Why use High Poly - Sketch Up ... instead of learnig GMax & Blender

RRSignal said:

Evidently, you have none of either. Besides, you want the internet to be shut down, so how can you get and distribute it anyway? Or is this a case of rules that should apply to everyone else except for you?

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Well I still stand by what I said, if the only way to stop faceless crooks, then it has to be that way... Also people, that way to personally attack me is really getting lame.. He needs to find a new one, oh thats right, he cant. Cuz I do not have many ways too have somebody personally attack me... Its becuz of my moral standards Which means how I conduct myself out here towards others.. Some thing that this guy has none of.. He conducts himself in a quite childish way....

Enzo1 said:

Well I still stand by what I said, if the only way to stop faceless crooks, then it has to be that way...

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If you want to stop the faceless crooks, they you shouldn't be helping them.

Pendolino said:

..., and I don't understand why saying so should be considered "snobbish" .

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The Platters in 1955 summed it up rather well with their hit that went #1 the next year

As for why, well, learning takes too much time and besides, the instant generation wants everything now and wants the accolades too. I guess the concept of earning praise is also so old fashioned.

Nothing wrong with 120,000 poly automobiles if only their "creators" would learn (there's that ugly word again) LOD. Then again, if night-mode is such a hard concept to understand and use, LOD is positively exotic

As a program, sketchup holds quite a bit of potential for trainz. Yes, the exports can be a bit on the bulky side if not properly managed. However, the easy importation into the game along in conjunction with it's interface with google earth makes this program viable for proto route creators. I can not advocate the useage of strictly 3Dwarehouse content for one's uploads, but I cannot say that I am without fault for using it myself; I used a Google made model of "HP Pavillion" hockey arena in San Jose because it was well done and low poly as well (great textures that I could never hope of getting myself). However, I have come to love creating my own assets:






With the exception of the trees, all made in sketchup (still WIP with photo textures and design)

However, as stated before by others, this can be a dangerous tool...


cheers

NIARTcar said:

However, as stated before by others, this can be a dangerous tool...

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Agreed. I admit when I first saw RubyTMIX released, I was worried about a flood of high-poly and/or crap content. Fortunately, most seems to be decent, and a lot of it is downright incredible. Also, it seems like much of the "high-poly" issue stems from the number of textures, as Pendolino pointed out, not actually the model itself (at least AFAIK.)

cascaderailroad said:

Personally I believe Sketch Up is for lazy people who don't want to learn how to create the real thing in a quality program, at low poly count ... and are taking the "Easy" way out !

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That's the biggest load of snobbery I've ever read. Sketchup and Ruby are easy tools to do with whatever you want. I would not countenance using a model from the 3D Warehouse and claiming it as my own but I have found it a very good programme to make simple models, for example curved platforms; tailor-made for my requirements. Simple models have a low poly count. Production of simple models encourages people to get more involved in content creation and then they may decide to get into GMax, 3Ds or Blender.

Knocking the efforts of others (and I'm disregarding the uploaders of other people's work from the 3D Warehouse) only harms us all in the long term. I encourage everyone to have a go at content creation (but don't pretend you're a content creator if you're not).

Creating Content for Trainz, whatever software you use, requires compliance with at least some basic requirements, and keeping polys and textures to a minimum is a must, as wheelsonfire stated above. Knocking someone who is working hard to grasp the basics of 3D modelling is stupid, as all of us (except some professional 3D designers) have spent hours - weeks, in my case ) to understand how to make the legendary "brick box" and exporting it in Trainz.

Converting 3D models designed for other games or purposes into Trainz content almost invariably leads to inefficient Trainz content, because they are not designed to meet the requirements of efficient Trainz content. I admit that this way you can have very efficient framerate killers, though .

By the way, if selecting "File|Import" then "File|Export" and writing a config can be called "creating" content, we may look forward to a very concise CCG .

I was reading this long...err...discussion... (?) and have thought about what I do to bring Sketchup models to Trainz. My Matchbox loco was made in Sketchup. Its poly count is only 5234. This is because I imported it to Blender and deleted some extra parts.

Would a tutorial on how to import stuff from Sketchup to Blender be helpful? And if so, would video or a text-with-pictures format be better? I was going to do a video tutorial on how to get a model (a simple house in this case) from Sketchup to Blender, UV map some textures (very simply) and export it to Trainz, but with a pre-written config file.

Kman.

Let's be honest. Gmax is mad dated, even though it still works. There will come a point when it's not compatible. Blender is super hard for newbies and even some vets. I'm sure it's good but the learning curve is crazy. Enter Sketchup, a relatively easy app to get into, it's not only free but supported on multiple platforms, has tons of learning material, and will be supported going forward by Google.

