HexScape

[Kinseth]

How many pictures for each?

[Porkins]

That's cool! What file format does the 3d model come out as?

[White Knight]

Originally Posted by Kinseth

How many pictures for each?

I made a turntable with walls and put pictures on the turntable and walls as a background (even though tutorials say not to use a turntable). I was taking a suite of about 25 pictures at about 10 or 20 degrees off horizontal, and then doing a second suite of 25 pictures at about 45 degrees off horizontal. It worked fine for the spider, but it was giving me fits with the 10th Regiment (misinterpreting many of the camera views). Manual stitching was also giving me fits.

Then I decided to try importing just the first suite of pictures (the ones closer to horizontal). It worked great--fairly clean, and the gun even looked like more than a thin stick! Then I used the highest resolution and it got even better.

Originally Posted by Porkins

That's cool! What file format does the 3d model come out as?

The native format for Autodesk 123D Catch is .3dp (?).
It also gives the following export options:
.dwg
.ebx
.rzi
.obj
.ipm
.las

Lyrgard said that the .obj file would be best for Hexscape.

Autodesk also has software to edit their files for 3d printing, but I don't know much about those programs yet. I'm still really new to this.

As a side note, my new Vellaman K8200 3d printer just came via UPS today. Now my kids and I just have to assemble it and learn how to 3d print stuff.

[SlipperySlope]

Originally Posted by Lyrgard

On the marker discussion :
@SlipperySlope
what do you mean by unwrapping ? I'm a total noob for 3D modeling. There is some thing I understand, some I already heard about, and other I don't really know what it means
What I know is that the 123 Catch texture are big, and contains lot of area that are not present on the model, so if it is possible to get a smaller texture, more "packed", it would be nice.

If you manage to get a model, and export it to .obj format, you can easilly try it :
- go to the folder your deziped HexScape
- go then to asset\3dObject\AgentCarr...

I played around with trying to load my models in Hexscape, couldn't get it to work. The Hexscape models are in .ase (Autodesk) format, and my version of Blender won't import/export that.

However, I used the 3D engine I work with, jMonkeyEngine 3, to load my model in both .blend and .obj format. It worked fine, including texture. (Unwrapping turns out to be unnecessary.)

The model is quite a bit smaller than the .ase files in Hexscape.

jME 3 uses JLWGL, so I think with some tinkering we can get the models to work.

What would be SUPER COOL, SlipperySlope, would be that you write a little How-To to help others not as familiar with blender to try it. Could you do that ?

To clarify, I've played around with Blender, and have done a bit of modeling and rigging, but I'm far from a pro! Maybe, optimistically, "intermediate" user.

However, your question gives me an idea. Would it useful if, for each particular project, we could have the most knowledgeable person on that topic put together a quick Youtube tutorial? That might help get more people involved, and also get you more consistent results.

If we have a Blender guru on Heroscapers who could do a tutorial for editing the model, that would be great. If we can't find one, I could give it a shot, but I'd happily defer to someone who knows more!

[SlipperySlope]

[Lyrgard]

Once again, so many thing to reply to !


Firstly, the news :
we will soon (probably today) have a private forum on Heroscapers to organize the task before us. There, we'll be able to open as many thread as we need, and yes, as suggested by White Knight and SlipperySlope, there will be How-to thread (with possible youtube tutorail if needed) to share best pratice for each team !




Next, a question about dice :
We will need Valkyrie dice. They are the same as combined dice, with just the blank face replaced with a Valkyrie symbol.

I have 2 choices :

1) replace the blank face in the combined dice with a Valkyrie symbol. In real life, it would be the same as always using Valkyrie dice to play
2) Create another dice type for Valkyrie dice, allowing to roll normal combined dice and Valkyrie dice, at the expense of having another tab in the dice panel.

What would you prefer ?




@White Knight :
Yes, small part like gun, swords, and so on can be tricky to get right
your 10th and fyorlag has some flaw in their model, but I don't know if we'll be able to get so much better than that. I would definitively play with them ! They look wonderfull

As for the turntable : the tutorial said to not use a turn table because of lightning problem. If you make your figure rotate, and the lightning has a direction, you change the way the figure is lighted, and it can have bad result. If you make a lighttent that suppress shadows, using a turntable is not a problem anymore.
When we'll have the private forum, we'll be able to share more in details our technics

I'm a little jealous of your Vellaman K8200 3d, guy ! Enjoy it well !



@Slipperyslope :
You know what ? HexScape uses JMonkey Engine 3 ^_^ So if you managed to load them, HexScape will be able too ! As for the .ase format, I used it because that is how the models are in VirtualScape (that and .3ds format). It was a pain, because I had to write code to read the .ase format and make mesh out of them. If someone have 3DS max and can open the models in .3ds to export them in .obj or anything we can open in blender, I would gladly get ride of the .ase format. All the models for the wave1 are there too, but only in .3ds, so if someone manage to convert .3ds to .obj, we have all the wave1 done !

