texture. I didn't really get the hitch part right either, should've been a little higher so it can fit the small tractor but I hope you don't mind.
  20. Slowly starting to upload some items into the workshop, not going to make individual posts for these lesser things but you can find everything here: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198000298296/myworkshopfiles/?appid=255710 Made a little food kiosk and uploaded that as well. I think I learned the shapes for these models pretty well, metal parts and rims for these food style props so I can make them pretty easily now. This one took like 3 hours total to model and texture, which was fast for me. I'm not sure how viable they are though, like when I'm looking for files on the workshop I prefer generic looking things or themed looking things so that I'll just have fewer files to worry about so I probably won't make more "random" variations. I do have some themed versions planned for sometime in the future though for amusement parks and zoos.
  21. @kingleno Thanks for that, I was planning on making my own seats so I was waiting for those. Made a little restaurant, had some trouble importing it as the game kept crashing but it seems to work now. The scale is a bit off but I'm writing things down before the "real" import so I'll have that sorted when I want to actually publish. The building includes the trevis thing for the ivy, steps and railing and the parasols to the right, it's 542 tris on 512x1024 textures. The seats are props, comes as table and 2 seats and you can assemble them together as so, it's 143 tris on 128x256. Finally, my beautiful little salad bar prop that you barely see (might make it a 0.1 bigger) is 232 tris on 256x256. I'll probably make a food version using the same theme so that they can be lined up so you can design a makeshift food service area for festivals or what ever.
  22. Well, here it is! Really tried to put my mind to this one and I think it came out very nice. The building includes the porch and the awning and it's 513 tris at 512x1024 textures. I tried to make something interesting with the awning but it looks kind of weird so might have to tweak that or scrap that idea, don't worry if you can't see it. The ice cream fridge is a prop and I left it and all other props (tables and what not) out of the building so you can make your own design. It's 117 tris with 256x256 textures. This asset taught me quite a bit, I figured out how to properly reduce tri count in blender after import and fix pretty much all the weird issues I've had in the past.
  23. Ignoring the flipped normal.. 1kg of old cheddar you say? Of course monsieur.. Here's a little charcuterie I made today. It's jam packed with nutritious goodness at 243 tris with 512x512 textures. The cheese fridge is a separate prop that's 185 tri at 256x256. The ice cream version is coming as well ^___^
  24. Not sure how viable detail this tiny is really, unless you're extra zoomed in with the mod you can't really make it out. Scrapped the initial version and made these double ones that fill both the boxes on the table, they're 24 tris on a 64x64 texture. Made a stacked version of the crate which I think I should make a little bigger like the regular version even if it's unrealistic, just so you can see the detail better. Also a little dolly for carrying them around. Another little commercial joins the fight, 200 tris on 512x512 textures. The sign is kind of crappy but it's not like you're going to be zoomed in staring at these buildings while you play. I think detail is good where it's seen and these buildings are going to be cramped together and stuck between bigger buildings, not so distinguishable individually but coming together as a whole so I think this is good enough for this one. I wanted to make some better looking shops but the lack of semi transparency hurts and shop pictures aren't that great even though I'm constantly using them. That's why I'm trying to make this theme of small open air market decorations just so you can add some more liveliness around the town and make it look more alive. Have some fun things planned for the next posts.
  25. Made some props, I hope you guys like fish They're all 70-120 tris with 128x256 textures, the awning is at 234tris with 512x512. Couldn't get the styro box to look right, it's still too bright so might omit that one. The fish on the very left is a modular piece, I'm also going to make some vegetable versions of it so you can plop what ever you want on those tables and I should also increase the size just 1 more notch. I have stacked versions of the blue crate as well but I wasn't happy with it's plastic texture so I didn't want to make it too visible, I'll make stacked ones of the wooden crates instead as I'm also going to use those for vegetables.
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