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Plan for Robert Brower
Plan for Robert Brower
| Name: | Robert Brower | |
|---|---|---|
| Date Posted: | Mar 05, 2005 | |
| Rating: |  5.0 out of 5 | |
| Public: | YES | |
| Comments: | YES | |
| RSS Feed: |  or Subscribe with  . | |
| Profile Page: | View profile page for Robert Brower |
Blog post
Got to see a man about a Horse!
A couple of years ago, as I was skimming through the forums, I noticed a general desire by the community for walking vehicles in Torque. I also got a lot of feedback from people who had purchased the Environment Pack Pro. They were hungry for more animals for torque. I considered a few different angles and decided that creating a Horse vehicle class was the best thing I could do. I created a horse model, and animated it the best I could. I also created a saddle. Then I bagan working in the C++ to create a new vehicle class which I called Horse.
Now, I can pump out meshes but I'm not much of a painter. I contacted a friend at ExileWorks (http://www.exileworks.com/) and told him what I was working on. He expressed a need for some code that I offered to write and we were able to work together on cleaning up my mesh and exporting it and all my animations. He went far beyond my expectations and provided me with a few different textures for the horse. Thanks Peter!
I tossed around the idea of making a horse game, but then I realized that without a team, this would be impossible given I had a fulltime job and just the horse alone was eating up a lot of my time. So in the end I decided that releasing the horse as a content pack was the kind of acheivement I was looking for. I showed my horse pack demo to some more friends at Bravetree and they gave me great feedback. I had some problems. My animations were not good enough. Also, as someone in the forums pointed out, the shape of my saddle was horrible. Thank you for the criticism, comments, and your valuable time Joe!
By this time, I had the engine class finished, and all the script written. I could ride my horse around in my demo and even jump over fences and haystacks to score points. When I found myself spending too much time having fun riding the horses and not enough time working on finishing my pack I knew I had something good!
People began to ask me about the horse pack so I established an early adopter program for people who wanted to get a jump on things and start working with horses right away. The feedback was fantastic. I want to thank all of the early adopters! Good luck with your games. And please don't forget to brush your horses before saddling them up.
I wanted to make some changes to the textures and provide more kinds of horses so I asked my friend Eric Elwell if he would be interested in touching up the textures that Peter had created and he agreed. Eric has serious painting telent. I knew this the first time I layed eyes on a submarine model that he had painted for me. We intend to release the submarine class, model, and art as a pack in the future. It's very cool. It has a mechanical arm that the player can control and use to pick up and drop objects in game, a working periscope that can be used to spy on surface ships, and a torpedo launcher. There is also an abundance of animated and static sea life models and art.
I contacted Danny Ngan who I had heard was a very talented animator and sent him a demo of my horse and all the jumping obstacles. He liked it very much and agreed to join me in working on the pack. Both Danny and I are very busy people so it took us a while to get the animations done, but when I saw what he had done, I nearly teared up. His animations are beautiful.
One more problem existed. The saddle I made looked like a well painted log. So again I went off to try to work some deals. Around this time, Mat Mitman showed me a mountable monster he had been working on. I agreed to help him get it into a Torque demo and he stepped up to the plate and created a wonderful saddle for the horses. Then I contacted my friend at ExileWorks again who was in need of code, and Peter made some changes to the saddle to make it work better with the Horse, and painted it.
I have been fiddling with the AIHorses in the Horse Pack Demo, and creating a pleasant mission that I can present that includes fences and haystacks and the ability to jump over these obstacles and score points. Danny is working on the last of the animations. The Textures are complete, and the saddle looks and works beautifully. Danny and I agreed that we will be supporting both Maya and Max for the Horse Pack. Soon all of our hard work will come to fruition. Here's a few screenshots of the Horse Pack! Enjoy!
