Vondell's Current Projects

[jbl89]

Looks incredible! Outstanding! Can't wait to see where you're heading with all this.

I'm also wondering, since people tend to underestimate these things, how much time you've already put in the Turtle ? Also, is there a story? Do you just think it's a cool animal, or do you miss a turtle in all the land animals in ZT1 (I kind of do!)? Or was it because you had an interesting tutorial which used a Turtle as an example or something? Always keen on development details of any kind :)

[(Designer)Vondell]

I'm notoriously bad at keeping track of amounts of time but I'd guess that I've put somewhere between 6 and 8 hours into it so far. Story behind it is basically that for my first animal, I wanted to do something smallish with a relatively straightforward body plan whose animation won't need a lot of full-body deformation. I also wanted to make something that's a common sight in zoos, and something with a recognizable and distinct shape that can't really be done via recoloring existing game assets, just to contribute something wholly new and visually interesting to the community (like your sunfish). After I'm done if everything works out I'm planning on releasing both the 3D model/rig and a zip with all the 2D animations so that others can use them freely to make other kinds of tortoises.

 

I also just love giant tortoises! They're some of my favorite animals.

 

RDingFT -- I'm hoping to give a more thorough explanation soon, but basically I've built a cube grid (a floor and two walls) that is scaled to ZT1 isometric proportions, which ends up being 2x by 2y by 1.633z in Blender units. (most pixel isometric graphics for video games aren't truely mathematically isometric, because of the way pixels display at low resolution. most use this ratio).

 

 

I've set the camera to Orthographic mode (Numpad 5) and positioned the Camera like so, adjusting the Z position and Orthographic Scale while looking at my Camera View (Numpad 0) until the grid lines up with the bounds of the camera:

 

 

 

Once that's positioned correctly, setting up the Render is pretty straightforward. I set the Output to produce a 64 x 64 pixel image file with Alpha set to Transparent, but come to think of it, I'm probably going to change that to render Alpha as a solid color so I don't have to go through and add a solid color BG to each animation before taking it into APE. (This kind of thing is why I haven't written a full tutorial yet :-P )

 

 

Finally I've got this Compositing Node setup that produces aliased edges in the Render but allows the rest to stay smooth -- without that, the images would not be usable ingame, since ZT animal animations only support binary (single-color) transparency. With no aliased edges, there would be a "halo" of color around each animation ingame.

 

 

 

Like I said, once I get a little more used to the process myself I intend to do an in-depth step-by-step tutorial for setting this up, but until then, I hope this provides some insight for anyone who's curious.

[jbl89]

Thank you very much for that explanation, Vondell! I also like the reasoning behind this being your first animal. Can't wait to use it! :)

[(Designer)Vondell]

Corrected a tortoise biology error and opened up the back of the shell -- I modeled it with two holes in the back but that's not how the carapace (top) meets the plastron (bottom) in real life.

 

[Rinding FT]

Cool~ I don't know how to use blender, maybe you can use blender to set some animal models to the statues or new animals(like the tortoise you made) in zt1. :)

[(Designer)Vondell]

I was thinking about that! I don't know much about ZT2 or how its models work, or if I could import them into a format blender could read. Maybe that's something to look into one day!

[Rinding FT]

About zt2, as I know, blender need to add plus tools to open zt2 nif files, then edit them, if you just want to see how the nif models look, use NifSkope. There's a tutorial about setting Animations from Blender to ZT2 at The_Round_Table, and you can see the tutorial video by checking the author.

 

http://w11.zetaboards.com/The_Round_Table/topic/9715788/1/#new

[(Designer)Vondell]

Oh, very interesting! Looks like it would be theoretically possible to port ZT2 animals to ZT1 animation frames. I don't actually own ZT2 but I might look into getting myself a copy. Would be a cool thing for the community to have a method of sharing models and animals between the games.

 

This guy has a ton of great modeling/rigging/animating tutorials!

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zufMhsMi7jE

[(Admin)Savannahjan]

I am totally lost in this thread, but it sure is exciting! :36_16_17: I'm so glad you all are working on new animals for the game of games. :woot-smiley:

[(Designer)Vondell]

Jan, this next reply probably won't help!

 

I've been fiddling with Blender all night to try to get a render setup that outputs the correct type of shadow automatically for all frames. I've been tweaking these knobs for hours, but I think I've got a setup that will work properly.

 

 

Here's the image it outputs:

 

 

I gotta say, the shadow really makes it look like a ZT1 sprite!

 

I actually redid the whole mesh for the body since the last time I updated, it was too complex and I figured it wouldn't rig and animate correctly once I got to that step. So I went back to the drawing board with everything but the shell. Now it's super clean and ready for rigging!

 

 

 

I keep asking myself whether or not this is too much work for an animal that's only going to be a few tens of pixels wide when it's all said and done. But I think it's going to pay off in the end in terms of quality.