The OP doesn't seem to understand how much time and energy goes into making content, that seems easy to make. What may seem easy to you is hard for others. Is there a lot of crap out there, oh lord yes, however those same people but time and energy into making it so that you and other can use it and enjoy it. Don't be so quick to down the easy way.

I am glad someone has told me to watch out for Sketch-up stuff, I have enough high-polys in traincar assets.

It seems to me that the time spent using Sketch-up and configuring Google Warehouse assets could better be used learning Blender or gmax.

As to the "your being lazy" guys out there. It's not just being lazy. Some of the people who use SketchUp can't figure out the other options. I've gone through every tutorial I can find for both GMAX & Blender; and to this day still can't create much more then an untextured box (I an do a Teapot in GMAX XD ). Don't get me wrong I've tried to learn GMAX & Blender, I have them both install on my system; however I still don't know how to make stuff in them. However I can figure my way around SketchUp fairly well.

If I had it my way I'd have Blender with a SketchUp-like interface. Plain & Simple to understand and use.

peter

Actually Blender has one critical "gotcha" which remained totally undocumented until I happened upon a tutorial, I think by Mick Berg. In the Texture window, you have to select, under Mapping, UV instead of "Generated." That's a big caveat that the tutorials don't tell you, even the other Trainz-oriented ones.

I don't get this "it's so hard" notion and not because I can use GMax to easily made the things i like and want. Every system is hard until you understand how it works and how do you understand - practice, practice and more practice. It also helps if someone can show you the way, point out the gotchas and suggest things to try, either in person or by tutorials. Now the time this takes might vary from months to years or more. Whether it's worth the effort is another matter. If it takes too long to figure out, using other people's objects is perfectly fine too. We all have a finite amount of time and how you use it is your decision.

What I find sad and disapointing is the attitude that using a program to create inferior objects is somehow acceptable. A 120,000 poly car might look gorgeous but it has no business being in an active 3D space like Trainz, at least not with the hardware we have today. As an example to show how exactly the details can be replicated, sure, go for it. But let's not pretend that it would be an acceptable object in Trainz.

You know I have spent the last 2 years trying to learn 3d Max. At this time all I can create is a box. Big whoop. I have spent the last 4 years trying to get some one to make the light to medium duty vehicles and trailers seen in every rail yard in the world. I have even offered to pay people to do this. I have the plans for these trucks and trailers yet no one wanted to do it. Then I run across the very thing that I'm looking. And now because I want to export it in to trainz,I'm called lazy? Just what gives you that right. And who are you to call me lazy? I am a route creator, and I'll put my routes up against any one here. All of my routes are done free hand and that includes elevation. The amount of research I put into a route before the first track is put down would have some of you running for the hills.

Also contrary to what I've seen others accused of here, I put in the config file of everything that I have exported so far the name of the content creator. Am I a content creator, not for trainz no. Do I think of my self as one? Not by any means. But to call me lazy is rather uncalled for. When I do upload something that I found in Warehouse,(that is after it's been run through 3d Max), if you don't want to down load it then don't. In fact if all your going to do is complain about it, I would prefer that you don't. This is very reason that 90% of the routes that I create, I keep for my self. It seems that no matter what, all you guys can do is complain about this or that. When I paid 50.00 for each version of trainz that I have, I didn't care if I made you guys happy or not. And to this day I still don't. I got the GAME so I could have FUN. Win lose or draw, that's what I'm going to do. If my approach is not to your liking oh well.

Also let me say, I do FULLY support ENZO1, this guy has been more of a help to more to people that you guys will ever know. He has bent over backwards when all you guys could do is climb all over some one because they didn't word a question correctly or didn't do what you think should be done. Instead of griping how about just sitting back and relaxing and having fun. After all isn't this supposed to be a hobby? Then again, I guess some of you have forgotten what it's like to have fun. As for Enzo1 and my self, we're going to have fun our way. If that's not your way, then oh well.

Pendolino said:

I also appreciate a well done high-detail asset, but I rarely saw a bunch of ill-conceived meshes as the ones taken from Google Warehouse: most of these "models" seem to have an inordinate numeber of polys just for the sake of it (400ft buildings made as boxes - 12 polys - with 2 ft chimneys made as 2,000 poly cylinders). LOD, of course is an unspeakably evil practice that should be avoided at all costs or - maybe - requires much more skill that simply using a conversion software ). Last, but not least, textures much too often consist of images taken from Google Maps or Google StreetView: the first are especially awful.

I can only strongly agree with hminky:



Exactly... I would like to see if these wannabe "content creators" are able to make the classic "brick box" .

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I've seen that too and have done both real models and downloads from Google. With Google downloads, I specifically found buildings that I could have made myself. They're simple mill buildings, but the person that created them got the textures and everything that I couldn't get done.

I have seen traditional models, done in 3d-Studio 4.0 for DOS) that had so many polys that they caused the animation to take 18 hours to complete. This animation was an introduction to some plastic training videos. There was some text and titles, which zinged in really quickly. The factory builing, done in AutoCad, zinged in rather quickly. Usually ACad files dork because of the number of faces, but this model was pretty well optimized. Anyway. The video gets to the room full of machines. This is where everything came to a dead stop. There were 12 machines running in the room with all of them producing the same green cup. In reality there was only one machine, but the rest were instance objects. These are like the trees we have on a route. There was originally only one of them placed, but the rest are rendered in memory based on the single tree.

We searched all over the place. Deleted the building, rebuilt the building, redid the intro, removed the cup, etc., all to no avail. Finally as a last resort, we pulled the injection molding machine from the scene. BINGO! We won the lottery here. There were no longer stutters and freezes. The machine model needed to be optimized. The video creator, who also was a modeler but was given this model to use, went through the model piece-by-piece. The culprit turned out to be the feet. There were six hexogonal-shaped feet on the machine. Each foot had 256,000 faces on it. No wonder the video stalled. Once the feet were reduced substantially, everything was pretty smooth.

So yes high poly models can come from any source.

The inherent issue though with Sketch-up models is there are so many texture bits. With Trainz, this is actually the performance killer. The large mesh gets loaded into memory no problem, but the little bits of textures get loaded individually. This causes Trainz to have to load up each texture piece into memory from the disk instead of loading up one master texture with UV mapping plains point to the mesh from the master texture sheet.

To better explain this, it's like using tiny decals with glue and tape on a gift instead of one piece of wrapping paper. Which gets done faster, or in the case of the 3d models, which loads faster?

John

Is This an Inferior Product??

martinvk: What I find Disappointing and sad is hear you say inferior product??Are you refering that Sketch 8 is an inferior product??I have news for you..It has been used in movie industry for several years now..It has been used by many,many Architects..I wouldn't call that inferior..

Following from JCitron's post, if people can get the model from Sketchup to Blender and UV map it, then there is no problem with textures. And that is in fact exactly what can be done! It is in fact what I did for my Matchbox loco. I made it in Sketchup, imported it into Blender, (VERY simple!) and textured it there (UV Mapping), plus added attachments, and exported it to a new asset folder, where a pre-written config was waiting.

I can easily do a tutorial on getting a model from Sketchup to Trainz, including the Blender stages of texturing. The tutorial here was very helpful to me, and I can do a video version of it. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Trainz/Tutorial_for_Blender#Textures

Kieran.

amrail2000 said:

You know I have spent the last 2 years trying to learn 3d Max. At this time all I can create is a box. Big whoop. I have spent the last 4 years trying to get some one to make the light to medium duty vehicles and trailers seen in every rail yard in the world. I have even offered to pay people to do this. I have the plans for these trucks and trailers yet no one wanted to do it. Then I run across the very thing that I'm looking. And now because I want to export it in to trainz,I'm called lazy? Just what gives you that right. And who are you to call me lazy? I am a route creator, and I'll put my routes up against any one here. All of my routes are done free hand and that includes elevation. The amount of research I put into a route before the first track is put down would have some of you running for the hills.

Also contrary to what I've seen others accused of here, I put in the config file of everything that I have exported so far the name of the content creator. Am I a content creator, not for trainz no. Do I think of my self as one? Not by any means. But to call me lazy is rather uncalled for. When I do upload something that I found in Warehouse,(that is after it's been run through 3d Max), if you don't want to down load it then don't. In fact if all your going to do is complain about it, I would prefer that you don't. This is very reason that 90% of the routes that I create, I keep for my self. It seems that no matter what, all you guys can do is complain about this or that. When I paid 50.00 for each version of trainz that I have, I didn't care if I made you guys happy or not. And to this day I still don't. I got the GAME so I could have FUN. Win lose or draw, that's what I'm going to do. If my approach is not to your liking oh well.

Also let me say, I do FULLY support ENZO1, this guy has been more of a help to more to people that you guys will ever know. He has bent over backwards when all you guys could do is climb all over some one because they didn't word a question correctly or didn't do what you think should be done. Instead of griping how about just sitting back and relaxing and having fun. After all isn't this supposed to be a hobby? Then again, I guess some of you have forgotten what it's like to have fun. As for Enzo1 and my self, we're going to have fun our way. If that's not your way, then oh well.

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More to RRSignals: I am an Admin at that site not becuz of my taste in content, but becuz I do more to help people, I do not crush them becuz they cannot do this that or the other, but instead try to help them!

Wow....this is starting to get out of hand.

Woah - this thread has gone from Sketchup, to 3D Warehouse, to Piracy, to Morals, to SOPA/PIPA, to Monorails, to snobbery.

What a read, and all in less than 24 hours?

Jamie