Some technical jargon:
Number of polygons is slightly less than 1000. In addition to the head and neck working with steering, the horse has three different speeds of animation that blend together based on speed. They are walk, trot, and gallop. It also has a root and rearing-up animation. The saddle is approx 400 polygons. There is a Horse and AIHorse C++ class, a horse script, an AIHorse script to get them running around in missions and seven different textures for the horses. The textures come in two formats, with or without the leather and saddle blanket. The pack may contain the obstacle script, fence and haystack models.
I want to give a special thanks to Craig and Nauris, my De-Railed teammates, for being patient with me and supporting my efforts to finish this pack! Thank you men!
Robert
Now, I can pump out meshes but I'm not much of a painter. I contacted a friend at ExileWorks (http://www.exileworks.com/) and told him what I was working on. He expressed a need for some code that I offered to write and we were able to work together on cleaning up my mesh and exporting it and all my animations. He went far beyond my expectations and provided me with a few different textures for the horse. Thanks Peter!
I tossed around the idea of making a horse game, but then I realized that without a team, this would be impossible given I had a fulltime job and just the horse alone was eating up a lot of my time. So in the end I decided that releasing the horse as a content pack was the kind of acheivement I was looking for. I showed my horse pack demo to some more friends at Bravetree and they gave me great feedback. I had some problems. My animations were not good enough. Also, as someone in the forums pointed out, the shape of my saddle was horrible. Thank you for the criticism, comments, and your valuable time Joe!
By this time, I had the engine class finished, and all the script written. I could ride my horse around in my demo and even jump over fences and haystacks to score points. When I found myself spending too much time having fun riding the horses and not enough time working on finishing my pack I knew I had something good!
People began to ask me about the horse pack so I established an early adopter program for people who wanted to get a jump on things and start working with horses right away. The feedback was fantastic. I want to thank all of the early adopters! Good luck with your games. And please don't forget to brush your horses before saddling them up.
I wanted to make some changes to the textures and provide more kinds of horses so I asked my friend Eric Elwell if he would be interested in touching up the textures that Peter had created and he agreed. Eric has serious painting telent. I knew this the first time I layed eyes on a submarine model that he had painted for me. We intend to release the submarine class, model, and art as a pack in the future. It's very cool. It has a mechanical arm that the player can control and use to pick up and drop objects in game, a working periscope that can be used to spy on surface ships, and a torpedo launcher. There is also an abundance of animated and static sea life models and art.
I contacted Danny Ngan who I had heard was a very talented animator and sent him a demo of my horse and all the jumping obstacles. He liked it very much and agreed to join me in working on the pack. Both Danny and I are very busy people so it took us a while to get the animations done, but when I saw what he had done, I nearly teared up. His animations are beautiful.
One more problem existed. The saddle I made looked like a well painted log. So again I went off to try to work some deals. Around this time, Mat Mitman showed me a mountable monster he had been working on. I agreed to help him get it into a Torque demo and he stepped up to the plate and created a wonderful saddle for the horses. Then I contacted my friend at ExileWorks again who was in need of code, and Peter made some changes to the saddle to make it work better with the Horse, and painted it.
I have been fiddling with the AIHorses in the Horse Pack Demo, and creating a pleasant mission that I can present that includes fences and haystacks and the ability to jump over these obstacles and score points. Danny is working on the last of the animations. The Textures are complete, and the saddle looks and works beautifully. Danny and I agreed that we will be supporting both Maya and Max for the Horse Pack. Soon all of our hard work will come to fruition. Here's a few screenshots of the Horse Pack! Enjoy!
Some technical jargon:
Number of polygons is slightly less than 1000. In addition to the head and neck working with steering, the horse has three different speeds of animation that blend together based on speed. They are walk, trot, and gallop. It also has a root and rearing-up animation. The saddle is approx 400 polygons. There is a Horse and AIHorse C++ class, a horse script, an AIHorse script to get them running around in missions and seven different textures for the horses. The textures come in two formats, with or without the leather and saddle blanket. The pack may contain the obstacle script, fence and haystack models.
