Maverick (Overview)
From Sketch To Flight
The Ships
Offline Help
See For Yourself...
Re-Texturing
|
Unlike 2D graphics, Maverick has demanded a complete jump into the world of 3D graphics and when it comes to 3D work, there's nothing better than 3D Studio. But how does this help and how do we get from simple design to finished product?
|
Step 1 - The Design
Sketching out the designs for Maverick took an extremely long time. With the number of ships required and the need to develop a completely new universe, the ships needed to have a common style but at the same time have a unique look. The original sketches were no bigger than postage stamps and while they may have evolved, they can be seen in the finished ships.
|
|
Step 2 - Model It!
Getting the design into the machine isn't easy - how do you convert your design into a set of 3D objects? We use the most excellent 3D Studio for our actual object modelling and it's really the only option available. Ok it's not perfect but once your model exists, you can manipulate it later on... Want to see what a mesh looks like? Well why not See For Yourself...
|
|
Step 3 - From Model To Ship
3D Studio is great but it's not going to output ships in the format we need. It's at this point that coding comes into the picture. Taking some code that was originally developed way back in 1995 (under Delphi v1) we created our own design tool - iPro 3D. Fundamentally a 3D design app, it used points, lines, and faces and worked well enough but was far too limited to handle the modelling aspects of the job. With a little bit of thought, investigation and copious amounts of luck, the 3DS ASC file format was cracked by us and iPro 3D now had the ability to get the data back from 3D Studio. Through tweaking, stretching, and playing around with the data, our models can be orientated as we want them, textures applied as we need them, and data such as collision spheres, exhaust spheres, and launch and shot vectors added. Huh?
|
|
Step 4 - Off The Drawing Board
The model has now been tweaked with iPro 3D and it's just a case of exporting the data into our preferred (and app specific) format, and straight into Maverick it goes. Yes the process described above is a very simplified account of what takes place but if you want the total control that we have, you're going to have to develop your own custom tools for the job
|
Are we releasing the code? No way! It's not copyrighted or anything and while we're proud of it (hey it's taken an age to develop) it's such a complex process that only Neil understands it intimately and creating help files and supporting it would take far too much time up.
So why are we going through all this? Is it just to fill another web page? Well partly but if you're developing your own 3D apps, maybe this might give you some ideas about what's involved, and it does describe the process of how we create ships for Maverick.
So look at the ships, play the game, and try to remember that a lot of work goes into every aspect of it.
| |
