The Remnant game synopsis is up

As promised here is the game synopsis, i was inspired for this game from my History Professor, and ancient aliens.

Story: The Remnant

August 19[SUP]th[/SUP] 2060
We thought we were alone, we were wrong and it cost us dearly, fighting amongst our-self’s all changes and our bloody ways will reach out to the stars, we will make the Abaddon pay for what they have done.

As the earth is fighting another war our race learns we are not alone in the universe and we had been protected by all of the imaginings of our past. When the remnant races of the universe were fleeing the Abaddon they found a safe haven in our solar system humanity was very young and one of the remnant races called the Anunnaki decided that the whole of the remnant should do what they could to look after us and keep us safe and hidden from the Abaddon.

Over time these races have been lost to our mythology and later became known as elves, dwarves, Gods and demons. At some time in our past the remnant races left earth to stand watch, building out posts on Mars, Venus, and other planets in our solar system. Hidden away for thousands of years they kept us safe and influencing our tech slowly. When man reached for the stars for the first time they looked out for us, and as we launched probes to look around they spoofed the signal and destroyed them if they were going to go beyond our solar system, all in an effort to keep the Abaddon from finding us.

Now on the day we need them they come to earth to stand with us in our battle against the Abaddon.
***

Objective: FPS style game working through the story as you fight from the day of desolation fight as buildings crumble around you and ally yourself with Anunn and other races. Fight other humans known as Scraps who want nothing to do with the aliens or the humans who do, as they attempt to steal a couple of battle ships, battle on the deck of a space carrier, repelling boarders turn the tides as you attempt to board the ships of the Abaddon.
***
Details: Abaddon: are a single race of Aliens who wage devastation and war on the galaxy, they live for war and hold any race in high regard that can fight as hard as they can, they do not see their enemies as pray they see them as fellow warriors who must find the true path. To die the death of a warrior.
***
This started off as a story i wrote and i thought it would make a cool game.

with blender getting more and more powerful i decided to take one of my game models i had worked on and get with some detail. still working on it but this is really the first time i have ever been able to model even at this level, everyday i am working on building my skills, and i have only you guys in this community to thank for that. It has always been you guy’s here with constructive criticism even if it has been brash at time’s you guys are the ones who help drive me. so thank you .

so tell me where to improve next and if you like it let me know, i really hop to get more of this game done.

this is the original (not so good)


this is the new one.


the first one looks like an simple spaceship, rerminds me a bit of Starfox.
the second one has defenitly more details, reminds me more of an wipeout “car” (anti-gravity-hover-vehicle?!)

Well i guess what you should do next is some kind of engine on the backside of the vehicle.

Loving them both. Great work.

Although the original isn’t as good as the second, it is still rather good. The new one, however, is fantastic. I love the amount of detail and the way the wings end with the faces coming back over the wing is awesome. It reminds me of those old Tie-Fighters from Star Wars.

And perhaps, to make it interesting, you could instead name them Mk I and Mk II. Saying new and old makes it seem like the old one is obsolete.

As for textures, perhaps you could benefit from something like this, from my own collection:


Just this is enough, I’ve found, to make a ship’s hull and plating seem non-uniformly variable. And maybe, in combination with this:


… Could make it look rather dashing, it’s what I’ve done to my stellarship models.

Well done, a very good job.
Tom Cat

Cool! It reminds me of StarFox too. I loved that game.

thanks guys hope to have more done latter today i should be finishing this up and getting it ready for un-wraping soon. i am still fairly new at uv mapping and making textures but I will cross that bridge when i get there.

I really like that texture, but that might look better on my star ship rather than the fighter, i will post that one after i am finished with this one so you can see it. i also have to make some high res renders so you guys can see the real detail in them.

okay so i am still working on the detail for this, and cant say if i am doing it right but it seems to be working, i am posting a zoomed in image so you guys can see what i have going on. lots to do so back to it.


That’s very impressive.
I guess you’ll be making a low poly version as well?

If you need help with baking down and texturing, just ask. (I’m happy to give advice, or to get my sticky little fingers stuck into it)

love advice, love criticism, anything that pushes me to do better, i will take what i can get lol thank you. and yes i have preserved the low poly version of this model already, i did that just before i started adding detail. if i cant use it i will do a retopo of this one.

