Not much, to be honest. I can navigate my way through the controls and settings, but my models kinda suck. I can make somewhat decent creatures, but my humanoid models are quite awful. I tried editing Clint's hero model to make a demon, but it didn't look good. Gotta level up on my artistic skills.
Here are some screenshots of a few creatures that I've been working on.
I've also included a head model that I made following Riven Phoenix's excellent step-by-step tutorial on the human head. All the credit goes to Riven, I just followed his instructions. Here's his channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/junaidakhan1
Here's how this works. There are two types of spritesheets, called "unpacked" and "packed". Let's use the minotaur example. The first screenshot shows an unpacked sheet, while the second one shows a packed one. When you use Clint's script in Blender and then you run Image Magic's montage tool from the command line, it generates an unpacked sprite sheet. If you want a more detailed explanation, it can be found here:
In order to transform your unpacked sprite sheet into a packed one, you would use another tool, called "sprite sheet packer". Stefan Beller has written one for FLARE and you can download it here:
But here's the thing: you don't need to transform your sprite sheet into a packed one, you can play the game just fine with the one you generated with Blender and the montage tool from the command line. For example, let's say that you're modifying the Empyrean Campaign. Copy your unpacked minotaur spirte sheet, and paste it into this folder:
/flare-game/mods/empyrean_campaign/images/enemies
Make sure that it's named minotaur.png. Now you need the text file that control the animations. Go to:
Paste the .txt file there. Just one more step. Open the minotaur.txt file, and remove the first line. Replace it with this:
image=images/enemies/minotaur.png
I've include two more screenshots, showing the minotaur.txt file before editing it, and how it shood look after you've added that line.
That's it! You're good to go. Ideally, you would use the RectangleBinPack for optimization, but you can play the game just fine using unpacked sprite sheets and their corresponding .txt animation files.
Painting can definately be more difficult than 3d modeling. For one thing, in painting you have to worry about perspective, foreshortening, shading and coloring. In 3d, all of this is way easier to do. Perspective and foreshortening is basically done automatically for you. And instead of shading, you just place the light source somewhere; this will generate the correct cast shadows, etc. As for coloring, you just choose a base color, and the light source does the rest. Granted, setting all of this up can take longer than making a drawing or painting from scratch, but once you have everything set up, you can generate all kinds of images from different angles at a blazing speed. Even more so if you rig the model, so that you can pose in different ways, in combination with different camera angles. Finally, you can use all of this to generate your own illustrations or paintings. You simply take a screenshot or export it as an image, and then just adjust it a little bit with Photoshop, Gimp or Krita to give it a "painterly" look.
Unity is definately a great engine, very powerful. What I like about flare is that it has been taylored to a very specific genre. This saves modders a lot of time, since they only need to focus on art assets, map making, and editing text files.
Speaking of the art assets, I think Clint has done an amazing job with them. Making 2d sprites from a 3d model is kind of a lost art, but it was the process that Diablo 1 and 2 used. The Infinity Engine games (Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale) used the same method. Heroes of Might and Magic 3 was also notable for this.
Then the roads split. One the one hand, some games went the pure 3d way (Warcraft 3, etc), other went the pure 2d way (as in hand-made pixel art, with no 3d models from which to render them).
Today it's relatively rare to see games that use the method that flare uses. But I'm convinced that it's a huge time saver for 2d games. Besides, suppose that you want a pixel art look instead of a realistic one, you can configure Blender so that it outputs all the sprites that you need,.in whatever visual style you prefer.
Thanks. I'm trying to re-code this in as an object of the Map class used by the engine,, so that it would be possible to use the MapSaver API. However, this task is proving to be way beyond my next-to-nill knowledge of C++.
Does anybody have any suggestions? Currently I made a subclass called RandomDungeon so that it can access the protected members of Map. And I'm still hunting all of the necessary dependencies (I thought I had them all, but I was wrong). Beyond this, I'm not really sure what to do.
Maybe I could try an intermediate solution. Instead of creating an object of the Map class, maybe I could create a class and object for my humble dungeon generator instead.
Ah, MedicineStorm, I just realized you're one of the site's admins! Quick question, is there an option for blocking a user, so that you don't see what they post and vice-versa?
Mostly to get critiques and feedback. I would love to share models that would be useful to someone, but as you can see, I'm not quite there yet.
I'm not even sure if it's ok to modify Clint's models. It's one thing to modify code, but modifying art assets is a different matter. I'm thinking in terms of licenses here.
Not much, to be honest. I can navigate my way through the controls and settings, but my models kinda suck. I can make somewhat decent creatures, but my humanoid models are quite awful. I tried editing Clint's hero model to make a demon, but it didn't look good. Gotta level up on my artistic skills.
Here are some screenshots of a few creatures that I've been working on.