The code I write should try to open, for each folder in the asset/3dObjects folder, a file with the same name as the folder, and .ase or .obj extension. Hum... perhaps this functionnality was not yet in the 0.0.5-alpha you are using... Could you send me a link to get your .obj model ? As soon as the private forum is set, I'll give the link to the latest version of HexScape to its members.

I agree with you that finding a blender guru would be the best. Did you look at the youtube link I gave you ? The guy use 123 Catch to get a model for a game. The last part of the tuto is not for us, but in the first part, he opens the model he got from 123 Catch, decimate it and bake the textures.

The syvarris you show is the low poly model ? If yes, it is wonderfull, and the first figure to go throught all the necessary steps ! I'm feeling good about all this !

[White Knight]

Originally Posted by Lyrgard

As for the turntable : the tutorial said to not use a turn table because of lightning problem. If you make your figure rotate, and the lightning has a direction, you change the way the figure is lighted, and it can have bad result. If you make a lighttent that suppress shadows, using a turntable is not a problem anymore.

The other reason not to use a turntable is because 123D Catch uses the background to help generate the model. If only the figure rotates, 123D Catch can't interpret the images correctly.

I fixed this by basically making my turntable into a tiny room with walls for the figures--a room that rotates with the figure. The only problem is focus. Because the figures are so small, when I zoom in and focus on them most of the background is blurry. I'm going to have to experiment with depth of field on my camera to see how much I can improve the images.

[Typhon2222]

Originally Posted by Lyrgard

Firstly, the news :
we will soon (probably today) have a private forum on Heroscapers to organize the task before us. There, we'll be able to open as many thread as we need,

[Lyrgard]

Originally Posted by White Knight

The other reason not to use a turntable is because 123D Catch uses the background to help generate the model. If only the figure rotates, 123D Catch can't interpret the images correctly.

I fixed this by basically making my turntable into a tiny room with walls for the figures--a room that rotates with the figure. The only problem is focus. Because the figures are so small, when I zoom in and focus on them most of the background is blurry. I'm going to have to experiment with depth of field on my camera to see how much I can improve the images.

For the photos, I made a lighttent in the form of a box, with white walls. The background is just uniform white, so 123 Catch cannot get info from it.
I just added lines and symbol to the plate of the turntable, that rotate along with the figure. It seems to works great, because I don't have the blurry background you speak of.

I get photo like that :


My only problem is that I would need more powerfull lamp.
Oh, and my lamp light is a little yellow, so I use a config in my camera to correct this (named Tungsten light, or something like that)

Here is some photo shots I took :

Anubian Wolf 1
Anubian Wolf 2
Anubian Wolf 3
Kosumeth
Sir Denrick
Swog rider
Knight of Weston 1
Knight of Weston 2
Knight of Weston 3
Knight of Weston 4

[Mars1912]

I understand the need for a private thread, but can there be a public announcement thread for this project to keep the rest of the community up to date on the project and future updates to the publicly available program.

[Lyrgard]

Of course !!

Don't worry about that ! I wish for HexScape to be used by the maximum of persons, so public communication will stay important.
The main need for a private forum is that we will need to open a lot of threads to work on the task of getting 3D models out of figures, and I don't want to flood the public forum. All feature requests, ideas, bug on public releases, general discussion, release, and so on, should still take place in the public forum.

HexScape is free and open source, and I want this set of mind to be for all part of the project, not only the code.

Thinking about that... I'll need the people that want to help me getting the 3D models to agree to release their work under the GPL v2 licence, the licence I use for HexScape. The key points of GPL v2 are :

You can:

• copy and distribute the program’s unmodified source code
• modify the program’s source code and distribute the modified source
• distribute compiled versions of the program, both modified and unmodified provided that:

  - all distributed copies (modified or not) carry a copyright notice and exclusion of warranty
  - all modified copies are distributed under the GPL v2
  - all compiled versions of the program are accompanied by the relevant source code, or a viable offer to make the relevant source code available
  

I chose this licence to be sure that HexScape will remain free and open source for all to use.

[Xorlof]

Regarding lighting--I use cheap clamp-on work lights with a daylight 23-watt fluorescent bulb in each:



Take 4 of these and point them at the light tent on the exposed sides (you can only see two in this picture, but the other two are there):


(this picture is with things setup for taking top-down photos of figures--I'm starting to redo them for the existing online play system and for the browser-based system I'm working on)

That seems to be enough light for even my cheapie camera to get good images and no color correction is needed. If you don't already have them, the work lights are about $6 each and come in handy doing various jobs around the house. (The bulbs are $6.50 for a 4-pack).

@Lyrgard--any chance of making just the 3d-models available under a more permissive license? Since they're not code, perhaps something like a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike or Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike?