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Apr 8

Hello World

icon1 blengine | icon2 Development | icon4 04 8th, 2008


Here’s a peek at the base terrain for the Apricot world. As it stands now, the dimensions are around 3km by 3km. Platform objects like slabs of rock and other terrain features are being created separately. Feedback is welcome but will be totally ignored, because I’m an artist and can’t handle criticism. No, if anyone has any ideas, of course we’d love to hear them, especially at this stage and especially about terrain. Although more comments about apricot rocket launcher cheat codes will still be considered.

To create the terrain, I started by painting a pretty simple black and white height map in Gimp and then applied it to a subdivided plane through the displacement modifier in Blender. After modifying the height map a bit to produce a result that was good enough to work with, I applied the filter and then used sculpting for then on. It had taken a few attempts to figure out an efficient technique to create a massive chunk of terrain while still having a decent amount of control over the proportions, which was extremely important and difficult in this case considering the main character(Frankie) is only like half of a meter long.

This week we’ll be working on texturing this with splatting and getting it all into Crystal Space. Also below is some concept art.

world2t world1t

wellt tree1t platformt house2t house1t bridge2t bridge1t

25 Responses

  1. Pablo Lizardo on

    Nice drawings!, …one question… 3km means how many blender units?



  2. MrNoodle on

    Nice sketches.For the environment do you use proportional editing?



  3. dusty on

    Woot! Looking good! Keep up the good work!



  4. chris on

    We’re working with the scale 1 meter = 1 blender unit, so 3000 blender units.



  5. loken on

    So, how do you figure its 3km x 3km? Are you guys using 1 blender unit as a meter, or is there some other conversion going on?

    Wonderful stuff so far guys. Keep up the great work!



  6. loken on

    Woops, posted too late. MY Q was A’d! =)



  7. chris on

    No, I haven’t used much proportional editing on the terrain. Sculpting works much faster.



  8. Francisco Ortiz on

    Very interesting! I liked it very much. The terrain looks very natural.

    The plataform sketch is my favorite.

    And what’s going to happen inside the water? And if i try to climb this mountains what happens? Please please! I cant wait! :))



  9. NathanKP on

    Very nice looking. There’s a lot of detail. I can’t wait to see how you’ll model all that detail and yet keep the game’s frame rate reasonable.

    NathanKP



  10. dragonrebel on

    looks a little bit like morrowind (i just mean, an island, since we know little of how the game is going to be, and for the rocket launcher cheat codes, i guess we will be able to find them in the source code?



  11. Pablo Lizardo on

    Thank you chris!, i work with the same scale (1 Meter = 1 Blender Unit).
    Question: Is there (in the blender institute) any idea on the blender developent to add units convertion? (For example, work with meters, inches, km, px, etc) Thanks! it’ll help a lot for the architectural design



  12. jonny on

    @dragonrebel: I think they’ll hash the cheat codes, so you won’t be able to read anything 😉

    Har Har.



  13. Quantum Anomaly on

    Looking good. As far as suggestions/ideas go, maybe a waterfall and some caves would be cool. You know, classic features of games that take place in outdoor settings. Hell, why not throw in a secret entrance to a Zelda dungeon with mummies and such. :p j/k



  14. MrE on

    This is nowhere near what i was expecting from the game. I expected some basic proof of concept things but this is F’ing awsome!! (pardon my Dutch 😉 ).
    I mean if the scenery is half as nice as the concept drawings it’s going to impact like a apricot shooting bazooka (cheatcode Ceci n’est pas une apricot).

    Wouldn’t it be nice /is it an idea/ Is there still time for people to build their own scenery and implement some of it into the game?
    Maybe as a competition where the winner will see his or her creation in the game?



  15. deynord on

    Good work! Cant wait for textured/shadered verson. Can you painting on terrain with layered textures and setup the slope angle range where you want to paingting? Thanks for screeeshoot.



  16. Topher Hunt on

    This terrain layout is beautiful. I hope it ends up being as expansive as it looks like it will be. In my mind, the best games in history have been those that take a while to get through: Ocarina of Time, Black and White… Keep it up! I’m hanging on every word from you guys.



  17. Dalai Felinto on

    Looks great.

    I’m just missing the scale reference.
    For drawing and adjusting the terrain size and height do you put the characters together?

    Best regards,
    Dalai



  18. Kirado on

    looks interesting.. how will the landscape work with LOD. Are you going to cut it up into quads or use some landscape BSP type of thing?



  19. Thomas on

    i don’t think cutting the landscape into blocks will work with LOD, it will produce holes at the seams. i’m interested too in how you get the landscape into the engine (converting back into a heightmap? ).
    Greetings
    Thomas



  20. gersin on

    me parece que tiene muchos poligonos? quedara muy pesado me parece no se..



  21. Francisco Ortiz on

    @gersin: Probably they are going to bake this into a low poly model with “bump” mapping texture(s): http://www.blender.org/development/current-projects/changes-since-245/render-baking/
    😉



  22. blackula on

    very nice; can’t wait to see this textured and in game! keep the updates coming 🙂



  23. Asa J on

    Very cool visual style. Classic. Reminds me of an old Briar Rabbit story I once had.



  24. chris on

    Regarding water and mountains we’re still working on those details. There will definitely be caves and waterfalls.

    Pablo, better tools and features for architectural design are on a long list of general things to do in the future, but it’s possible that we may see another open project in architectural visualization to develop blender better in that direction.

    mre, we’re definitely not opposed to having external help with all of the artwork, but only if needed and more towards the end of the project.

    dalai, I didn’t use the character in the scene itself, but based the proportions of the terrain on the character being around half of one blender unit long. Changing the amount of displacement in the displacement modifier helped with this too.

    We’ll have more information soon in another post regarding how the landscape is exported into crystal space and how it works with lod and everything else.



  25. john fleming on

    If your considering rocket launcher cheat codes you need to add an alternate weapon,
    an OICW would balance out the rocket launcher nicely, and the two would help fps types to get uased to playing a platform type game.
    JF