Crash Course Engage:
***A good UV layout is fairly critical to good textures, as seams tend to be slightly visible. A good layout also makes the placement of details on a model easier.

The best way to create a UV layout is to define where you want seams, and then use the unwrap method ‘unwrap’ to turn the segments into a layout. Then it’s a case of selecting a section, and moving it into place.
You can place seams either with space and typing it, or the ‘mark seam’ button in the toolbar. Place seams on sharp corners or natural lines: fronts of wings, where wings meet the fuselage, the ends of cylinders (and one along the side) etc. Try to visualise how the computer will flatten it, and adjust where you put the seams so you can get the fewest islands, but still have them a sensible shape.
Unwrap it with U and select mode ‘unwrap’
When adjusting the layout in the editor, go into island select mode. There’s a row of four buttons along the bottom that represent vertex select, edge select, face select and island select. With island select you don’t have to worry about missing a vertex/face and distorting it.

***When making a diffuse texture, remember that it will also contain some lighting information. Specifically Ambient Occlusion. Most photo editing tools have ‘layers’ and you can adjust the way one layer effects the next layer down. Look for ‘hard light.’ A ‘selective gaussian blur’ can also have good results (on gimp, selective gaussian blur blurs only similar colours, and helps get the noise out of bakes.
Remember that in 99.9% of things, colour is not consistent across an object. A layer of colour noise (in gimp the plasma filter) on a low opacity can add the illusion of detail. Even metals, which we tend to think of as grey have red tints with blue highlights. Even if this in the diffuse map as a color variation, it can still look good.
When I visualize the texture for the second ship it is a worn metal. What you can do is create a new image in blender, and use the texture paint tool to draw these on. Then you can save it, and use it to colour the metal (browner around the scratches (rust) with small bits of bare/clean metal showing thorough in deep scratches). You can then add it to your normal map as well, using a tool like the gimp normal map generator (white is high, black is low, so black is scratches).

***Normal maps can be made ‘deeper’ from an image editor by duplicating the layer and setting it to type ‘overlay.’ It is possible to take it too far and make the colour intense enough to ruin the normals, so some tools (like the gimp normal map plugin) offer the option to ‘normalize’ the normal map. Generally bakes coming off blender are the right depth though, but use this technique to add in the scratches.

***Specularity is the hard one to do, and I don’t yet have a process. Generally where the bare metal shows through, you have more specularity, and increasing the specularity on the object edges/sharp corners can make it more visible in game. Consider the material as well. Glass and plastics are shinier than metal is. One thing you can do is set the specular map to not only influence the specular amount, but also it’s hardness. This way the higher specularity bits glow at a further angle away from the light source.
Most importantly, don’t overdo specularity, otherwise everything looks like plastic.

Play with the colour of the specularity of the material as well. A clean metal will be slightly blue, a rusty metal a red and a dirty metal green (mould). But in all cases, if it’s dirty, keep the specularity ~0.1. Here’s a metal gate that shows this. The specularity is green and subtle. As a result, it does not look like plastic, nor does it look wet.



Here’s the same with the default specularity settings:


The scoreboard at the top is a plastic, and has a much higher specularity (plastic) and lower hardness (because the plastic has been matted to make it easier to read from a variety of angles).
It is interesting to not that there is no specularity map on the metal arch, and the bump map is just the diffuse map applied as a heightmap. It is a one-image-texture model.
***If something is shiny, like glass, you can add to it a texture to provide ‘reflection’ this is done by clicking the ‘reflection’ box in the texture panel. A simple noise texture can make glossy things look good. You can see this effect in the hovercar I did a little while back. Don’t go overboard with this, as if you do, it becomes clear it is not a reflection but a static image.


