Posts Tagged ‘EcoSystem’

I’m slowly working through old blog posts creating pages for scripts and other bits and stuff that deserve to have more permanant pages so that they can easily be found. Tonight I’ve added one for the EcoSystem Vertical Scatter Script I wrote a couple of years ago.

I’ve checked EcoSystem to CSV / CSV to EcoSystem in Vue 7 Infinite and its working. As with the other scripts once I’ve tested them all I’ll update the impworks web pages.

I was doing some tidying up and sorting out over the weekend when I came across the files of notes from my old gaming campaigns I ran at University. Leafing through them was a bad idea as I found the Ravenloft campaigns I ran for several years as introductory games for freshers. Some would say Ravenloft wasn’t the best setting for new role players to start with but I always found it worked. Its low magic level and focus on humans rather than a polyglot of fantasy races made it easier to get new players of AD&D 2nd Ed started without a lot of the clutter and confusion. Best of all though it was easy to tell them what the world was like: think of a Hammer Horror film.

Anyway back then access to computers for frivolous, none academic work, was difficult to get so pretty much everything except the odd hand out is hand written. All of my maps and diagrams are hand drawn on tracing paper with ink mostly with my Rotering 0.2mm pen which was my favourite for design work because I didn’t tend to end up having a sheet covered in nasty ink marks.

I came across my reworking of the Ravenloft world and for no good reason started redrawing it on the computer. I’ve no really good reason for doing this other than finally I can have the whole map visible at once and I can see how some of the bit it was hard to draw or change by hand go together. My swapping round of some of the domains not for thematic reasons but to put similar ecosystems and climates together. Replacing the shadow rift. Increasing most of the areas by a factor of ten, although keeping some domains almost at their original size. Bringing more of the domains in to the core to add new regions and make the sustainability of the whole world more believable. Anyway two evenings and most of Sunday later I’m pleased to say the old hand drawn version seems to have held up to the passage of time.

The down side is I didn’t write the lighting tutorial I ment to or work on any fiction and since I don’t expect to run a game any time soon its pretty much lost time… like when you take a 10 minute shower and when you get out an hour has past.

This week’s Vue Lighting Rig is less of a rig and more of a way of achieving a Christmas light effect. Looking at the Christmas lights in Liverpool I noticed several invisible Christmas trees. I’m sure these are popping up all over the country. You see lights in the shape of a tree but no tree. I’ve made four EcoSystem materials that create a similar effect when applied to a cone. One each in red, green and blue with a three colour one too. I’ve tested them with Vue 6 Infinite.

Download the zipped Christmas Tree EcoSystem for Vue (92KB Zip File).

LMcLean was looking for a way to vertically scatter instances in a Vue EcoSystem. I realised I could easily adapt the Vue EcoRotate Python Script I wrote a few weeks ago to do it. Here is a quick Vue python script to do this with a simple interface…

Download: Vue EcoSystem Vertical Scatter Script (3KB)

There was a question on Cornucopia 3D’s vue python forum about setting all the objects / instances in an EcoSystem to point in a direction possibly with a bit of variation. So here is a quick python script for vue to do just that…

Download: EcoRotate (3KB)

Another picture made using Vue 6.5 playing with the new cloud lighting features. Here a single red quadratic spotlight points at the cloud from behind the hill. The hill has the Hollywood Jungle EcoSystem applied.

Last weeks picture I made for WW was made entirely in Vue. I started with Vue’s default settings.

I began by creating a terrain object.

In the terrain editor clicked on the erode button till the default mountain became a smoother hill shape. I resized the terrain to fit the picture I had in mind and angled the virtual camera up to set up the frame I was thinking of having in the final picture.

Next I created a tree object using the Summer Cherry Tree plant type. I positioned it roughly over the top of the hill where I wanted it to be and then used the drop button to put it on top of the hill. I tried dropping it several times till it landed where it looked best.

I used an EcoSystem to put the rest of the plants onto the hill. It’s a mixture of the patch of grass and fern that come with Vue along with the weed patch from Linda’s lush underbrush set from Cornucopia 3D.

I switched to the atmosphere Bruno kindly gave me a while ago. Then I fiddled with the camera a bit more and rendered the final picture.

I made the sidebars for the revamp of impworks in a similar way and used different atmospheres to create the different pictures I’ll be rotating on the side bar that featured in my Thursday Thirteen last week.

I’ve just made a few little code changes to my EcoSystem to Object script that should speed it up. I’ve not updated the page yet (I’ll do that tomorrow) but I’ve uploaded the new version of the zip file.

This version will only work with Vue 6 so I’ve left the old version of the script for Vue 5 Infinite in the zip file.

An updated and edited version of my earlier blog post on making a Bifurcated Lava flow in Vue is now available on the impworks web site as
Creating a Bifurcated Lava Flow in Vue Infinite.

While making an image to go with this I’ve been playing with some of the new tools in Vue 6 Infinite and I’ll do an update on the tutorial sometime showing how to make use of these features. The image would be at the top of this post but I got a bit carried away with the size of the ecosystems and it looks like the render will take most of the night to finish. So I’m off to bed and I’ll post it tomorrow.

Edit: The picture is now finished and can be seen in my next post – Vue Eruption