Over at the boys and girls have been going nuts over a free 3D Model Design program that has been bought out by Google. What their doing is recreating the blocks with textures then virtual building! This way they can work out the number of casts they need but also how the blocks will fit together.

This is using Hirst Arts Molds/blocks in SketchUp.


More Hirst Arts SketchUp can be found and

Now you ask why would I want to be told about a third party product for a terrain system that isn't cardstock? Well after thinking about it we could use this program in our field. Just think of the city layouts you really want to do but don't know where to start. Build a 2.5D or 3D dungeon on screen to give you numbers of pieces.

Now how do we do this? You firstly need to grab a free version of SketchUp . Then run through the video and the Self-Paced Tutorials in order to grasp the concepts.

I can see this style of "building" a huge helping hand to any user. Hopefully it will catch on and we as a community can build a library worth of object reflecting WorldWorks sets.

I have just gotten the program and have had fun on the tuts so I haven't ahd time to really play with it. I think that if we build basic structures, structures reflecting the shape of folded cardstock (buildings, walls curved walls) but leave them untextured or basic textured, then have the end-user drop real textures inplace to give the desired results.

I really think that this is the sort of program that Matt's flash for PCON and SoM needed to evolve into... and now they can.

What do you guys think?


Lord Abaddon of Wormwood

Wow - COOL!

Yeah, I can definitely see how this could be incredibly useful for laying out WWG sets.

SketchUp is simply awesome... Trust me on this one... It takes all of the cumbersome elements of AutoCAD and VIZ and distills them into an astounding, user-friendly interface which combines the strongest visual elements of both. Some very high-end presentation work on all sorts of projects has been done in SketchUp, leaving my jaw on the floor, and critics with nothing to say... Forgive my Anime-glistening eyes for fawning over this software, but it has turned several of my conceptual builds into fully-rendered 3-D models which took half the time to produce, and shuttled studio projects along at full-speed when time was of the essence...
...Now why in the Hell I haven't used it to block out WW builds seems silly, but I'm just now getting to that point w/ the Mega-Build... We'll see what happens...

Ok boys before we run off to do our own individual projects I feel we should get some sort of library started - with the same sort of ratio happening.


I'm half way through the tut videos - it just keeps getting cooler and cooler.

Lord Abaddon of Wormwood

Ended up going with one square equals five feet. I just fooled around real quick with one of the Chunky Dungeons floor files, here's a picture of the completed project.



If more than one person is going to work on this we need to come up with some standards so that nothing clashes. For floor tiles should we have them be flat or have some height to them to simulate being mounted on foamboard?

Just did the BigWalls File real quick. I believe that's it for tonight, as it's 6:30 am and I have yet to sleep, though that is not unusual for me. Gotta love a messed up sleep schedule!

I say mount them on foamcore. This way it will help stack with some of the buildings in Mayhem and H-veil.

As for scale, well after combing the threads over at H-Arts it seems that they settled upon 1:48. Unless someone else had a better idea I think we should run with that.


Ideas?


Lord Abaddon of Wormwood

Monkey like the look. What process did you do to get teh pdf as a image file to paste the textures? (I really haven't had a chance to play it this yet)


Denny is it ok to post the textures like so (look above)? It's not going out of the whole "Don't post pure textures" rulings, is it?


Lord Abaddon of Wormwood

Eep, kinda forgot about that, I'll fix the files by disruping the textures a bit.

Anywho, the process. Open the file in photoshop, save as jpeg. Create your geometry then alt drag the jpeg from explorer into the face that you want textured. Modify texture as needed.

Edit: Fixed

Thanks I picked the pasting of the image but the whole conversion of the pdf to jpg was a tad missing in my brain.


Thanks .... now go to sleep.


Oh I wasn't picking on your textures I just thought we should ask the Shiny Headed God for his Blessings.

Lord Abaddon of Wormwood

Ok I did a little fiddling with this last night (god I'm slow to catch on), now I know the scale is not quite right and the layering of the texture could be done smarter and easier but....







Now I can't seen to get a link to the actual pictures so you will have to travel there.


Lord Abaddon of Wormwood

One cool feature of this is that you can set shadow according to time of day and when in the year. This give a great shadow drop. Now you as why is this important to the project? It isn't but its cool
another I have done, again I still haven't worked out the scaling correctly. What I'm doing is measuring the object in the pdf then muiltplying by 48 then dividing by 12 to bring it back to feet - sound correct?

Any way I think we should ask Topo from H-Arts, Mel Ebbles to give a brief tut on this. He seems to have mastered it fast and correctly.


Lord Abaddon of Wormwood

I just used the seemingly standard 1" = 5' (or in the case of CD 1.5" = 5'). The walls are fairly short by this logic, being 6 2/3' high

We really need to know that Denny & Co. used for each set - scale that is.
This way we can get a true standard.

Lord Abaddon of Wormwood

Ok got another one to show.


Andbut exploded.

The upper floor took forever! Ah well it was a learning experince. This is the reason I chose CWU over Mayhem - the different geometry on the roofs and towers, learning exp. I keep telling myself.


Lord Abaddon of Wormwood

The makings of a little village?


Did a simple version of the simple roof. I'm comming to release that I don't need to model exactly but in likeness.

I must say some of the measurements in CWU must have been eyeballed a tad - just plain weird measures... unless Denny was using metric.


End result it that I will scrap these in order for the right scale. I want to get to the HarbourMaster asap.

Lord Abaddon of Wormwood

Got to playing with sketchup today when I should have been working on my other projects, and I came up with this (The outflow pipe model from PCON for those who have yet to get it)...

This stuff is SO freakin' cool!

I can't wait to see what all's possible with this.