Archive for the ‘3d’ Category

Google may want to organise the Web – I just want to organise my website.  So since I had a couple of freebies for Vue floating around on Too Many Ideas without a proper home and I think I may have some more on the way I’ve made a new home for Free Vue Objects downloads.

Here are two quick Vue 9 renders of work in progress models made with CityEngine 2010.3 Indie. Since I got CityEngine in November I’ve been tinkering with it working on trying to get to grips with its CGA language and make some semi realistic models. Yesterday, after coming across some photographs of architectural models of Soviet Constructivist building schemes, I decided to see if I could get CityEngine to generate similar looking models.

So far I’ve got a seven different lot layouts and a simple square tower building. The colours used for the buildings on a lot are uniform and selected randomly from a set of predefined combinations. I want to add a couple more simple building types (rectangle, cylinder, large H, large L and large O). I also want to drive the road colours with a colour map so they can become bold lines running through the images.

Overall though for maybe five hours gentle effort I’m pleased with the progress so far.

The first model is made with a simple road network with the rules applied to it.

The second model was made with the same simple road network scaled so there were more lots with the same rules applied to it.

With all of the different flavours of Vue now available I’ve spent a bit of time cleaning up my unofficial Vue News blog. I’ve even tweaked the Vue Squidoo lens although those get so little traffic I’m seriously tempted to knock them on the head.

Last night I started messing around with a picture I was messing around with in Vue 7. I was never 100% happy with the lighting of the original. The monster was too visible – I wanted it to be lurking and menacing. Now Vue 9 has the wonderful new relighting feature so I made a small render of the scene and then saved out 21 variations. I varied the lighting seven different levels of intensity. I also varied the sunlights colour to a blue and a green hue from the white it was in the original. To illustrate the effect here is a quick contact sheet I knocked up.

These two are late additions suggested by @WastexGames…

Sea Monster Variations Orange

Sea Monster Variationsv - Red

I’m torn over which one to go with so here is a quick poll that will run till Sunday night to see what you think (or leave a comment if you’d prefer) – you can pick more than one picture if you like several.

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If it seems like I’ve gone quite quiet here its because I’m playing with new toys. First of all I’ve been getting to grips with Vue 9 Infinite with its excellent new features. Re-lighting is a wonderful enhancement and is a massive time saver for me. Texture resizing is also a massive time saver for me as I used to resize large image textures manually but now Vue can take care of it for me.

Alongside that I got a copy of CityEngine and I’ve found its pretty easy to lose an evening getting to grips with one part of it. So far I think I’ve got the hang of bringing in terrain data from NASA hgt files, road systems from OpenStreet maps, building street networks and modelling streets and buildings using programatic rules. The facade wizard has managed to stump me at the moment but I probably just need to work through the tutorials to crack it.

I’ve not forgotten gaming in all of this 3D fun. Along with continuing writing on my little RPG I’m using CityEngine to model part of the city my game is set in. My ultimate aim is to be able to render pictures of parts of the city for use as hand outs in game.

I would post something but I hate my early experimentation putting anyone else off either Vue 9 or CityEngine.

I’ve been meaning to write some tutorials on writing Vue’s Python for awhile.  The obvious place to start would be with some basic stuff.  I will get to some of those eventually.  First though one is a short tutorial on Vue’s GetFirstHitObject.  I get more Emails about this than any other function.  Hopefully this will help solve some of those.

I’d love to know what you think of this tutorial.  Is there enough detail?  Would you like more examples?  Does it need an exercise to go with it?  Is it clear enough?  Is there anything else you’d like to know?

I’ve tweaked the display of the Vue links directory and the Google custom search of the site’s in the directory to hopefully make them easier to use.  I’ve also worked through all the python script and so they’re all displayed with a code highlighter.

It’s that day of the week again.  Here is my 8th updated Vue lighting rig which this week uses two lights shining horizontally on a figure.

Here is the now regular update for a Tuesday of one of my old Vue lighting rigs: tonight’s features Spotlights at 45 degrees from the Front and Back.

I’ve been tweaking my unofficial Vue News Blog.  There were a few of the new features available through Blogger I’d been thinking about adding for quite a while.  I’ve finally got round to switching to one of the new templates that can use them easily and rendered a custom background in Vue 8 for the page.