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Old 30th June 2004, 03:57 PM   #1
crow34
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i bought ac3d because it was recommended as a good 3d modeller

i purchased so i can begin making 3d ww2 houses and bombed rubble for a game idea i have but after a month of trying to get started on the program and learn the fundementals of the program i am having difficult time getting started i followed the tutorials on the ac3d site and i was wondering could anybody point me in direction of any further beginner tutorials

i would be gratefull thankyou
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Old 30th June 2004, 06:02 PM   #2
Andy
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The tutorial section on this forum has some good stuff.

If you give us a better idea of what it is you are trying to make, we can help with some specifics.

Andy
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Old 30th June 2004, 06:09 PM   #3
foxa
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Been there - done that. Iv'e been using AC3D for almost a year now. I used several 3D packages (and own some of them) and I still look at other packages now and then (sorry Andy ops: ) - trust me AC3D is the most intuitive and easy to use modeler I have used. That being said, 3D modeling is not easy or simple to pick up, have some patience with yourself and the program and it will happen. Look through the Tutorials section on the forum, and download and read the manual (I found it easier to read when printed). Last but not least, dont be afraid to ask questions here on the forum (how do I or how do you etc.), you will find plenty of my questions in there.

Don't give up and good luck.

Art
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Old 1st July 2004, 02:14 PM   #4
crow34
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i am trying to buildhouses that would appear in a mohaa game typical houses of that type and era typical french village with bombdamaged floors blown away walls and so on

ill stick with ac3d because i believe in the program

the problem i am having is a number of things they may seem silly sorry

but here goes

do i start modelling from a photograph using primitives ie cube and so forth
if so how is the interior modelled

do i start using polys if so do i start by setting a texture to the background to start drawing polys from if thats the case anybody got some good textures to start from?

do i set a photograph as a background like the car body tutorial on ac3d.org and start building polys from there the problem with this is i can never get hold of photographs with a front profile and a side profile the photos are always on an angle....gggrrrr

do i start building the walls of the building individually using primitives if so how would i build interiors that have ovals

i have gone through the tutorials on this forum some of them are fantastic but i found a few of them a little incomplete or difficult to understand




am sorry to be a bit of a nuisance guys but a need help big time

have downloaded the manual and have begin to read basically ive gone back to the drawing board
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Old 1st July 2004, 03:22 PM   #5
Dennis
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Modeling over photo backgrounds is certainly a viable approach. If you want to model specific buildings for which you have photos/drawings, there are some things to consider.

For example, most building photos you'll find are taken at an angle, which will not really work as a background for ortho windows. When I have such a photo, I'll generally come up with my own external blueprints for it - I do this by assuming certain measurements, like that the front door is x meters tall by x meters wide, and based on that I can estimate the size of the exterior wall surrounding the door. While not 100% accurate, this can produce good results.

Modeling the interiors "inside" the exterior can be tricky --- I'd almost recommend doing the interior first if you can. I'd love to see layers in AC3D, which would help the modeling of interiors/exteriors immensely. In the only building I've modeled, I modeled the outside first, then copied the building to a new file, placing a bounding box over where the interior walls and doors/windows would go. I then removed the parts I didn't need and modeled the interior as a separate model. This way the exterior walls didn't get in the way. Once finished, I merged the interior/exterior together. You could also just hide the exterior polygons, but I use Hide/Unhide a lot, and it would have been a pain to hide interior walls and then unhide them (thereby unhiding all of the exteriors as well) --- this is why I opted for the new file.

Hope that makes sense.

When choosing between polys, primitives, lines, etc, it will all depend on what you're going to do with the final product. If you want these buildings to actually be loaded into a game environment, then the answer lies in how the game environment needs to see the data. For many formats a "triangle soup" (a bunch of triangles that make up your model) is fine, which means you can use any combination of polys/primitives/etc., but if your engine uses/needs BSP/CSG, you'll want to stick to closed primitives.

Rubble, holes, and debris are not as easy. The CSG plugin would work wonders for making blast holes, but can often produce a *lot* of triangles - this is normally only an issue if you're loading the data directly into a game engine, though.

For rubble, it may seem silly, but getting photos of rocks/planks/etc can be handy for creating random rubble. Modeling a rock seems trivial enough to do without a model, but for most people (myself included) more realistic results are achieved when you have a real rock to work with.

Also, don't feel like you have to model every random piece of rubble - you can get by with surprisingly few rubble models, and by stretching/rotating/resizing them, you can copy the same objects many times over and create a decent looking "random pile".

These are all just opinions, of course, but I hope they help.

Dennis
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