New NF barrack Concept (fun projects inspiration)

So after browsing the forum for awhile I decided to tackle the fun project of creating a new Northern Faction Barracks.

This is the concept drawing from the wiki


And this is the model I made


This is the inside of the barracks.


What I hope to accomplish is a shorter NF rax so BE players can't use height to there advantage when assaulting it, and just a compact the rax and make it look a lot more appealing to the eyes. This is just the rough model so I still have a long way to go before I would even submit it to the devs, but just wanted to get some feedback on what should be added.

Also I plan on making NF and BE shipyards, and battleships in the near future just as something to do, since I am beginning to like the Softimage Mod tool

Update: 1/18/13

 

Pretty decent effort, but I still think Chris' should become official.
It was a sexy rax.

 

i cant see the inside picture

nvm

 

Yea it needs a lot of work, I think after I'm done it should look similar to existing NF models. It would be great to redesign the NF vehicle factory too.

 

indeed for a first show this is pretty good.

 

texture diversity please, additionally i think the original concept looks more badass then your model and this is because your model just looks way too small to be practical

its probably around the size of a current nf rax, but i think you should still increase the size compared to the door

 

looks very round.

I like the art picture for 2 reasons: the shape is very oval. Also, the walls are very thing, like old military tin buildings.

The things I do not like about your model.

It's very round.
The doors and such are much thicker than I would think it would be. It looks weird.

on the other hand, the interior is about right. Barren with a couple of bunks. Conceptually you've got it down, but the shape and size just don't much up.

 

I've always wanted to live in a drainage tube.

Honestly the concept is pretty crap.

It LOOKS like a good schematic, but if you translate it to reality it's going to have problems. Ingame it would looks ridiculously simple and incredibly flat, because it's just a textured half-cylinder.

I would suggest you make one yourself, add interesting shapes to it.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1579090/imagehost/nf_modular_rax_render_1.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1579090/imagehost/nf_modular_rax_render_2.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1579090/imagehost/nf_modular_rax_render_3.jpg

That's the one I made, it has some simple ideas behind it.

As I am an entirely uncreative individual I always approach design from a functional standpoint, I start by thinking what the thing needs to do. In this case, it needs to house people from a wide variety of elements, and be quick and easy to produce and construct.

From that, we get the design, first of all it's a modular design, prefab boxes like this can be mass produced and connected together to create any 'building' you need, much as with the design of construction offices on building sites, which are usually converted from shipping containers or something similar.

So, that gives us the main square body, and the body gets all the features of a room, windows, doors etc. Some doors will be blocked off because they aren't connected to anything, and they use a standardised hatch cover style look for them, that gives us the extra detail on the back wall with the blocked doorway.

Next, the specific use for this building is a barracks, so it needs bunks, these are just slots on the wall in my case because there isn't a bunk prop handy for the NF, but they're in there, and given time/budget/better building rendering technology I would make some clutter props to put inside. The building also has those lightweight clip-on partitions connected to the walls, another feature of the modular design and there to provide some sense of enclosure for the sleepers.

Finally, the second mini-box is added as an entrance hall and 'airlock' of sorts, a buffer zone between the spawn and the outside, neccesary for gameplay reasons.

Once the general structure is finished, add the details, like the window slats to block sunlight but provide ambient scattering light, if source had a good lighting engine for this sort of thing I would probably make them adjustable for fun. Then add the door/stairs, these are based again off hatch technology, which is often used on submarines and ships, and also is often double purpose, with some hatches having ladder rungs on them for use when opened, or forming part of the floor/a ramp. Fits with the modular theme and is a good space saver.

Once you do all that, lift the whole thing off the floor on a quick concrete base and some metal feet, this prevents ground conditions from damaging the building proper, and is a feature of many portable shelters. And stick a camo net over the whole thing so it doesn't get bombed off the map.

