Didn't find a fitting area to post this, so it's now in General Discussion.
Anyway, I'm recently doing research and trying to figure out how to make 3D models in Blender. A completely new thing for me, who has been doing 2D all the way until now.
So today I drew some concepts, and i'm gonna try to finish a first basic mesh during this week.
This thread is mainly for feedback and self-motivation purpose

- - -

Hereby I present to you my creations:

Ammoniak

A steampunkish insectoid robot maintaining its vital functions by inhaling Ammonia gas from his container on the back.

Origin

An alien species with four arms. I was thinking of a Nali with twisted bones (watch his arms and legs)

Tia

I posted a female cop concept in this thread some time ago, but it got lost so I made this revamped version.

- - -

I don't know if I can manage to make them look that good in Blender considering the fact, I never made anything 3D before But I'll try to keep you up to date in this thread.

Stay tuned.

Pretty sweet. Those are going to be extremely hard on blender. Good luck.

Hehee those are some wicked concepts you got there HarryButt. I think my fav is the stempunkbug Best of luck with your project, i really hope so see thise ingame

KillaGrunt: wth are you talking abt? WHY would thise be hard to do in blender?

[GF]HarryButt wrote:Tia

I posted a female cop concept in this thread some time ago, but it got lost so I made this revamped version.

That looks awesome. Is it possible to have particles on playermodels? that would look really nice, but I guess you could just animate it the non-dynamic way.

Okay, I can basically manage to extrude stuff from other stuff That's cool.
I have a question though. If I'd like to make a segmented model, what type of segmentation am I supposed to choose? Afaik Quake3's segments are head, upper chest, lower chest and legs when it comes to animation, right? So I need separate objects for each of those parts to animate them properly?

P.S: I started with Origin, for he's (comparatively ) low detail and looks at least a little human.

EDIT: After a talk with my little brother (who's a real geek) we came to the conclusion that my first attempt in creating a torso was an asymmetrical piece of crap and completely useless, so he Ctrl+X'ed my file... He suggested that I don't rush in and start making stickmen first...
Dunno... I understand now, that Blender is by far more complicated than I expected but I want new models. Hard.
Anyway, when this week is over, I'm gonna show the thing I made for you to laugh at.

yay! things to laugh at!

nah, i'm just joking. keep it up!

Just here to say great work as always [GF]HarryButt. I wish you the best of luck!

Thanks to all of you!
These self-motivation-threads actually do work
Tomorrow I have half a holiday, so I'm gonna try to dig into this threedimensional stuff as good as possible. Jeez, I hope to finish at least a body part or something

There is no model segmentation in Nexuiz. You could make a segmented model anyway though, to future-proof it (if at some point nexuiz does get segmented models, it can be easily ported.)

My advice, same as your brother (he seems like a smart guy), is that don't even try to make any of these models if you've never done any 3D before. I've seen tons of newbies coming and saying they will create an awesome, super-realistic human being and whatnot when they never even touched 3D. Now I'm not saying you're like that, in fact you seem very understanding in what you do, that's great.
Cause when these newbies actually get in to work with their models they find just how hard it actually is and how long it takes to create anything good. So they lose motivation and some even give up 3D altogether.

So, before even attempting modeling anything organic model out a few simple things. Get the hang of the tools and the workflow. Stickmen is a good idea to do too.

Blender is very hard to learn, even I don't know it. I've tried learning it twice (though not seriously) and I gave up as it's so confusing at first. I work in Maya and man that's 10 times easier. My wish is that I actually do learn it sometime, and I'm gonna check out some Blender vids if I find some good ones (I hate reading ).

Anyway, good luck with this.

Eh, Blender isn't that hard to learn. You really just have to seriously sit down with it for 2 weeks, playing around, and you will get it. Ultimately, it's faster than a program like Maya because it's almost entirely based on hotkeys, so you don't waste time hunting for buttons long lists and menus.

Also, I find the system it uses for face/vert/edge selection much more intuitive.

