One of my many hobbies is playing Shogi (japanese chess) and I’ve always thought it
would be cool to animate Shogi boards playing through a game. My main project at the
moment is doing just that. I recently made a major breakthrough on an issue that
was hindering progress (importing Japanese characters to manipulate) and I’m
happy to finally be seeing some renderable results from my efforts.
Here is a pic of the board with it’s pieces in their initial position …
This one shows the promoted sides of each of the different piece types for both Black’s
and White’s armies. Note: Some pieces aren’t flipped because they don’t promote. …
This next one shows some experimental light markers that I’m toying with. I may go
with something other than lights for the final cut, but I want visual markers during
the animation to show the path the moving piece takes, which piece is about to be
taken, etc. …
Comments and/or suggestions welcome.
If anyone has a tip on how I can get the wood patterns on the squares a little less
uniform that’d be cool. I realize I could use a different texture for each, but is there a
better way. Also, any suggestion on my ambient lighting are welcomed.
looking good so far, i don’t know anything about shogi ,so i can’t comment on that, but what bugs me about your stills at the mo is that the same wood texture, and therefor grain, is applied to the entire board/table thing. I may be wrong here, but i’m assuming that in real life the entire thing isn’t made out of one big chink of wood. I would make each part of the table a seperate mesh, and apply the texture to each of the parts, so the grain of the wood does not flow between the parts. posibly even use different textures for each bit.
Thanks for your input. I have done some updating on the wood textures …
In the process of my updating I discovered that the black dots near the center of the board were protruding too much and corrected that also.
You’re right, each of the three tables needs it’s own texturing …
In the picture below I have highlighted 3 areas (A) of the central table. On traditional boards these three areas would actually be made of the same very think piece of wood, although traditionally the black strips wouldn’t be there (I added those for a little extra decoration). Also, traditionally the red squares would also be part of the same think piece of wood (and lines for the squares painted onto the tabletop) as the rest of the table, but again I took a little artistic liberty on that. I figured that if I made the whole thing out of one piece of wood, without my decorations, that it would look even more off.
The uniformity of the red squares on the top of the table bug me. Do you know of a way I can get some variation on them without using multiple material? If I give them each their own material it’ll take 113 of them for this set. For the larger shogi variant previously presented, it would take around 300. Is there a way that I can apply the same material to all of the red squares and then alter some parameter for each of them (red squares) to produce some variation?
Here’s also an updated vision of my marker lights idea …
Previously I was using spotlights to produce the markers (probably a silly idea, but I’m still a newbie), but have started experimenting with using halo textures on objects the same size and shape as the basic shape of the playing pieces instead. I think it makes a nicer result.
I’ve now uploaded my second test animation, which impliments my lights idea and the pieces raising as they move (rather than just sliding). You can find it here.
I recently made a major breakthrough on an issue that
