Beginner's Guide To 3D Art Assets - Buildings Oct. 12, 2017

[esosorcdc]

esosorcdc submitted a new resource:

Beginner's Guide To 3D Art Assets - Buildings - This guide is a step-by-step tutorial on creating and implementing 3D art for buildings.

This guide is a step-by-step tutorial that will walk you through how to create 3D art and add it to your ModBuddy project. It focuses on the 3D art for buildings in districts, including buildings in the city center district. At the end of this guide you will have a 3D Model of a building that you created in your mod that shows up in game.

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[Golan v]

Guide for art assets units- when?

 

[esosorcdc]

Guide for art assets units- when?

I am making a mod right now so I am not sure, but I also want to wait a little while to see if people find any typos or anything with the buildings one. But since your asking for it, I will plan on making it sooner than later.

 

[Mudkip1001]

First of all, THANK YOU FOR MAKING THIS!!! This was really helpful for someone with little to no modeling/modding experience! The only revision that needs to be done is that some of the photos are really blury and hard to read. Otherwise, without this guide I would be still looking for where to find the assets. I got stuck around page 33 though, baking is really intense and I don't think I did it right and now the thing wont export as .cn6 right.

 

[esosorcdc]

First of all, THANK YOU FOR MAKING THIS!!! This was really helpful for someone with little to no modeling/modding experience! The only revision that needs to be done is that some of the photos are really blury and hard to read. Otherwise, without this guide I would be still looking for where to find the assets. I got stuck around page 33 though, baking is really intense and I don't think I did it right and now the thing wont export as .cn6 right.

If it won't export, then 9 out of 10 times it is the bones. Select your 3D Model first, hold Shift, then select your bone second. Alt P and select Clear Parenting, then with everything still selected, Ctrl P and select "With Automatic Weights". Remember, the 3D model will be outlined in orange and the bone in yellow when you do the selection right. Sometimes the parenting gets messed up and you just need to re do it at the end. Also, after you re-parent, go in to edit mode of the 3D model, in the Properties Menu look under Object Data , and make sure all of your vertices are assigned to a vertex group. With vertex group selected and with your entire 3D model selected , click Assign. Save and try exporting again. Let me know if this worked for you.

Yea, I was worried about the photos getting blurred when I made it in to a PDF. I originally made it in Microsoft Word, but everyone does not have that and it is not free, were as, most people do have the pdf viewer and it is free. I did however select the option for the compressed version, since I was afraid it would be to big. Maybe I will try doing the uncompressed conversion and see if that fixes it.

 

[esosorcdc]

esosorcdc updated Beginner's Guide To 3D Art Assets - Buildings with a new update entry:

Uncompressed (22inx22in)

Some images in the first version were a bit blurry due to it being compressed so this is an uncompressed version. I had to make the page size the max size, which is 22in x 22in, so that the larger images would fit. Remember, if you don't like dealing with the bigger size, you can just download the original version.

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[Kevin Lopez]

Hey wassup man, nice tutorial, very well written. I'm having a problem with step 14. You wrote select the vertex group and press the assign button. Where is the assign button? I can't find it anywhere.

 

[Deliverator]

Hey wassup man, nice tutorial, very well written. I'm having a problem with step 14. You wrote select the vertex group and press the assign button. Where is the assign button? I can't find it anywhere.

You need to TAB into Edit Mode for the mesh and then the Assign Button will be available:

 

[esosorcdc]

Hey wassup man, nice tutorial, very well written. I'm having a problem with step 14. You wrote select the vertex group and press the assign button. Where is the assign button? I can't find it anywhere.

Yes, just as Deliverator said. Also, remember to enable scrolling in the pdf document (view=>page display=>enable scrolling). The default view in a pdf is a single page view, which makes it more difficult to see how everything flows. Every step that has actions will have an image below it. I do see how the image for step 14 got put on the next page right above the text for step 15, so that could be confusing. But it looks like pdf does not have a "true" continuous one page view, so enable scrolling is the best option.

Spoiler Screen Shot :

 

[esosorcdc]

esosorcdc updated Beginner's Guide To 3D Art Assets - Buildings with a new update entry:

Oct. 8, 2017

Removed headers for better continuous scrolling through pdf document.

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[Deliverator]

First of all, THANK YOU FOR MAKING THIS!!! This was really helpful for someone with little to no modeling/modding experience! The only revision that needs to be done is that some of the photos are really blury and hard to read. Otherwise, without this guide I would be still looking for where to find the assets. I got stuck around page 33 though, baking is really intense and I don't think I did it right and now the thing wont export as .cn6 right.

Baking is not required to make 3D assets at all. I don't do it myself and I've made lots of custom 3D art assets e.g. all the Moar Units elements. I really think the guide should be restructured to make it clear that baking textures is Blender is by no means essential. You can simply make a base layer texture in Gimp 2.0/Paint.NET/Photoshop and stub out the remaining 5-6 PBR textures with plain images.

 

[Kevin Lopez]

thanks, stupid mistake... Im currently making a new civ while also learning to use blender, while also learning to code on ttop of that. Blender is such a cool program, it seems like it can do anything.. I was curious what type of jobs do you guys have?? are you guys game developers??

 

[esosorcdc]

esosorcdc updated Beginner's Guide To 3D Art Assets - Buildings with a new update entry:

Oct. 12, 2017

Added Cycles Baking Disclaimer and export UV Map instructions.

Read the rest of this update entry...

 

[esosorcdc]

Baking is not required to make 3D assets at all. I don't do it myself and I've made lots of custom 3D art assets e.g. all the Moar Units elements. I really think the guide should be restructured to make it clear that baking textures is Blender is by no means essential. You can simply make a base layer texture in Gimp 2.0/Paint.NET/Photoshop and stub out the remaining 5-6 PBR textures with plain images.

As you suggested, I put a disclaimer at the beginning of section 3 and instructions on how to export a UV map. Thank you for watching this thread and looking over my tutorial. Let me know if you see anything else that needs to be updated.

thanks, stupid mistake... Im currently making a new civ while also learning to use blender, while also learning to code on ttop of that. Blender is such a cool program, it seems like it can do anything.. I was curious what type of jobs do you guys have?? are you guys game developers??

No. I have a degree in computer programming, but have a completely different job. I just do this for fun.

 

[dunkleosteus]

Few questions: how applicable is this to adding a new tile improvement? Can water be added to a building this way? I kind of want to add a moat as a building, but I'm not sure how to get it to render. I'd ideally want a ring of water just outside the city walls.

 

[Deliverator]

Few questions: how applicable is this to adding a new tile improvement? Can water be added to a building this way? I kind of want to add a moat as a building, but I'm not sure how to get it to render. I'd ideally want a ring of water just outside the city walls.

All of this is applicable to making Tile Improvements and Landmarks.

Water... depends what you mean. If you want to add a plane that looks like Water to your Building then you can do. Maybe look at the Aqueduct or something like that for an example of a water-like texture. You could use a Decal to simulate water like I did with the Mosi oa Tunya (Victoria Falls) Natural Wonder in Terra Mirabilis.

With GS they have Districts that actually cut down to the water layer - the Dam and Canal. Unfortunately we can't see how those work yet until they release the updated SDK Assets.