Need help on turning a Blender model into a unit

[Takhisis]

Greetings, fellow civfanatics!! To your very own personal misfortunes, I'm back!
After nasty, bothersome interruptions, like starting at university; having old comp fried by a tension spike (OUCH! ) and losing hundreds of megs of downloaded scenarios, units, sounds, maps, my own crap, and so forth; having me old copy of civIII ruined (and having to procure a new one), The Dark Queen of Krynn (permanoob class ) is back yet again to haunt you all.
Everything has changed a lot, I see many are gone and others have left for Civ 4. still, it was to be expected after 2 years.

in the meantime, I've been mucking about with Blender 3D for more than a year now. I can make some nice things, as long as they don't have to include people or anilas, I'm not very good at them yet. Still, the Noob to Pro book at Wikibooks has been a great help.
I've been tinkering around for the past few days and have made the following model of a catapult:



Now, I know a bit about armatures but SUCK (yes, in capitals) at animating, so any tips at making movement smoother can help.
I just posed the catapult and the rock ball for that, didn't even start the armature-positioning yet.
The main thing is: what do I have to do about colours? i.e. magenta background (which exact shade is it in RGB?). Also, the special shade of blue that is replaced by your civ-colour, which is it? (Remember, I've lost all the data, even the tons of bookmarks on such useful tips that I had) Any help at all will help. I'll also have to work out where to position the camera.

So... any help fo it at all?

[wolf_brother]

The Magenta background color is {255,0,255} in RGB.

[Takhisis]

Originally Posted by wolf_brother

The Magenta background color is {255,0,255} in RGB.

That's a good start. Thanks!! Any other ideas?

EDIT: it doesn't seem to work, maybe Blender renders it differently or something.

[Takhisis]

I need the camera positions... pleeease?
And also how to implemente the blasted colours uniformly in the model. Sun type lamps appear to work but not quite.

[Supa]

Don't forget it doesn't really matter which colors you're using as transparent or civ-specific color.

Magenta is convenient because it's never used in the unit itself.

What matter is the palette itself used in FLC. The last two indexed colors are what Civ-3 engine will use as Civ-colors and transparent color.

[Takhisis]

So i can just use the average gray (used by blender whenever there's no "real" colour) as civ-specific colour, then, um... leave the ugly blue background or some other crazy colour for the magcrap. Now I have to start redesigning the catapult because there's a MAJOR flaw in it, maybe you people can see it (I showed it to my father who pointed out every single tiny wrong speck of dust he could find. How charming!).
I'm planning on doing 15-frame attack anims (10-12 for moving the arms and 5-3 for the projectile flying away).

btw me dad says that "Supa" should be changed to "SQUEAK".

[Supa]

If you leave the ugly blue background, as you coined it, be sure there isn't any colors like it. In fact, if I was you, I'd swap it for magenta anyway. Keep whatever you want for Civ-Colors, but use an infrequent color as background.

And I was wrong for civ-colors, it just came to me that it's the last two rows* ** that are used for civ-colors. Eh, it's been so long since I've put together an unit.

*last 2 colors excepted - they are for transparent colors, like background and borders
**in GIMP anyway, it's the first two rows in PSP)
***Between my avatar, my title and my pseudonym, there are already two references to T. P. It should be enough.

[Takhisis]

If I change the ugly blue background (henceforth, u.b.b. or UBB) it affects the way light is rendered, so that everything looks as if it's been dipped in strawberry yoghurt.

I have GIMP, not PSP. I'm a bit of a noob at it, but I suppose I'm generally good at poking, tinkering and asking for help.

***Do you mean Hex?

[Supa]

The background reflects light in your Blender setup ? I've never used it, but I guess it should have option to deactivate that.