I've also included a head model that I made following Riven Phoenix's excellent step-by-step tutorial on the human head. All the credit goes to Riven, I just followed his instructions. Here's his channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/junaidakhan1
Here's how this works. There are two types of spritesheets, called "unpacked" and "packed". Let's use the minotaur example. The first screenshot shows an unpacked sheet, while the second one shows a packed one. When you use Clint's script in Blender and then you run Image Magic's montage tool from the command line, it generates an unpacked sprite sheet. If you want a more detailed explanation, it can be found here:
https://github.com/flareteam/flare-engine/wiki/Animation-Definitions
In order to transform your unpacked sprite sheet into a packed one, you would use another tool, called "sprite sheet packer". Stefan Beller has written one for FLARE and you can download it here:
https://github.com/stefanbeller/RectangleBinPack
But here's the thing: you don't need to transform your sprite sheet into a packed one, you can play the game just fine with the one you generated with Blender and the montage tool from the command line. For example, let's say that you're modifying the Empyrean Campaign. Copy your unpacked minotaur spirte sheet, and paste it into this folder:
/flare-game/mods/empyrean_campaign/images/enemies
Make sure that it's named minotaur.png. Now you need the text file that control the animations. Go to:
/flare-game/art_src/animation_defs/characters/minotaur.txt
Copy that file, which is the unpacked animation definition for the minotaur. Now go to:
flare-game/mods/empyrean_campaign/animations/enemies
Paste the .txt file there. Just one more step. Open the minotaur.txt file, and remove the first line. Replace it with this:
image=images/enemies/minotaur.png
I've include two more screenshots, showing the minotaur.txt file before editing it, and how it shood look after you've added that line.
That's it! You're good to go. Ideally, you would use the RectangleBinPack for optimization, but you can play the game just fine using unpacked sprite sheets and their corresponding .txt animation files.
Looks good. When you say you couldnt get it to be game ready, what was the exact problem? Maybe I can look into it.
Sure, share away! : )
Painting can definately be more difficult than 3d modeling. For one thing, in painting you have to worry about perspective, foreshortening, shading and coloring. In 3d, all of this is way easier to do. Perspective and foreshortening is basically done automatically for you. And instead of shading, you just place the light source somewhere; this will generate the correct cast shadows, etc. As for coloring, you just choose a base color, and the light source does the rest. Granted, setting all of this up can take longer than making a drawing or painting from scratch, but once you have everything set up, you can generate all kinds of images from different angles at a blazing speed. Even more so if you rig the model, so that you can pose in different ways, in combination with different camera angles. Finally, you can use all of this to generate your own illustrations or paintings. You simply take a screenshot or export it as an image, and then just adjust it a little bit with Photoshop, Gimp or Krita to give it a "painterly" look.
BTW, if you're interesting in the process of using Blender to make pixel art, you might wan to check out this excellent tutorial:
https://www.gamefromscratch.com/post/2017/01/24/Easy-Sprite-Art-In-Blender-Tutorial.aspx
Unity is definately a great engine, very powerful. What I like about flare is that it has been taylored to a very specific genre. This saves modders a lot of time, since they only need to focus on art assets, map making, and editing text files.
Speaking of the art assets, I think Clint has done an amazing job with them. Making 2d sprites from a 3d model is kind of a lost art, but it was the process that Diablo 1 and 2 used. The Infinity Engine games (Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale) used the same method. Heroes of Might and Magic 3 was also notable for this.
Then the roads split. One the one hand, some games went the pure 3d way (Warcraft 3, etc), other went the pure 2d way (as in hand-made pixel art, with no 3d models from which to render them).
Today it's relatively rare to see games that use the method that flare uses. But I'm convinced that it's a huge time saver for 2d games. Besides, suppose that you want a pixel art look instead of a realistic one, you can configure Blender so that it outputs all the sprites that you need,.in whatever visual style you prefer.
Thanks. I'm trying to re-code this in as an object of the Map class used by the engine,, so that it would be possible to use the MapSaver API. However, this task is proving to be way beyond my next-to-nill knowledge of C++.
Does anybody have any suggestions? Currently I made a subclass called RandomDungeon so that it can access the protected members of Map. And I'm still hunting all of the necessary dependencies (I thought I had them all, but I was wrong). Beyond this, I'm not really sure what to do.
Maybe I could try an intermediate solution. Instead of creating an object of the Map class, maybe I could create a class and object for my humble dungeon generator instead.
No one is harassing me, but I've sent you a pm.
Ah, MedicineStorm, I just realized you're one of the site's admins! Quick question, is there an option for blocking a user, so that you don't see what they post and vice-versa?
Ah, I see. I'll look into it more thoroughly this week. Thanks! For now I'll just remove the files in the original post.
Mostly to get critiques and feedback. I would love to share models that would be useful to someone, but as you can see, I'm not quite there yet.
I'm not even sure if it's ok to modify Clint's models. It's one thing to modify code, but modifying art assets is a different matter. I'm thinking in terms of licenses here.
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