I want to give a special thanks to Craig and Nauris, my De-Railed teammates, for being patient with me and supporting my efforts to finish this pack! Thank you men!
Robert
Recent Blog Posts
| List: | 11/20/07 - Arctic Antics 03/05/05 - Plan for Robert Brower |
|---|
Submit your own resources!| Chris "DiGi" Timberlake (Mar 05, 2005 at 20:37 GMT) |
| Jeremy Alessi (Mar 05, 2005 at 20:45 GMT) |
| Stefan Lundmark (Mar 05, 2005 at 20:52 GMT) Resource Rating: 5 |
Keep us updated please.
| Harold "LabRat" Brown (Mar 05, 2005 at 21:00 GMT) |
| Dan MacDonald (Mar 05, 2005 at 21:21 GMT) |
| Josh Williams (Mar 05, 2005 at 21:55 GMT) |
| Johnny Hill (Mar 05, 2005 at 22:34 GMT) |
Edited on Mar 06, 2005 22:52 GMT
| Anthony Rosenbaum (Mar 06, 2005 at 00:26 GMT) |
| Josiah Wang (Mar 06, 2005 at 01:10 GMT) |
| Brian Wells (Mar 06, 2005 at 01:30 GMT) |
| Teck Lee Tan (Mar 06, 2005 at 01:40 GMT) |
| Rex (Mar 06, 2005 at 01:54 GMT) |
| Robert Brower (Mar 06, 2005 at 17:57 GMT) |
http://www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=6222
and i would make them follow the horses like in this resource:
http://www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=6673
and for turrets I'd probably look at this content pack:
http://www.garagegames.com/products/53
Thanks for the encouragement everyone!
Robert
| Clint S. Brewer (Mar 06, 2005 at 18:23 GMT) |
for extra credit add flying support...I want my pegasus!
@Brian Wells
this quote makes it sound like yes "Mat Mitman showed me a mountable monster he had been working on. I agreed to help him get it into a Torque demo and he stepped up to the plate and created a wonderful saddle for the horses."
| Robert Brower (Mar 06, 2005 at 18:39 GMT) |
Robert
| Clint S. Brewer (Mar 06, 2005 at 19:25 GMT) |
http://www.tmpgenc.net/e_main.html
does a good job compressing those 50 meg movies down to 2 meg mpgs
| Jeff Gran (Mar 06, 2005 at 20:02 GMT) |
One crit on the horse model: The tail is lifted up at the base instead of falling straight down... horses only do this when they need to relieve themselves (to keep their pretty tails clean ;) ). Other than that it looks great, though!
Jeff
| Danny Ngan (Mar 07, 2005 at 08:20 GMT) Resource Rating: 5 |
Structurally, the source 3D files aren't very complicated at all. Anyone who has read through the DTS docs and done a couple of basic characters will be able to understand the scene setup very quickly. In fact, the scene is a pretty standard DTS shape setup. The only additions are a couple of custom controls that I used to simplify the animation process (i.e. bypass some Character Studio oddities as they relate to Torque).
Until Robert gets some in-game samples posted, here are some renders of a few of the horse's animations:
Horse Pack Animation Preview
| Billy L (Mar 07, 2005 at 13:44 GMT) Resource Rating: 5 |
I been waiting for this a long time !
| Johnny Hill (Mar 08, 2005 at 22:55 GMT) |
From a Technical standpoint would be easier to adapt the horse pack down to a 2-legged mount. What comes to my mind is a ostrich mount like chocobos or lizard mounts that run like tauntauns.