The overall result is visible, save for a small amount of stylistic flair in the walls and things to add a bit of visual interest to flat area, the process is called greebling, and basically amounts to 'stick a bunch of techno-shit onto it to make it look cool. Very prominent in 70's-90's scifi films, and still fun to look at.

Overall, try thinking about what it is your object is supposed to do, and extrapolate from there, think 'Would I use this thing? If not, why not?'. Makes design very easy.

 

This one is nice but not enough to replace old NF barracks.

Chris' is awful. Looks like shit in the forest or worse. Chocolate you're making the same mistake: slapping old/inappropriate texture on a totally new model. Compare 2.0 walls and 2.1 walls, Empires really doesn't have to look like shit.

Why aren't you using parallax mapping? It makes no sense to me to replace with a model that doesn't use this technique.

 

you should be able to jump up on the roof from the sides

so less circular

 

Yeah I should have used all those new textures that are infinitely better than the textures everyone else uses, silly me.

 

well I appreciate the criticism, with Chris' model I do see some flaw though, even though you said you put thought into the real life practicality of the model, in game the shape of the barracks you made would hinder NF players, because form what I saw (could just be my perception) there was only one entrance. also there is a ridge in the doorway, which a player would have to jump over to get through depending on where players spawn could be exploited. When I model I usually think less about how it will be seen as realistic, and more of how can, or will a player exploit it or use it for cover, repair etc, especially in multiplayer games.

But i should use bump mapping

 

Untextured would be better.

 

There's a door on either side, in practice the fine specifics of the building are not that important, games will not come down to the NF not having quite as prominent a back door as BE, as long as people can get in and out of the building easily (i.e make sure there are two doors rather than one, and/or make them wide enough) and it's about the same size, it's balanced.

Same with height, it's not actually that important, you should make the NF rax the same size as the BE one, but it its height is hardly a problem.

Whether one building has a box or ledge to hide behind is simply such a small thing that it is close to meaningless in a game of 40+ people, 20 in tanks, on half-mile-square maps.

 

Mmmmmno, no it wouldn't, because you can't use an untextured building, you can use a poorly textured one, you can also retexture it quite easily, assuming of course you are inclined and capable of making textures.

Now if you would implement intelligent building support, with smaller models being spawnable inside the main model with their own fade distances and whatnot, allowing buildings to be constructed out of instanced parts instead of having to use one LOD for an object of that size, that would be quite helpful.

Also you realise you can quite easily untexture all the NF buildings if you really want to do that? Just replace all the material files with ones pointing to a blank grey texture.

 

I know I can do it but when you show model with crappy generic texture you hide all its flaws - no geometry, no distinct shape and so on. Not to mention awful lighting.

 

Which, given that's how it's going to look ingame, is the entire point.

I could render it with all stupid effects on it but why would I? It's not going to look like that ingame, the render was to save me having to use source's horrible model compiler to take an ingame screenshot. Generally I would prefer an accurate representation of what it's going to look like rather than putting effects on it to, as you put it 'hide all its flaws'. Certainly I shouldn't base my idea of whether a model is good on how many effects I turn on in mental ray, I model for the game, with game-like lighting and game textures, so that I can at least try to make it look good ingame.

Not that I really can without shadows, everything looks flat as shit without shadows.

 

I'm still not sure if you're getting it.
1. Your model is very generic. No one would remember it after 10 seconds. Looking at cube with doors (or 2 cubes) isn't exactly exciting.
2. You used texture set which worked for a different model with distinct shape and a bit of bumpmapping in right places.

If it's not going to get into the game then why texture it or even show it again? Chocolate abused existing textures to look nice with his design.

Lighting in Source isn't that trivial as you might have thought. (or suggested here if you know better). You can use bumpmapping, specularity map, environment map, detail map, modify model's lighting based on static lights around it and so on. If it doesn't look good in mentalray it certainly can't look good in the game.

BTW Chocolate this was BE concept drawing not NF.