*** Yes.

[Takhisis]

Not exactly. It simulates an environment, and in a normal "Earth" environment light fades to blue (ever stepped outside= Most of us nerds never do unless its completely necessary, but the sky is blue). If you change that to magenta then the light changes and becomes pinkish.
So I'm resorting to putting a huge sheet of magenta material and that's it for now, I'm doing it the stop-motion way, 15 frames and I'll put them together with Steph's SBB.

I'm rendering in ortho, not in perspective, since the Civ III map is rendered orthogonally.

Where should I position the camera?
What angle from the horizontal? 45º? Also, at what height?

[Takhisis]

This is the definitive one, here's a preview of it attacking due East.

The thumbnail looks crappy but the full image seems to be OK. I wonder why.
I'm doing it the stop-motion way since I don't see any other way of doing it, I'm no good at animating and don't even know how to convert the vid to a *.flc
I'll get a lot of them facing to one side, then us either SBB or a program I used to have (gotta find it again)that made *.gifs into animated gifs and the gif to flc tool. Well, I'm off to bed, so that's all for today I think.

[Blue Monkey]

Originally Posted by Takhisis

Not exactly. It simulates an environment, and in a normal "Earth" environment light fades to blue (ever stepped outside= Most of us nerds never do unless its completely necessary, but the sky is blue). If you change that to magenta then the light changes and becomes pinkish.
So I'm resorting to putting a huge sheet of magenta material and that's it for now, I'm doing it the stop-motion way, 15 frames and I'll put them together with Steph's SBB.

I'm rendering in ortho, not in perspective, since the Civ III map is rendered orthogonally.

Where should I position the camera?
What angle from the horizontal? 45º? Also, at what height?

Please don't mention the big blue room with the bright light too often - it frightens us otaku. The actual experience of it is so disorienting that only massive quantities of pizza can restore digital creativity.

I hope when you get the numbers figured out you'll gather them into one post. I'll probably be learning blender in the new year. If I figure anything out I'll add it here.

[Takhisis]

Do you mean this type of blue room?

The extremely large room with the blue ceiling and intensely bright light (during the day) or black ceiling with lots of tiny night-lights (during the night) found outside all computer installations.

I use to call it "real world".

If you need help with Blender, besides using the tutorials in the official page, which includes a Blender wiki, you can also get the following wikibooks:

1. Blender 3D: Noob to Pro
2. Blender 3D Reference Guide
3. Blender 3D: HotKeys

And the Blender Open Material Repository
Or you can contact me.
Hope it helps.

[Blue Monkey]

Originally Posted by Takhisis

If you need help with Blender...

I've got help with Blender itself - both the items you listed, a couple of books recommended by my instructor, & my instructor himself. I'm working on getting an internship with his company, which uses Blender as a major part of its pipeline. I'm more concerned with things like the camera setups, etc. for producing items for C3C. Believe me, I'm not shy about asking questions publicly & you're on my list.

[Takhisis]

I'm on your list? That gives me the creeps. Well, I used to have a few nice models of stuf (including a war elephant and crew) until the old comp had an accident
Now I'm rebuilding. And one day I'll have that war elephant up again or I'll raze this forum!!!!
Feel free to ask many questions, I have acquired a bit off knowledge over the past 2 years.

Back to the main topic:
I have exams on the following dates:
23 November
26 November
04 December
So don't start trying to prod me into action until the 4th of December at 5 PM, GMT -3.

[Takhisis]

yayness! I've done a bit of copying and rotating and have all the models for the attack.
I'll have to do the same for movement... and a similar one for fortifying.
Camera angles, anyone? I can try to figure them out (I'm rendering orthogonally anyway so there's not that much of a difference) but only after Friday.

[Blue Monkey]

Originally Posted by Takhisis

I need the camera positions... pleeease?
And also how to implemente the blasted colours uniformly in the model. Sun type lamps appear to work but not quite.

blender set-up for Civ 3

[Takhisis]

Ooooh yeah!

[Takhisis]

Colours R G B

Horizon 1 0 1

Zenith  1 0 1

Appears to be the right world setting. (Renders to magenta-ish backrgound)