Horses are the best tho!! but the tech you created opens up a lot of fun ideas :))
3D Joust-like game :))
| David Montgomery-Blake (Mar 11, 2005 at 21:59 GMT) Resource Rating: 5 |
| Jaimi McEntire (Mar 13, 2005 at 00:26 GMT) Resource Rating: 5 |
| Robert Brower (Mar 18, 2005 at 17:04 GMT) |
| Jaimi McEntire (May 06, 2005 at 00:48 GMT) Resource Rating: 5 |
| Robert Brower (Jul 05, 2005 at 01:11 GMT) |
Cheers,
Robert
| Rex (Jul 08, 2005 at 14:01 GMT) |
| Jaimi McEntire (Aug 02, 2005 at 01:51 GMT) Resource Rating: 5 |
| Vashner (Aug 25, 2005 at 05:20 GMT) |
| T.R.Borealis (Sep 11, 2005 at 01:25 GMT) |
My Compliments! ^5's
| Jaimi McEntire (Sep 12, 2005 at 18:10 GMT) Resource Rating: 5 |
| Robert Brower (Sep 12, 2005 at 23:37 GMT) |
Robert
| Jacob Dankovchik (Oct 05, 2005 at 19:35 GMT) |
| Neil M. (Oct 05, 2005 at 19:46 GMT) |
| Welias D. Willie II (Oct 05, 2005 at 22:26 GMT) |
| Jesse (Midhir) Liles (Oct 07, 2005 at 01:31 GMT) |
I agree with Jeff Gran, the horse looks like he's about to take a dump with his tail up like that =)
| Jacob Dankovchik (Oct 07, 2005 at 01:35 GMT) |
| Robert Brower (Oct 08, 2005 at 17:14 GMT) |
You guys caught me in the middle of a move. I moved into a new condo and I'm getting hit with a lot of fires at work. I'm pretty happy with the pack thus far and super excited to be so close to being finished. Hang in there, I need more time to make it just right.
Robert
| Aaron McGowan (Oct 10, 2005 at 12:45 GMT) Resource Rating: 5 |
| Kim Ball (Oct 26, 2005 at 19:19 GMT) Resource Rating: 5 |
| James F (Nov 03, 2005 at 17:47 GMT) |
Any progress? What's the ETA?
Looking forward to rideable horses.
Thanks for making this available to Torque community.
| Kim Ball (Nov 16, 2005 at 23:18 GMT) Resource Rating: 5 |
| Robert Brower (Nov 17, 2005 at 00:11 GMT) |
Robert
| Jacob Dankovchik (Nov 17, 2005 at 00:50 GMT) |
| Sparkling (Nov 17, 2005 at 01:16 GMT) |
| Rob Riddell (Nov 29, 2005 at 16:05 GMT) |
smiles . . .
| Jaimi McEntire (Dec 05, 2005 at 03:40 GMT) Resource Rating: 5 |
| Dieter Eichert (Dec 09, 2005 at 17:57 GMT) |
| Jacob Dankovchik (Dec 11, 2005 at 13:29 GMT) |
| Robert Brower (Dec 13, 2005 at 00:35 GMT) |
Robert
| Sparkling (Dec 13, 2005 at 01:02 GMT) |
-Sparkling
| Robert Brower (Dec 13, 2005 at 02:56 GMT) |
Robert
| Jaimi McEntire (Dec 21, 2005 at 18:29 GMT) Resource Rating: 5 |
| Sparkling (Dec 21, 2005 at 20:14 GMT) |
| Eric Johnson (Dec 24, 2005 at 19:29 GMT) |
| Sparkling (Mar 14, 2006 at 22:23 GMT) |
Please say yes?
-Sparkling
| Jaimi McEntire (Mar 29, 2006 at 04:02 GMT) Resource Rating: 5 |
| James F (Apr 24, 2006 at 05:42 GMT) |
Contact me at fineas(at)prodigy.net
| Sparkling (Apr 24, 2006 at 13:36 GMT) |
| Scott Kaine (Jun 18, 2006 at 17:35 GMT) |
| Daniel Brown (Jul 04, 2006 at 09:52 GMT) |
| Stefan Beffy Moises (Apr 16, 2007 at 06:51 GMT) |
| Sparkling (Jun 05, 2007 at 14:04 GMT) |
http://www.3d-diggers.de/webshop/product_info.php?products_id=140
Have fun! Make more games!
-Sparkling
http://www.visionsgame.com
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