Particle's Projects

[YoungerPrinceLothric]

That teal one is my favorite! I cannot wait to use these!

[(Admin)Savannahjan]

Great work!  These all look fabulous, and I love the jewel colors.

[jbl89]

On 10/23/2020 at 9:54 PM, Particle said:

There is the trick to set the footprint to 1x1, and so I messed with that and sort of got the rotations right, (that is what you see in the picture above) but there are issues when you rotate the worldview where parts of the building do not show up right.  Tonight I'm going to try chopping this up into smaller pieces, to see if I can make it more of a modular piece instead of one big one, and start again from there.  (Sort of like the birdcage).  Not sure how well that will work, but every experiment like this brings more knowledge... which for me is still the primary goal.  Obviously once again, I'm not the first to play with this sort of thing, but I'm hoping to figure out every trick there is to know.  My back up plan in case I can't get this to function entirely the way I want, is to just put some scenery under the roof, like a maintenance vehicle, some boxes and crates, and a few barrels or something.  Either way, this has been a fun experiment with large observation areas already.

 

Really nice buildings! This is also the trick I used for my "shows for land animals" experiment. It's been so long I don't remember the exact procedure I figured out, but I think I had to place 2 or 4 of these elements, each time at the corner, to make it appear in every direction of the world view. Hope this might help you.

Also... I wonder if you use ZT Studio for the color swap. It allows you to easily change color order in the palette ;)

[(Designer)Particle]

13 hours ago, jbl89 said:

Really nice buildings! This is also the trick I used for my "shows for land animals" experiment. It's been so long I don't remember the exact procedure I figured out, but I think I had to place 2 or 4 of these elements, each time at the corner, to make it appear in every direction of the world view. Hope this might help you.

The real wizard has found his way into my thread!  Thanks for the compliment, you know I'm trying my best to stick to the "make it look like Bluefang art" idea but this is my first attempt at custom buildings and so hopefully I'll get better as I go.  Regarding the trick: yes I figured out that I could do it like that, and it seemed like I just had to properly place 2 roofs, not 4, at opposite corners, and that would work to cover up everything from all angles, but I did not like the idea of doing that for an observation area, and would rather just use that technique as a last resort, because that is sort of not user-friendly to set up.  So while that technique might show up for other things I do, like specifically, roof pieces, for this I ended up with a different idea, which was to split the building into walkable pieces and not walkable pieces.  How that works out is like this:

So the observation area is the piece without the truck, and the piece with the truck, is just normal scenery, with a 4x6 footprint, which looks like this:

 

So basically, you have a couple of fun building blocks you can use however you want, and are very user-friendly to build with!   And also, you can make it look like the guests/staff walk around in your building, which is one advantage to having the modular pieces, so I wanted to use that as much as possible.

 

13 hours ago, jbl89 said:

Also... I wonder if you use ZT Studio for the color swap. It allows you to easily change color order in the palette ;)

Um, yeah of course I'm using ZT Studio.  I have no idea how else you would be able to do it.  Seriously though, I cannot thank you enough for the work you did on making this possible!  There are not enough hearts on these forums to properly reward you my friend.  Amazing work!

[jbl89]

I'm already happy to see it still has some use to people, since I only created ZT Studio after so many years after ZT1's publication

[(Designer)Particle]

6 minutes ago, jbl89 said:

I'm already happy to see it still has some use to people, since I only created ZT Studio after so many years after ZT1's publication

Well, there may not be too many people besides me using it JBL, but I promise I will make it worth your time... I have only just started to mod this game...

[YoungerPrinceLothric]

On 10/25/2020 at 9:20 PM, Fern said:

I like that you curved them.

Me too! I find myself liking them more than the straight-line ones!

[YoungerPrinceLothric]

OH by the way, here is the color-swap screenshot I promised. I used them on a 'test' zoo, hence some of the unrelated items in the shot. everything appears to be in perfect working order!

[(Designer)Particle]

Those look great, I need to get that pack finished up and out the door!

 

What have I been doing instead?  Roofs.  Roofs are a pain in the ass.  The kind of roof I need not only must line up perfectly with the rest of the roofs in 4 different views, but also look good in 8 colors.  That is not easy.  And I am well aware of the fact that the more buildings in the pack, the more chance I have of the zoo just being a giant roof.  That is not good either.  We don't want the whole zoo to be about roofs.  So roof should be something that you don't even notice at all.

 

Here is a roof I did:

That is so not sexy.  Anyways.  I thought it would work ok, so I moved to the next step and put that on top of a little shed that looks like this:

 

 

That seemed ok, but one thing I've learned in the last week was never think something looks ok until you actually put it in the game, so this is what I found out:

 

You can see that although the rotations are correct (the bottom of the building lines up correctly) the roof is slightly off where it meets in the middle.  That is what I will be fixing tonight.  Also this building piece will probably be redone at 1 notch higher, because after playing with it in game, I'm sort of thinking it is too short.  So that is my progress report for now, basically no progress has been made in 2 days due to real life work and my failings with roofs.

 

In moments like these you also start to question your whole process.  What I think I will do from here on out when making a modular set, will be to make mock up pieces first, and play with them in game, to get a feel for how they fit together, and then after that I will design the look of the pieces, once I already know what size and shape pieces work best together.  Hopefully this will save me time, because by doing the pieces first, then putting them in game, I have wasted a lot of time redoing things that took hours to do in the first place.

[(Designer)Particle]

I almost forgot about these, I did these 2 nights ago, not sure what I'm going to use them for yet, but they turned out interesting: