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Started by jesta030, January 22, 2017, 12:03:50 AM

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jesta030



So this is my First shot at modding and I have a couples questions:

The toolbar Icon is empty, any ideas why?

Whats a decent amount of verts/polys for a simple house?

Can I assign different Materials and textures in blender or is the Single image at 1024x1024 the only way to Texture the House? Can I use a bigger image (eg. 2048x2048)?

Tom Sawyer

Hi Jesta! What a nice farmhouse. Looks like original from northern Germany.^^

The vanilla houses have round about 1 - 1.5 k vertices on 4 x 4 game tiles. My cottages have 2 - 3 k and I could not notice a relevant influence on the game performance in my tests. Trees and crops make much more problems. A texture with 1024 should be enough for a normal building but you can use 2048 too. It can make sense to combine textures of more buildings or variants in one file. I think it is also possible to assign more than one material but I don't use it. Try to keep the textures small. They increase your mod size a lot and are using memory in game. I use 128 pix per game tile for good detail and efficient file size.

The toolbar icon needs a correct link from the template to the sprite sheet.

RedKetchup

personally, i prefer to assign different material to different pieces instead of mapping to 1 big file. yes for a model, it makes more bytes than one 1024 but it gives a  better resolution per texture. and if happends to reuse the same textures for many parts, and for many models, you in fact save space overall because you are reusing many times the same textures
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jesta030

Quote from: Tom Sawyer on January 22, 2017, 01:32:22 AM
Looks like original from northern Germany.

Good eye. Its the house I grew up in from north east germany. If i get the hang of this thing i'm loking into making a whole range of thatched roof houses.

Quote from: Tom Sawyer on January 22, 2017, 01:32:22 AMThe vanilla houses have round about 1 - 1.5 k vertices on 4 x 4 game tiles. My cottages have 2 - 3 k and I could not notice a relevant influence on the game performance in my tests.

Good Lord! Break out the beveling tools, we're going full ham on this bad boy. The model i'm using has 107 verts, 109 faces.

Quote from: Tom Sawyer on January 22, 2017, 01:32:22 AM
The toolbar icon needs a correct link from the template to the sprite sheet.

Yeah the guide by discrepancy i used was a bit vague on what to do with the icon. guess i'll have to figure it out. had some errors building but just ignored them as it was late at night. maybe i'll look into them some more and it'll fix the toolbar icon issue.

Quote from: RedKetchup on January 22, 2017, 02:06:15 AM
personally, i prefer to assign different material to different pieces instead of mapping to 1 big file. yes for a model, it makes more bytes than one 1024 but it gives a  better resolution per texture. and if happends to reuse the same textures for many parts, and for many models, you in fact save space overall because you are reusing many times the same textures

and how would i go about doing this? how does banished know which textures are linked to what part of the mesh? any tutorials out there?
i guess i could use a couple 128x128 or 256x256 textures to get more detail while keeping the size down.

Thanks for the tips guys, much appreciated!

RedKetchup

each texture need his .rsc and Texture.rsc like you do for your big 1024x1024.

how you apply it to your model i dont know, i dont use blender (i use 3dsMax)
but some do
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kid1293


Hi and welcome!
In Blender you first create a new material slot with the 'plus-sign'(1)
name it and assign texture to it.
In edit mode you select your faces and click on the material slot
you want to use and 'Assign' (2)
Then you unwrap as usual having only the faces you want selected.


You must write a set of files for each texture you use. (as RedKetchup wrote)


Tom Sawyer

A range of houses in this original style would be nice. As far as I know we don't have it in Banished.

The vert count of about 100 I can't believe. At least I guess you will increase it fast when continue with creating models.^^

And hard to say what concept is more efficient. With a single texture the efficiency comes by overlay in the uv map to use the same part for several faces. And when making an individual look or weathering effects at walls and so on, you come in trouble with shared files. Probably both have their advantages. I made a little making of too. Maybe there are some interesting points but I think Discrepancy's Blender guide is more useful for modders.

To help with your toolbar icon issue it would be better to see the code. And of course the vanilla resource files in the modkit are a good reference to check how it works.

jesta030

thanks for all the replies. my plan is to make models for a 3x4, 4x6 and 5x8 house. they will probably end up looking like this:

3x4: https://farm4.static.flickr.com/3828/9589382171_b77a0cf0e8_b.jpg
4x6: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/02/Bilderh%C3%BCtte_K%C3%BChlenhagen.jpg
5x8: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/Hof_der_Heidmark.jpg/1920px-Hof_der_Heidmark.jpg

the first house is my goal right now.

if i keep at it, here's my plan:

the latter two will be split into two halves that can be combined (like the colonial houses or the small town row houses) offering a choice between housing, storage and maybe functioning as an animal pen yielding meat/eggs since those houses traditionally were half living quarters and half stables/storage.

they might require clay and reeds to be built.


two more questions:
1. can i use the cycles engine in blender?
2. i read discrepancy's tutorial on blender and banished (http://worldofbanished.com/index.php?topic=1216.0) and it uses full cubes as beams where only 1 or 2 of the outside faces would be visible. isnt that adding extra vertices and faces that add unnecessary complexity and load?

thanks again!

kid1293

As for your houses - they will fit perfectly!
I wish I had thought of combining living quarters and workplace.
It's an organic way of building towns.

question 1 - I never used the cycles engine, but as long as the result is a fbx-file
I don't think it matters. (Looks interesting)
question 2 - Yes, there can be a lot of hidden faces. But one way to reduce them
is to do the tedious work of removing the bottom and 'stick your head in' and remove
faces and edges by hand. But you only get a few that way.
I don't know of any tool to automate it. Maybe Blender forum has hints?

jesta030

Quote from: kid1293 on January 31, 2017, 02:49:07 PM
But one way to reduce them is to do the tedious work of removing the bottom and 'stick your head in' and remove faces and edges by hand. But you only get a few that way.

well im obsessed with cleaning my models so, i'll stick my head in. no extra vertices, faces with an area of 0 or the likes... :) thanks for your answers!

RedKetchup

taking out the extra unused vertices is important and can still gain a not negligible amound of polygons
but you also need to take care with that, the shadow engine of the game is also counting on it.

shadows arent always casted by the outside face but often by inside faces too
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jesta030

another question: does smooth shading carry over to banished and is it recommended?

kid1293

Smooth shading works and can be used to soften sharp edges on roofs/beams/whatever
You don't have to use an excess of triangles to make smooth dome on a house...

jesta030

Quote from: kid1293 on February 01, 2017, 02:28:06 AM
Smooth shading works

This just keeps getting better. Dont think I'll sleep tonight, I#d much rather model and paint.

RedKetchup

Quote from: jesta030 on February 01, 2017, 08:11:01 AM
Quote from: kid1293 on February 01, 2017, 02:28:06 AM
Smooth shading works

This just keeps getting better. Dont think I'll sleep tonight, I#d much rather model and paint.

haha i know how you feel ^^
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