Soluthis' Harbor (wip)

[Razorwing]

The crane is pretty much finished now. The ground is just there for reference; the real cranes will be placed facing ledges. It's based on an ancient greco-roman crane called "trispastos", which you can read about -here- if you like.

[Razorwing]

I've made a Redoran cargo shipping container. I don't know if I'll end up using the morph animation though. I'm happy with the result in itself, other than that it plays too slowly. I just don't know if I'll find a way to implement that particular animation. I did it mostly as an experiment, so no harm done. If I skip the morph animation on this model then the static model will look like it is when it is in the relaxed position.

[youtube=center]http://www.youtube.com/v/7AQlpyfrPbc[/youtube]

The video shows the model exported with the CivIV exporter, so it doesn't display normal maps or vertex colors. The attached screenshot shows how it looks with those enabled.

[sandor]

Nice work!

Perhaps you could use thicker ropes for the crane and the container, for a heavy load they are quite thin.

[nick_op]

Originally posted by Razorwing
The video shows the model exported with the CivIV exporter, so it doesn't display normal maps or vertex colors. The attached screenshot shows how it looks with those enabled.

It should be very easy to speed up the animation if needs be.

Quick question, though: why did you export it with the CivIV exporter rather than NifTools?

[Razorwing]

sandor: Thanks, and you're right - I didn't realize that until now I'll be sure to make the rope thicker.

nick_op: True, it would be easy for me to fix the animation speed. It's just that there's no point to this particular animation, which I did partly as a test and partly just for fun. In theory it could have worked as part of the crane, whereby the crane would lift up the container, rotate, and release it on the ground.

But that's not possible since the crane design I used is fixed to the ground and can't rotate. (It's a real-world crane design so presumably the cargo would be hoisted up, then workers would move the payload while it hung from the pulley rope, and when they had positioned it they would lower it onto the ground.) So I figure I'll use it as a static container with the ropes relaxed onto it. I enjoyed the practice I got with morphs though.

In SaidenStorm's tutorial he says things like "If you plan to export the morph using the Niftools exporter you have to make sure that the entire mesh has broken verticies along its texture seams otherwise the Niftools exporter screws up the UV seams on export and it is a pain to fix outside of Max." and, in reference to using the CivIV exporter, "Vastly easier then using just the Niftools exporter". So, going by that I figured I'd use the CivIV exporter from the get-go. I also recalled comments I've read that there are still things animation tasks one needs that exporter for, so his statements made sense to me. Are the things he says about the Niftools exporter no longer true?

[Koniption]

Yes, the niftools exporter seems to export morphs even without broken seams now:

http://niftools.sourceforge.net/forum/vi...=20&t=1900

Also, I have exported the morphed head of my plant creature, the morphs work fine, and I'm pretty sure the vertices are all welded together, too.

Koniption

[Razorwing]

Originally posted by Koniption
Yes, the niftools exporter seems to export morphs even without broken seams now:

http://niftools.sourceforge.net/forum/vi...=20&t=1900

Also, I have exported the morphed head of my plant creature, the morphs work fine, and I'm pretty sure the vertices are all welded together, too.

Koniption

Thanks for confirming it! Cool, that certainly makes things easier

I did try exporting the morph with niftools at one point but it didn't come out right, although that turned out to be an unrelated error. (The 3.4 and earlier versions of the exporter autochecks that the "Extra Nodes on Mesh" option is active while the 3.5 pre-release does not, though tazpn said he could fix it.)

[nick_op]

Originally posted by Koniption
Yes, the niftools exporter seems to export morphs even without broken seams now:

Yeah, I pestered Steve about it a while back - he got it working pretty quickly so that we could get the kwama forager finished. SaidenStorm's tutorial is a little out of date in some respects, but is still massively useful - it was his creature tutorial that got me into animating.

[Razorwing]

Here's a screenshot from the CS of the current state of the harbor in Soluthis.

As you can see I haven't decided yet if I want to make taller pylons that reach down to the sea floor, or if I want to raise the level of the sea floor.

There's five custom buildings in the harbor.
1) The warehouse on the islet
2) The tower
3) Three small interiors baked into the harbor docks

Out of those five I'm only sure what one of them will be, which is the warehouse (which is out of view, some distance to the right of the screenshot). Gotta have a warehouse in a harbor. I'm not sure what the other four will be. Any ideas?

[TheImperialDragon]

Originally posted by Razorwing
Any ideas?

Will there be people taking care of the docks? Maybe a harbourmaster of some sort?