Hmm I might have something for you to make, if I can be bothered redrawing it in a nexuiz fitting way.

Damn... dont have it on my photobucket anymore anyway. Basically its a snake-like creature with arms. I'm not a great artist, but it still looked damn cool.

I'd scan it in again since the pic is sitting infront of me on the wall but my scanner is screwed.

As long as it doesn't look that awkward I can do it
In 2D!!

Yeah, and I'm getting used to Blender's interface by and by. To be honest, I never expected this to happen I think, in the end the outcome's not gonna be that bad actually.
At least for a very first unfinished mesh...

It looks slightly like that, but cooler and snakelike.

torus wrote:Eh, Blender isn't that hard to learn. You really just have to seriously sit down with it for 2 weeks, playing around, and you will get it. Ultimately, it's faster than a program like Maya because it's almost entirely based on hotkeys, so you don't waste time hunting for buttons long lists and menus.

Also, I find the system it uses for face/vert/edge selection much more intuitive.

2 weeks to learn Blender? Hell, I learned Maya in once single day. Of course the more advanced stuff took a little longer. But overall, you should be able to learn even those way under 2 weeks.

Anyway, Maya has millions of hotkeys too. Now I don't know how Blender works, but in Maya you don't have to dig trough menus and stuff too much. You can tear them off and access one tool in ten different ways. And F8, F9, F10 and F11 are hotkeys for vertices, edges, faces and 'object mode'.

However, saying that one program is faster than the other is an overstatement that is nothing but false. As it depends on the individual and how much experience he has with that program. If you know what you're doing with any program you can get results pretty fast.
Though one thing, I've seen more people having trouble learning Blender than learning Maya or Max.

Okay, the mesh is making progress.
I'm working with a polycount comparable to N64-games, so it's really low As far as I can see, I already screwed up some stuff, for example the normals seem kinda twisted around in every imaginable direction...
Anyway, it's my first model ever, so it's more of a test than a serious attempt in modeling... Friday in the evening (UTC) I'm gonna put some screens in here along with the .blend-file.

Thursday EDIT: The polycount is getting higher. Blender says, I have about 700 faces already. And I didn't even start the lower body half.
My model is built of three separate objects by now. Upper torso (including his back arms), head and jaw. Maybe if someday Nexuiz should have facial animations (like an angry face while shooting) this might come in handy.
I think, the model has some major glitches, there have to be some holes, I didn't discover yet. It's not exactly looking like my Origin-sketch, but it's cool anyway and I'm already proud of myself Though I expect, this isn't gonna last long, as soon as I post that .blend-file and you start finding bugs all over the place.

Friday morning: Starting the legs, so it's now head, jaw, upper chest and lower chest (including the legs). Gonna upload the .blend-file today between 23 and 24 o'clock (UTC)

Friday afternoon: It looks pretty finished now. The polycount is low in comparison to the usual Nexuiz-model, but it still looks kinda cool. Maybe it's just because I finally built a 3D model myself, but I'm actually very satisfied with my work For now.

Sorry for the doublepost, just wanted to refresh this thread. An admin should join my replies plz.


Anyway, after a week's work I finally have built this:



Consisting of the following objects:
- head
- jaw
- chest (four arms attached)
- legs
- armor plate
- cloth to cover the khram (doesn't wear any panties though, stupid)

My first 3D model EVARZ! Don't let the faces counter confuse you, I accidentally overwrote my original file after converting the upper chest into tris. The lower body half, head, armor, cloth and jaw still have some quads for easier editing. If you'd convert all this stuff into triangles, you would come to an overall polycount of about 1200. The .blend-file is available here, in case somebody wants to learn from a Blender noob. Anyway it would be cool if somebody could check, if all this is of any use, cause in the next two months I'm not going to continue work on this one, since I gotta prepare a portfolio for an entrance exam.
And as long as I can't make anything in this direction for the next time, hereby all the stuff posted in this thread is GPL'ed and everybody can make whatever he wants either with my concepts or with this 3D thing.