No idea how much of that is new to you, or how much you understand of it (pretty condensed). If you want clarification on anything, just ask. I should really make some tutorials on this stuff one day…

sdfgeoff no that information is great and the examples you posted really show me what you explained, this all does help so thank you. as soon as i am ready to unwrap i may have some questions, like i said i am new to uv mapping and textureing. i do still struggle when it comes to making textures in photoshop even after spending a lot of money on books on how to make them there seems to be things that are not included, this one will have a pretty steep learning curve.

took a moment to render a couple of shots of where i am right now the fist render is a standard setting render the second i fooled with the settings a bit and set it at 1080p



i am thinking of removing the rear fin, cant decide if i like it or not what are yours guy’s thought on it?

I don’t think the rear fin fits in with the rest of it, so I think it should go. I may also be tempted to make the fins at the front a tad bigger, to fit the overall blockyness.

About making textures in photoshop (well I use gimp, but same diff), it really is a matter of practice. Books do help, and can show you techniques, but skill comes from repetition and experimentation. I recommend starting off with trying to make more ‘generic’ textures. Grab the default cube, map an image to it, and spend an hour or two trying to make a single texture for it. Ignore normals maps and specularity maps, just focus on the diffuse one. Try various surfaces such as:

  • New metal (brushed metal is really easy)
  • Old metal (just scratch up the new metal)
  • Rusted metal (try some weathering/corrosion, add some reds/browns)
  • Concrete (has a much coarser texture than metal)
  • Wood (this one is really really hard. I can’t do it)

You can also try adding ‘shape’ to the metal panels:

  • Round corrugations
  • Square corrugations
  • Panels
  • Rivets
    For these, you won’t be changing the colours of the metal, but just shading them. Try using either a shading layer, or a brush on ‘hard light’

Once you’ve made a set of generic textures, you can combine them together to make a nice texture for a specific model. One thing I’ve experimented with recently is creating a whole bunch of materials, combining them with some nifty tricks in the node editor, and then baking them down to a single texture (single diffuse texture, single normal map, single spec map). This offers quite high quality final textures, but is a pain to set up, and tweaking the texture when you’re done is hard. Then you’ve got to add the details (paintwork, numbers etc) on later, and that’s really hard.

I once wrote a tutorial on introducing people to texturing. I spent three pages, and never mentioned a computer tool, but focussed on how to observe what you see around you, and how to think about replicating it. No-one I showed it to liked the tutorial because they wanted to make a texture, not look at the world. As such, I can’t find the darn thing any more. But the lesson from it is still valid. To make good textures, look at the world around you, after all, it is what you are trying to imitate.
I should warn you about texturing this way: Once you’ve done it for a month or two, you will walk around analysing the objects that you see, figuring out what filters, brushes, maps you would need to replicate them on a computer… (I do this to a lesser extend with modelling too, can’t not see where to put polygons in things I see)

i also think the front fins are a bit small. they seem a bit useless at this size. or maybe they are holding weapons (turrets or rockets maybe), then the size is alright i guess.

i agree with both of you guys the front fins did seem to small to me so i am glad you guys said something, and the back fin does not really fit the design of the model.

sdfgeoff, oh man now you want me to use the node editor lmao i have not gotten that far yet, actually i know your right and i will need to hit some tutorials up for using the node editor. honestly i cant wait to start texturing this every bit of progress i make drives me to finish just so i can see what it will look like when i finally finish. this is just one of many models for my game that i have to complete, many of my old models will work i will just have to spend time adding detail. i have a freighter i modeled 4 years ago that would look great in this game.

this has been a great adventure and you guys have been really helpful, later today after my wife is done with her appointment i will toss up the synopsis of the game so you guys can see what i am attempting to do.

still working on it, removed the fin, extended the front wings and redesigned the engines. i will get the game synopsis up but I have things that need done today. also need to learn how to properly light a scene. i am hoping to start the un-wraping of this model this weekend and start the texture process. here is to best laid plans lol.


Hmm, still not sure about those front wings. I think the width is correct, but they are too long. I think they should be short and stubby.

sdfgeoff, agreed in fact i was thinking of doing away with them completely, but if i did that then the back wings would need to be made bigger i think. i will finish the panels for the hull later today and then play with the design of it. also i looked at some of your stuff on your website drop me a pm i would like to ask you something.

just some assorted renders.






and for the rear of it with the redesigned engines.