Prev/Next Blog
by date

Plan for Lizard Fire Studios: Torque model shop

Name:	John Burch
Date Posted:	Apr 13, 2006
Rating:	Not Rated
Public:	YES
Comments:	YES
RSS Feed:	or Subscribe with .
Profile Page:	View profile page for John Burch

Blog post

Hi people,
I'm John Burch, the guy behind Lizard Fire Studios. I've been an animator for 6 years.
You can see my high res models at www.lizardfire.com

Josh gave me permission to discuss this commercial plan here, so I hope I can create some interest.

We've just opened our game model shop and hope that we can provide a lot of models for game developers. I love this Torque engine and I intend to create several games myself for our in-house commercial project. One game is playable, but needs a lot of work to be finished. But to pay the bills, I'll probably have to sell a lot of these models along the way.

We just threw open the doors this morning.
The shop is at game.lizardfire.com
We tested the payment software (paypal) but there may be some bugs. Give us feedback and we will fix it ASAP. I want this thing to be a positive experience for everyone.

OK, what are we going to provide? The first two products are online. Trees. A ten pack of small trees and a unique tree that stands by itself. There's also a free fort DIF that would work in Realm Wars.

In the near future, we have a city kit that is still in development. Modern, detailed and with LOD. So far, we've got a block kit that includes streets, traffic lights, mail box, signs. They fit together like a chess board so you can build a big city. But to fill up those blocks it takes a lot of work to build high quality buidings that don't look alike. We have four unique buildings at the moment. And plans to provide several packs along the way with new buildings. Just getting LOD to work on a few buildings so that is slowing down delivery.

I've built a few birds, a dragon, a F-16, a scifi flying car, so I'll have a group of models I call flying things. These still need work to put them into the game.

Here are photos of the models we have or are working on. Please give us suggestions of what you want to see. Send suggestions to game@lizardfire.com

The Big Oak Tree:

Tree in a street pot:

The City seen from above:
A few buildings dropped onto the checkerboard.

Traffic Lights:

These four lights fit on the four corners and come as one model for easy placement plus individual lights for separate positioning. The lights have collision mesh.

Thanks, I'll keep you updated when significant models on online.
John

Recent Blog Posts

List:	04/13/06 - Plan for Lizard Fire Studios: Torque model shop 01/24/06 - 3D art packs for Torque

Submit your own resources!

Chris Labombard (Apr 13, 2006 at 19:33 GMT)

Image links appear to be broken.

James Bond (Apr 13, 2006 at 19:34 GMT)

hmm
I seen them trees before somewhere

Alan H (Apr 13, 2006 at 20:17 GMT)

Do any of your city buildins include an interior - like a lobby maybe?

Does your snap together city system allow for elevation changes?
Edited on Apr 13, 2006 20:18 GMT

AndrewOsborne (Apr 14, 2006 at 08:36 GMT)

@fundemic: Me thinks someone is the proud owner of TreeMagik..

treemagik.thegamecreators.com/ :)
Edited on Apr 14, 2006 08:36 GMT

Alan H (Apr 14, 2006 at 12:58 GMT)

@Andrew - If your right then I think that would be a violation of the license of TreeMagik. Not to mention dishonest. Which would mean no buisness from me.

Chris Labombard (Apr 14, 2006 at 15:38 GMT)

Alan - There are licenses for TreeMagik that allow you to sell your work.

BigPapa (Apr 14, 2006 at 19:49 GMT)

The free fort is missing a texture and crashes torque.

AndrewOsborne (Apr 15, 2006 at 06:29 GMT)

@Alan: I believe he is free to sell anything created from TreeMagik AFAIK. but you could spend an extra $30 and buy the program instead of the content packs and make as many trees as you like :)

John Burch (Apr 15, 2006 at 15:39 GMT)

Sorry bout that, these links below should work.

Yes, TreeMagik. They do give you a license to sell the trees. I thought it would be worth the money for these reasons:
The program does not export to Torque,
the textures are not always power of two and you have to be careful changing the size or you get white glow around the leave due to antialising.
And the leaf mesh needs to be two sided in torque to look good.

The big oak tree ain't something you can get out of Treemagic.

The buildings do have interiors, but they are not all finished and I'm still messing with LOD, so it will be a while before they are ready. They are designed for a flat terrain. I guess I could offer ramps or rising streets, but not sure how to handle all the variations that are possible. At the edge of the checkerboard, you would have to blend into a different sort of road system. I'll add a street section to the kit so you can get curves, ramps and inlines.

Humm.. I'll fix the fort and put it back up. It worked at one point.

The big oak tree
http://game.lizardfire.com/images/OldOakTree.jpg

City From Above:
http://game.lizardfire.com/Products/images/CityStreets/CityfromAbove.jpg

Tree in a pot:
http://game.lizardfire.com/Products/images/CityStreets/TreeInPot2.jpg

Street View:
http://game.lizardfire.com/Products/images/CityStreets/Streetview.jpg

Street View Two:
http://game.lizardfire.com/Products/images/CityStreets/Streetview2.jpg

Traffic Lights:
http://game.lizardfire.com/Products/images/CityStreets/TrafficLights.jpg

John Burch (Apr 15, 2006 at 21:31 GMT)

I fixed the free fort. You can see it and download it at
game.lizardfire.com/Products/Fort2AFree/
or
game.lizardfire.com/Products/Fort2AFree/

includes the 3DWorld Studio file for customization.

Main building has 5 floors, windows on 4th. Ramps everywhere instead of stairs. Very fast climb to the top. One entrance to the walls.

I hope this guesture makes up for the poor initial showing of this plan.
Thanks,
John

AndrewOsborne (Apr 16, 2006 at 01:35 GMT)

Image resizing and exporting simpleshapes to torque isnt exactly difficult.

I cant help but feel perhaps you should be at least editing these in your modelling package after exporting from Treemagik to give them your own special touch, as apposed to being stock standard trees (hell I have Treemagik, and im sure I could create the exact same trees you have here)

Just my 2c, feel free to ignore me, im tired and hungover.

John Burch (Apr 16, 2006 at 01:52 GMT)

No problem Andrew. I can create more shapes but these seemed like good ones to start with. If I did not have Treemagic, then getting 10 trees for $14 feels like a nice bargin to me. it took me about two days of work to figure out all the problems and fix them, so it is not a simple process unless you have already gone through it a few times. Heck, I was suprised to discover that photoshop would actually resize the textures without blurring them if you use the "nearest neightbor" option when it resizes. Guess not everyone knows that. I didn't and we all have to learn sometime.
It helps to go fix the size of textures in Treemagic before you try to create a tree. They give you really squirrly values somewhat like 385 pixels wide on a few of them. And they need to have the background color changed to something close to the leaf color. Otherwise Torque blooms that white around each leaf even when the mask is clean. But if the background is brown to begin with, then Torque gives you good looking leaves.
So, there are the nuggets of value I found when working with Treemagik and probably good to know when you make leaves from photographs too.
John

You must be a member and be logged in to either append comments or rate this resource.