P.S: If you want to work on that model, watch out for gaps and duplicate vertices. I checked pretty much everything, but I can't say for sure if there's not still something ugly around.

This was my self-motivation-Blender-thread, thanks for your attention

Wow this is pretty cool. Good job! Can't wait to see how you do on the other ones! Does the download cost money?

No, it's just a lame trick to make you become a Premium User...
Just click on "Free" in the lower right corner, wait until the countdown is over and enter the captcha.

Yeah, and I'm not going to do modeling as long as I'm preparing my portfolio (which is gonna take a while), so if you wanna give it a shot, go on.

great concept work and your blender work is pretty impressive for a beginner. i've got a little bit of feedback for you, i downloaded the blend file and took a look at the model and noticed this...

...i removed the mirroring from the body section and as you can see there are internal faces (which i've highlighted in red). if you'd applied the mirroring then you'd end up with edges which were attached to 3 faces (face on the left side, face on the right and a face running through the centre of the model), which is something the smd export script can't handle.

These are the bugs I was talking about
I believe that's not all I have overlooked...

And by the way: zuriastrad, you're the man...

Although you missed the armor and the underpants, but I suppose that was absolutely your intention

harrybutt-
i've got something for you. i made your model into a zym.

the pk3.
the blend file.

gotta warn you though, it's a very rough job on my part. the uvmapping is terrible, it's textured with a nexuiz floor tile texture and there isn't a proper skeleton, so it's not really anything more than the shape of your model gliding around the map, but i thought you might like to see it anyway.

i did have some major problems getting the mesh to export. even after deleting the internal faces that i pointed out earlier i still couldn't get it to export properly. i think it might have been something to do with the body and faceguard meshes being seperate objects. i selected both (in object mode), pressed W and selected "union". this made a third model where the two had combined to a hollow mesh. i tidied up some of the excess verts and it exported ok.

What about the armor? Doesn't it work if you merge the two objects with W -> Boolean Operation -> Join? I thought, this would remove the faces inside. At least, that's what I did when joining the back arms with the torso (they were separate objects at the beginning).

And by the way: zuriastrad, you're the man...

thankyou.

yeah, join would combine them into one object, but it didn't seem to fix whatever was causing the script to fail. i'm going to have another look and see if i can find what was causing the problem. once i find it i'll let you know. i forgot about the armour and underpants. i wasn't making him nekkid on purpose or anything.

just occurred to me that the problem could be because i'm using an svn build of blender and it might have a few bugs. worth bearing in mind.

this is the error i keep getting. damn nuisance.

ok. i started from scratch, uvmapped it properly and made sure i used all the parts of the model. i'm not getting the export script error anymore, not sure exactly why, but it's good news.

for the bulk of the model i uvmapped one side, mirrored it and applied the mirroring. then i uvmapped the chest belt thing afterwards. the uvmapping is pretty randomly spread around, but it wouldn't be too hard to shuffle it around and rescale it.
origin-0008.blend
origin-0002.pk3

Whoa... I never expected my first mesh to come that far...
The "only" stuff that's missing are animations, textures and normal maps, right?

The "only" stuff that's missing are animations, textures and normal maps, right?

yep, just those few little things and it's done.

on the subject of textures i decided to bake ambient occlusion into the skin of the model to make it a bit more recognizable than the green tiled mess it had before. to do this i had to uvmap the model again (without mirroring). it's not a proper texture or anything, but it does look a lot better.

origin-0003.pk3
origin-0009.blend

Whoa... I never expected my first mesh to come that far..

well, i was really impressed by both your concept art and your meshwork, so i thought seeing your model in the game would be good encouragement. if you've got any questions about any of the stuff i did give me a shout and i'll be happy to talk you through it.

[quote="HarryButt"And by the way: zuriastrad, you're the man...
I agree with you all the way HarryButt