Deep Space Settlement is a 4X real-time strategy game focused on empire building and grand-scale space battle.
normal mpa magic
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Description
What you see is a body crafted to perfection, a pair of legs engineered... oh wait :P
What you see is a normal map generated from the high poly source and applied to the low poly game model of the cruiser core, rear end.
My main motivations to do this are
1) much more interesting surfaces and as a result speculars, as well as
2) edge highlights where otherwise would be hard polygon edges and finally
3) DO YOU SEE THE GREEBLES?
The quality of the assets just goes through the roof.
All of this is of course open to modders as well. I'll do my best to offer support and assistance, should it be needed.
Just a quick question for dssmathias I take it your the 3d modeling designer? If that is so then I wonder if you could share with us what sort of 3D design package you used to make something like this...
Nice detailing I have to say to.
As for the technical side, you should be able to do that using all the major 3d apps, probably even Blender(free).
I personally use The Foundry's Modo for all my asset creation. To bring the assets into DSS we currently use an exporter for 3DS Max however. The exporter will be released with the game and I can see it also being made available for other packages(like Blender), but I'll have to check this with Stephanie.
To create the normals maps, I'm using the de-facto industry standard xNormal(free).
This all may sound confusing at first, but it's a straight forward, sequential process, without much guessing involved.
As for the artistic side, the design side of things, that's of course an entire separate issue. I can talk about this for hours, if somebody wants me to :)
Thank you dssmathias you've covered more or less what I was curious to know about, I myself have a keen interest in 3d model design and was curious to know where I should start off, but if I could ask one more question of you, which would be of all the 3d packages you may of used in your experience which do you favor the easiest to use, from a rookie's point of view that is?
You're welcome. It really comes down to personal preference and you can't really say if somebody like a tool unless he/she has tried it for themselves. That said, Modo is very modern in it's approach and UI and many people find it relatively easy to get into. It's not without its quirks though.