3D Modellers (a bit offtopic)

[drcode]

Any of you have experience using 3D modellers? I've come to the conclusion that the most practical way to create art for U7 or a similar-looking game is to create the objects in 3D, render them with the proper perspective, and then touch them up by hand.

The professional 3D packages are >expensive<. And the free ones I've looked at don't seem to be done. Blender is powerful, but a pain to learn.

One that looks pretty good to me (having little experience) is AC3D, which is inexpensive ($40) shareware. Anyone have an opinion of this?

[Darkfist Dragon]

I dont know if a raytracer would be a good one..
but ye can give it a try: PoV raytracer (freeware) at www.povray.com
and the Moray modeller at www.stmuc.com/moray which is shareware..

[Telemachos]

Raytraced images has a special look to them that I think is very unsuitable for games.. hmm.. they are often what is called "super-realistic" which means that they often model reflections and refraction of light in a way that is theoretically correct but only for perfect specular surfaces - something which the real world does not consist of I don't know what kind of images povRay produces.. it is possible it does not suffer from the mentioned flaws...

I would go for a scanline renderer like 3d studio max or something... create a model, texture it, set up a camera and render the tile.

- Tele

[Beholder]

There's also Milshape:
http://www.swissquake.ch/chumbalum-soft/index.html

and gmax:
http://www.discreet.com/products/gmax/gmax_index.html
which is from the makers of 3d studio max.

Both of these are free. I'm not too sure how well they would work for what you want. I pretty much got them for the the same reason but I haven't gotten far enough with either to know if it's viable or worth the effort. Right now I'm trying to model pieces and a board for my Othello game, which is my answer for art since I'm much better at coding than "drawing".

-Beholder

[Roman]

yeah, with what I know...I use milkshape for halflife modelling...its rather easy

[drcode]

I'll take a look at Milkshape...

I've played with Povray in the past. It does produce nice output, but it can get >very< tedious.

[nadir]

The advantage of something like povray is that it is scriptable. And I think you can set it to render in different modes to make it less photo-realistic

[SB-X]

Even if the texture wasn't what you wanted, you said you were going to touch it up anyway. You could edit it completely so it has that U7 style

[Colourless]

The problems with raytraced images is that the modellers constructing the scene don't know really know what they are doing. Just because you can use 100% specular lighting on a surface, doesn't mean you should. The same problems will also exist with other sorts of renderers (i.e. a scanline renderer) since the problem isn't with the rendering method, but with the source art.

Raytracing + Radiosity will produce far more realistic results than any other method, if used sensibly.