DeleD Community Edition

[afecelis]

Hi Guys,

First of all, and after a long time, I must say hi to everyone, to those who know me and to the new members (which I see is a number that has grown and that makes me glad).

I've been quite busy the last year with RL stuff, but I always try to keep an eye on deled and what's going on in its forums. When I saw this contest I said to myself I had to participate but I was so involved with a couple of projects that I thought I wasn't going to make it. Fortunately, things are turning out right and now I found some quality spare time to dedicate to a contest of such importance. So hi again, it feels great to be back again working with deled, and sharing experiences with all of you.

Enough chit-chat. I decided to go with the medieval town topic, so let me try to outline and explain a bit the process I'm following. The first thing I did was a quick sketch of what I got in mind:


The idea is pretty simple in its design, yet complex and challenging in the modeling part. It's the border part of a mainland that holds a village with around 30 houses. It's got a square in which I plan to place several elements (some of the props) as well as a church. The design is very lineal, but the idea is that at the end of the houses, there's a main gate that connects the village with a bridge. This bridge is all above a lake and finally it leads to the castle which is located on an island. The idea is that the castle will be at a higher level so that you can see it from town (and also so that they can have visual control over the village). I still don't know how much of this scheme I'll be able to develop but I'm aiming at modeling it completely.

Other points of interest:
-the square (already mentioned)
-the main gate
-the bridge
-the control tower
-the island with the castle

Props to use:
-oil lamp
-water well
-crumbling wall

Next thing I did was look for references. Jeroen's links are an excellent source of inspiration:
http://svenart.3dk.org/
http://medievalworlds.com/
Yet they set a very steep quality standard.

Then I started thinking of the material libraries I was to use. Here I ran into excellent news, the guys of the Fruitbats team (packs for the Torque game engine) released their medieval pack under the creative commons license!! (coincidence or a sign that I should go medieval? heheheh ), check the info and download the textures from here:
http://www.garagegames.com/mg/snapshot/view.php?qid=1517

So now I'm organizing the textures I shall turn into a new entry for deled's material editor.

Finally, before starting to model, I'm re-capping deled's workflow and functionality and getting used to the whole new set of tools and stuff that the new 1.81 version has got. Mainly, I'm reviewing CSG operations as well as UV mapping and unwrapping my models.


So next step will be: getting busy with the basic modeling, so once I'm started, I'll post screenshots of my progress.

Oh yes!!! About terrains!! If anyone got any interesting links on how to create a small terrain like the one I require for this level, please link it here

best regards, and good luck to everyone.

Alvaro

[afecelis]

PS. I just found some very valuable info on terrain construction in deled. This, for instance, is one of the new things for me, as well as the smooth option, the magnet tool, etc etc etc. Great tools, let's hope I can take advantage of them.

Regards,

Alvaro

[bugubmx]

Looks like its gunna be really nice! More inspiration for me to join...

[elementrix]

great to have you back can't wait to see the drawing in 3D
_________________
Chickens RULE | www.elementrix.nl

[trucker2000]

We're doooommed. (just kidding)
It's great to see you back.
It's been a while. Thanks for sharing your thought process with us. It's great.
_________________
Some day I will grow up and be a real modeler.
"Never give up! Never surrender!!"
Sys specs:
asus
8 gigs ram
Invidia gtx560 video card
Windows 8 (worst op sys Ever)

[afecelis]

hehehehe, Thanks guys for the positive vibe!

I'll try to post all my progress and development steps here so that we can discuss about them

As a matter of fact, I already got some questions about some issues I'm running into. Perhaps they're bugs that have already been submitted so please bare with me if it's been discussed before; I just want to double check.

I started the basic modeling of the bridge part to get a sense of the scale and proportion of the project:


The idea in this stage is to have a "box modeling" of the whole project to then do some lighting tests, prior to modeling the details and texturing.

It's pretty similar to the screenshot I posted above. I'm using a csg op to get the arches and then I group the arches with the columns to create a module that I start to clone (duplicate with the spacebar). However, whenever I clone a group, the new copy is ungrouped, forcing me to group things again with each duplicate I generate. This makes modeling a bit tedious, specially when using modular parts. Anyone knows anything about this?

My second question is about the 3d gizmo. I find it to be of great assistance, specially for modeling, it's a great addition to Deled, but I see it only works in the 3d view. Is it possible to get it in ortho views as well? If not, I think it would be great to have it implemented in all views.

Ok, that's it so far. I'll try to dedicate some time to the project today and post shots of my progress

regards,

Alvaro

[afecelis]

mmmm, come to think of it, a "zoom to selection" shortcut or option would come in pretty handy. Specially as the project starts to get bigger. It would be very useful to have what you select centered in your view, does something similart to "zoom to selection" exist already?

Just felt the need of it when working on the middle control tower:


cheers!

Alvaro

[Mr.Fletcher]

You make me want to start working on my entry now!
_________________
Behold! The DeleD Wiki! Please help us expanding it
DeleD on IRC

[afecelis]

hehehehe, that would be great! aha! so you're leaving it for the last moment!!! And to think I felt I was short on time! That's why I decided to start right away.

Ok, some more stuff: solving out the corner:


Another thing I feel I'm missing (besides the zoom to selection option, hehehe) is the possibility to shift-select multiple vertices in the 3d view. Multiple vertex selection only works in ortho views, but it would be great to have it in the 3d view as well!!!

regards,

Alvaro

[Paul-Jan]

First of all: love this thread. It's great to see all the concept art, notes, WIP shots, remarks, etc of an artist at work.

On to the questions/remarks bit:
> whenever I clone a group, the new copy is ungrouped
Good point. I put it on the list.

> possibility to shift-select multiple vertices in the 3d view
Hit ctrl+shift+click for multiple vertex selection, both in 2D and 3D views.

> zoom to selection
A much requested bit of functionality, and for good reason. No, this functionality is not available yet, but we'll have to add this soon!

[afecelis]

Glad you like it PJ! I'll try to post as much as I can of my process.

Thanks for the vertex selection tip, didn't know that one!

And it's very good news to hear you guys will take the "grouped clones" and "zoom to selection" requests into account. Deled can only get better!

I'm planning to design 2 o 3 house types to populate the town and to give it some variety. Should I sketch them out first, I'll post screenshots of this process as well.

2 final questions (speaking of house types):
1. Can I model my house on a separate file, make a prefab of it and import it into my main city model? Or should the house be modeled inside of a "one and only" file?
2. Do you have plans to support instances? I mean, to reduce memory consumption and having only the main meshes weigh in poly/vertex count? Dunno if it would be practical for a level editor without an engine taking advantage of this feature, but it would be interesting to know if you guys have considred this.
2-a. Derives form my previous question; What ever happened with delgine? I mean, the 3d engine. Did you guys totally stop its development? Or is it still being worked on. A deled-delgine combo would be a killer!!!

regards,

Alvaro

[Jeroen]

Actually, the 'zoom to selection' is available in DeleD. It's called 'Focus on selection' and can be found in the popupmenu using the right-mouse in 2D views. Works with objects only though, so it won't focus on selected vertices/polygons/etc (yet).
_________________
Check out Figuro, our online 3D app! More powerful 3D tools for free.

[Paul-Jan]

Good point there by Jeroen . I assumed Afecelis wanted this functionality in the 3D view, I should have mentioned that it was there for 2D views.

Regarding those questions,
1) Sure you can!
2) The plans are there, but currently this is on the list of "things that have a rather low priority unless a significant amount of people starts asking for it". I suspect we might get some more demand for this feature once we implement game "entities", as entities often are instances too.
3) Delgine "the engine" (and later, the Parnassus project) got canceled, mainly because we lack the manpower to build both a 3D modeling application AND a (decent) general purpose 3D engine. We had to choose, and we chose DeleD. We felt we could make more of a difference there.

Of course, the whole idea is to get integration through plugins up to such a quality level that no-one will miss the "dedicated engine" thing. Also, we would definitely be interested in working closely with the developers of any of the existing (proven) engines to improve such integration. However, those developers are usually quite busy working on the core engine itself, and not very eager to get a co-op going.

[trucker2000]

I have never used the group command, but when I want to clone multiple objects, I just select them all and clone-->move-->clone...etc... and have never had a problem.
_________________
Some day I will grow up and be a real modeler.
"Never give up! Never surrender!!"
Sys specs:
asus
8 gigs ram
Invidia gtx560 video card
Windows 8 (worst op sys Ever)

[afecelis]

Thanks for the explanation Jeroen, I'll try it out, but as PJ mentions, I meant "focus on selection" also in the 3d view It does help a lot, indeed, as I said, specially when your level starts getting bigger. It would be great if all views updated to that selection, including the 3d viewport

@PJ, thanks for answering. You got a point there, Deled exports to several formats that are easily integrated into most commonly used 3d engines, so it's better to have a very complete modeling-level editor like Deled, and not a half-working editor/engine. Instancing would still be interesting but I don't know how useful it would be if once you export your models to the engine they get converted into regular meshes, in other words, the engine would have to be able to recognize such meshes as instances too.

@Trucker: grouping is very useful, specially when you have modules that need to be repeated several times. It's also great because the mesh behaves as a single one and so does its texturing. In this case my module has 6 columns, 4 arches, 2 beams and 2 sidewalks, so everytime I clone the bridge module I have to reselect 16 elements, and that takes quite some time instead of selecting just 1 if it were a group Groups are widely used in 3d engines and they're thought that way to optimize both the modeling and cloning process. Then comes the instancing issue, but that "flour from another sack"

regards,

Alvaro

ps. One final note for J and PJ, is that I noticed that when cloning a group the elements in the newly created group get messed up and don't snap to the grid; after cloning a group, and prior to regrouping the new elements (CTRL+G) I always have to hit F10 to force the cloned elements to stick to the grid again.