Mercpedia UI

Here is a work in progress of the current UI:

Designing a 2d UI using 3d Art

Hey everyone, sorry about the long delay. I've been horribly busy. The good news is, I've been busy making art! I'm not going to add too much detail in this post, but I'll probably do another live stream soonish.

I'm currently working on an Android app for Mechwarrior Online. It will include a full encyclopedia, mech lab, and hyperpulse radio. Plus, if the dev's make an api, a lobby, community warfare map, and news feeds from the game.

When my friend and I sat down to begin making this app, I decided to build all the art in 3d and then use GIMP to apply shading so that it meshes with the UI of the game. The steps are as follows:

1) Create 3d image
2) Filter out background
3) Trim and resize to a factor of 2
4) Apply filter
5) Apply lines
6) ??
7) Profit!

Here is a gallery of what I've done so far:

Graphics Tablet Ahoy!

So I splurged and ordered a tablet from Monoprice. And before you start laughing at the prospect of an off brand tablet, consider this:

It's getting better reviews than Wacom Bamboo tablets and is less than $50 for a 10" x 6.25" tablet. This comes with a pen as well, though you'll want to spend $9 for the nicer version.

It also sports twice the resolution and a higher report rate than a bamboo tablet more than twice the price.

The tablet just arrived, and I'm rather impressed. Sadly, they didn't include the extra nubs I paid for, but that's only $1, so I'm not terribly upset. Plus the upgraded pen comes with a couple extra nubs anyway.

My first reaction is that it's way more comfortable than a mouse. Even plinking around on the desktop and inside applications. Part of this is the natural position I sit in when I place it on my lap. It also has a set of short cuts and hot buttons that are all programmable (for things like coy, paste, save, etc).

I'm currently setting up an art workstation that will be used only for doing designs and 3d work, as my current workstation has too many things around it to place this (rather large) tablet in a permanent spot.

While it's definitely going to take some getting use to, I'm already seen a comfortable improvement in gimp, and the amount of time I'll save in zbrush using the pressure sensitivity instead of manually adjusting brush and stroke strength is already pretty big.

The fact that it's super comfortable to scoot around the Mechwarrior Online interface is a great bonus.

If anyone is interested in giving the tablet a spin, you can purchase it from here:

Monoprice 6814 Graphics Tablet

Mechwarrior Online

Mechwarrior Online just hit open beta! It's completely free to play and has plenty of big-robot-smashing fun. Check it out at http://mwomercs.com/. For those of you curious about what it's like, imagine Mechwarrior 4 thrown into a blender with World of Tanks and League of Legends. This tutorial by the great guys at No Guts No Galaxy will help get you started:

Trooper Mk III

I was just gifted a Colt Trooper Mk III from a friend. These were made from the late 60's to the early 80's. This particular weapon was purchased in 1969. It's been a bit neglected, but only has superficial rust. It currently has a date with the ultrasonic cleaner, so that should pretty well clean off without any trouble. The next step would be to re-blue it to restore the finish where rust ate through.

Cleaning firearms always reminds me of spending weekends with my father. His place always smelled like Hoppes and filtered Camels. I usually spent a good portion of the weekend stripping and cleaning something that went bang. That was always part of the deal - "You shoot them, you clean them."

Getting up close and personal with something is a great way to visualize the 3d model. Building an atmosphere around them can help you give your models more character and life. Try spending a lot of time around the things you model and focus that energy into your work. You'll be surprised what you can do with a deeper understanding of the content.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

EDIT: Fixed the LiveStream link.

I've been a fan of them for as long as I can remember, going back to the cartoon in the 80's. The newly released show inspired me to do a little extra 3d work to practice Sculptris a bit. Most of the process has been recorded and saved on my LiveStream channel.

I'm pretty close to being finished:

I still need to add a belt. I'll be putting it up on shapeways in a 1", 2" 4", and 6" version. I'm pretty pleased with the overall result. I think a number of things could be better, but that's why it's called practice :).

3D Tool Shakeup

In the past, my program of choice for 3d modeling has been sketchUp. I have oodles of plugins for it and find it extremely fast at creating hard surface models. However, Google recently sold sketchUp to a company called Trimble. Their latest update seems to have seriously broken the scaling tool. Because SketchUp does not work well with very small dimensions (less than 6"), I've produced my models as a factor of 10 or 100 times the desired size. Once the model was completed, I used the scaling tool to reduce it down.

As of the latest patch, SketchUp crashes immediately when I scale below 6", or when I explode components  in less than 1'. Basically, it's now incapable of producing small components. While irritating, this did lead me to discover a couple of useful tools.

Netfabb Studio Basic - This is a free program that accepts Collada (.dae) files from SketchUp, scans them for problems, resizes, and exports to .stl format. It even has a basic mesh fixing algorithm that can fix simple problems with your mesh.

This is also great if you want to make an injection mold for your models instead of 3d printing. The interface is minimal and easy to learn, with only a few options that are pertinent to the design pipeline.

Sculptris - Another free program from Pixelogic, the makers of zBrush. This is an amazing tool for producing organic models very rapidly. It is slightly more difficult than SketchUp, but leagues easier than Maya or Blender for making organic models. Though there is a slight learning curve, there also are piles of tutorials for making just about any kind of model you want. Sculptris exports to .obj, so it can be loaded into Netfabb, correctly sized, and (if necessary) exported as a .stl file.

Another great benefit of Sculptris is that you create models in the same way you would clay or putty, so a lot of the same techniques can be used. The downside is that it has very few undo steps, so it's possible to destroy a model on accident.You'll want to make alternate saves at regular intervals to avoid this. Once I get the hang of Sculptris, I'll do some blog updates with tutorials, renders, etc etc.

Happy modeling!