Exult Forum

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?

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..

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.