This is a pic of some dragon eggs.
I started with an ellipse added a metal texture to it, then rendered it, cloned it twice and rotated them individually. simple enough.

what I learned to day;
then I added an environment. a screen shot I had from a game and placed them on to the map. (I know, it looks like they are floating)

ok, I followed max's tutorial for the cave mesh and the mesh is a bit different for 3ds 7 but with some trial and error I was able to make something out of it. the tut. that max did left off at aplying textures/materials to the mesh but there was some good info on another tut. that he did.

So here is a single texture cave mesh. (the lights and camera were not saved in this pic)

I am trying to learn nurbs and stumbled across AEC objects. and that 3ds max can make a few million trees, here is a small set, a wall, and fence all aec objects. (premade objects)

The AEC objects are a nice starting point, but I'd strongly suggest looking into something like SpeedTree to get really good results. (At the very least, retexture the AEC trees because the default colours are awful close up.)

I just have not gotten around to check out speed tree in full yet it looks like it has to go with autodesk (or whatever the name is) so there is 2 programs that I have to get

I don't even know what AudioDesk is. SpeedTree comes in the form of a standalone program and accompanying plugin. It can be awkward to get hold of for some versions of 3dsmax though. I'm also recovering from how much it's been put to shame by Bryce, anyway.

ok with some guidance from windwalker I was able to do some rudimentary uvw maping here is an example of with and without (the one that looks better is with uvw maping)

now if I could add some ramparts I would be all set

ramparts/battlements haza! and some funky 3d vertex paint, it is not good but I did not even think that you could paint in 3d.
with 6 cap segments and selecting 3 polygons and leaving out the fourth then repeat as nessesary then set the face extrude to 8

ok, learned' may be a stretching it a bit' but what I did today was working with edit poly modifiers and came up with this following the tut. in 3dsmax. I did not want to 'wow' you guys too much but it was also animated

Here is a bishop, using a boolene subtract A-B I made a slice out of the top of the 'head piece' not a very monumental looking thing but it will come in very handy later

just messing around with bevels on a sphere.

I tried my hand at lighting today, it is not going well I guess I'll have to read some more
but here is a stair case with 2 omni lights colored in a red with small diameters. and one spotlight.

why is it when I never add a light it always comes out worse than with no light?

Don't know how to do this in MAX, but try to set an ambient value to your surfaces or to the scene overall. I normally use plain white set to about 15%, but of course there is plenty of room for experiments

yeah I can do that thanks! I did not even think of that. where do you put it tho and what kind of light?

Ambient light on your surfaces will work nicely in outdoor areas (and you basically always have to do this with SpeedTree), but doesn't do so well on indoor scenes, where you need to light only the interior of a hollow object. Experiment with attenuated lighting, since that tends to give more realistic results, and doesn't affect the whole scene.
And if you're using shadows, they're basically always going to look awful until you make them transparent and give them soft edges-- by default, all shadows in any version of 3dsmax seem to be totally black and overly distinct.

I still do not have speed tree as you can tell
yeah I have been playing around with them a bit. a little something I have been working on. shadows have been purposfully shortened to give the impression that it is closer to the equator.

Big thanks goes out to max tbg for the tutorials (well all of them) in 3d to day I learned the FFD modifier which makes ajusting shapes (standard primitives) much easier.
sorry no pic for that lesson.

well it has been a long time since I have done anything public thought I might share some gold goblets that could be found in a treasure room or something. shrink them down and put them somewhere in bg.

today I tried to mimic a BG texture of a dome in the docks distric. the color is off but I think the overall look is pretty good. I made my own texture; 300x300 yellow w/ green smatterings, added 4 circles. made sure that it would be tilable then saved. psp has a feature that you can use your current image as a texture so I used that @ 50% painted over the whole thing and added a grey textured top . opened up max, created a cirlcle, made it a hemisphere .5, droped my texture on it, used the same texture as a bump map. changed the uv cordnates and bam that is it.

well it has been almost a year w/o and update now I am not sure how much I have learned in that time more that this pic will sho and too much to tell in one post. but this is what you can do in a couple of hrs.

but in this image I have used a new shader on the crystel ball.

Yeah, that looks good to me. Obviously you have studied a lot of tutorials to come up with something like this. BTW, if you ´ll have some questions about creating BG2 area art, just ask, if I can, I will answer...

thanks means alot coming from you.

I think I have a good grasp on the modeling tho the 1000+ textures never seem to be what I want, so I end up making my own again.

this is just something small a side trip from the work I am really supposed to be doing it is an unfinished work I might someday add driping candle wax, ingredients for potions, dust and probably more books and other little things.

At first I liked the globe but now it did not turn out as I liked. so I have a new one using raytrace. added a a floor, fixed the book mark ribbon, and fixed the shadow from the candle.

Looks much better now, but still, the shadow edges are too sharp to be produced by candlelight, so if you used raytraced shadows, use area shadows instead... A little detail that matters....

And far attenuation is very big, set it lower. Candlelight shouldn´t be producing so much light to scene....

Above all, it looks very nice...

yeah if I continue it Ill definatly change the lighting. I used raytrace since there are fewer options just to make decient shadows. I'll check out how areas shadows fall thanks for that tip.

I am just using 2 omni lights one both w/o any attenuation restrictions (at the monent) one is the candle the other is just a ambient light.

I guess that candle using an onmi is ok but what would you use for the heh 'ambient' light

Ty not to use "ambient" light at all. Just the omni "candle" light, with correct parameters, it will be enought. With camera set right your scene will looks much more realistic... Try and see...

Small tip: rendering scene with area shadows will take more time than with raytraced shadows, so be aware...

another long time since posting.
try this one more time
Fun with partials:

Yey, cool animation, and right on time as always, SK
I just got a request (more like a question), if it would be possible to make a movie for a mod, something like the one in the game, on entering Beregost - with characters. I know I've seen a tut somewhere long time ago about adding movies, probably outdated now. I wonder if it is possible to compress .mov files (I think the game uses .mov) when adding to a mod.

ToD Tower of Deception adds the only movie that I am aware of to any mod and it was made by valiant, so he should the talking for that one.

another low texture animation just to see if I could get the particles to work right

kind of like the movie 300 but real low quality

http://www.blackwyrmlair.net/~sk/ArrowPflow01.zip

Man, this is so cool !!! I am green with envy

It was pretty hard work to make that movie for TOD. It has began as a static scene rendering, but then I decided to move camera around the whole scene. After that I have rendered it as .avi file, extracted some music from original BG movies (yes, recording "what you hear"), composed in that stupid Movie Maker (shipped with all MS Win XP) and finally compressed via AVI2MVE cmd program... Btw, that program is not working, if the original movie doesn´t contain the music. You´ll get some errors.

You mean it HAS to have audio?
Do you remember the size limit for the game? And maybe frames per sec limit too?

Correct



I´m not sure right now, but there´s also a program called MVE2AVI. Just try to convert one of the original movies to .avi format, and you´ll be able to extract file infos... That´s how I did it.