[Gardon]

I'm a c++/directX programmer and need to start making some models and levels for my world. I've tried a few things (Pnp Terrain Creator for heightmaps, 3D world studio for buildings, and milkshape for character/weapon models), but it sucks because they can't all tie together. Buildings made in 3D World Studio have to be scaled down to fit onto the terrain with Pnp TerrainCreator, and look totally wrong. Characters made in milkshape can't be imported into 3D World Studio because everything must be made internally by 3DWS (it doesn't allow imports), and Milkshape can model things but doesn't have terrain features.

As you can tell I'm in a bind. I'm curious as to how a level is made, along with models and characters with that level. How do these artists do it? I need to stop programming for a bit and do some art stuff so I keep my focus, and would like to work on a level. But how on earth can I do this?

Any tutorials/advice/links would be TREMENDOUSLY helpful.

Thank you for your time.

-Gardon

[DeveloperX]

Maya
3dsmax
wings3d
blender

all of the above can create all the assets you need.

I use wings3d for all my stuff these days.and its free!
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Rambling Indie Games, LLC

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[RampantCoyote]

I understand Wings3D doesn't do animation, though.

I'm a Blender fan these days --- I mainly use Milkshape to help export file formats to ones Blender can use.
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Tales of the Rampant Coyote - Old-School Game Developer talks Indie Games, RPGs, and the Games Biz

[Gardon]

What about heightmap exports vs. .x files? Can Wings3D export terrain as a heightmap, while still letting me drag and drop models onto it?

[RedSlash]

I use Blender. Blender has a steep learning curve, though.

[Hajo]

Blender seems to be the best free program out there. But be prepared to read a lot of tutorials and spend some weeks on practising. At least some days.

[Verious]

I've always been a fan of Autocad and 3D Studio Max. Creating non-organic objects in Autocad is very fast because of the "command line" interface and precise entry of dimensions.

[RampantCoyote]

The problem there is price. New copy of 3DS Max is $3500, and AutoCad is $4k.

Newest version of Blender is $0.

And while there's no doubt the latest versions of 3DS Max, Lightwave, and Maya are a bit more feature-rich than Blender, for indie game development you won't be taking advantage of more than a fraction of Blender's features in the first place.
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Tales of the Rampant Coyote - Old-School Game Developer talks Indie Games, RPGs, and the Games Biz

[DeveloperX]

[DeveloperX]

[Gardon]

[DeveloperX]

There are a few ways to go about this.

One method is to use a model with 0 polygons (just has a single vertice in the mesh) that is never drawn, just the position of the vertice is loaded into the game (easily extracted from whatever data structure your game uses to store model data I'm sure)

You place this special vertice mesh where you want something to be in your game (sort of like a location anchor if you will).
You can then load and position your models that you want at the location of this locator vertice.
Or if its a game event, then you can simply check to see if the player is on that locator (or near it, or whatever) to trigger your events.


Another way would be to create a mock of your game level in either wings3d or anim8or and then export each game object seperately so that they are all positioned correctly when you load them into place in code.
This does not solve the event problem, that would require either using the first method, or a lot of testing to see if your events are placed correctly.

Yet another method is to write a game level editor (doesn't have to be complex) that loads your heightmap same as the game, and loads all your game object models and lets you place them using the mouse anywhere you want, and then saves the position and rotation data for every model to a file for you to use as a game level.

If figuring out how to use the mouse for selecting and transforming the model position and rotations is too much work, then something simple could be worked up using just a few input fields to type in coordinates for the selected object and 3 fields for the X,Y,Z rotation of the selected object; then either have a drop-down to select a different model, or even arrows to scroll through the available models. A 'submit' button would save the changes to memory, and then a 3d display of the level could then be updated to reflect the changes.

In any event, the BEST method is to write your own editor, the work is well worth the effort if your game is using a lot of models (such as an rpg or 3d platform game)

I am thinking about implementing something like the latter for my game soon; cause it is becoming quite tiresome entering the coordinates by hand in the code. Hmm...*opens visual c#* :D
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Rambling Indie Games, LLC

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[Gardon]

I've been slowly coming to that realization.... developing my own editor. Currently I'm working with 3 programs: one to build terrain, another to build buildings, and a third to build characters. It's a total pain in the ass to have to switch between the three, because each and every time I have to re-scale everything to fit in with the other programs.

Example: Create a building, then import it to Freeworld3d (terrain program) to see how it measures up. It's all out of scale, so I have to fit it to the best of my ability, which is often wrong.

Thanks DeveloperX. I think I'm going to have to make it one way or another. :)