My first model with gameSpace

[Sascha Willems]

With my 2nd place at the compo I've also won a copy of Caligari's gameSpace 1.6 and always wanted to try it out, but never really had the time to do so. But the past second days were more bright on the side of freetime (It's very seldom these days that I got one or even two hours in one session to spare on my hobbies), so I finally decided to build a vehicle model for my NewtonPlayGround.

As a long-time user of 3D Studio MAX (I even used it's predecessor under DOS, Autocad's 3D Studio if I remember correct) it took me quite a while to get used to gameSpace's UI and I'm still trying to use shortcuts, mouse-actions or even try to find things that I used almost daily in 3DS. But I must admit that even after a few hours of working you really get the feeling that gameSpace (hence the name) was created for making 3D models for games. It's workflow is very smooth when creating such a model and it's flexible UI with all it's icons is also very nice (at first you're annoyed that there are only icons everywhere, but you quickly get used to them). So after browsing through the tutorials (which are very good btw) I started building a truck (and a trailer) which I wanted to use in my NewtonPlayGround.

My biggest problem with 3D Studio was my unability to get my models UV-mapped correctly, even after years of using it I never really got a nice UV-mapped model finished. But nothing of the same in gameSpace! After building the model itself (and therefore learning the basic usage of gameSpace) I fired up the UV-editor and found it very easy to use and even for programmers (although I never really made something only using "prgrammers art") it's easy to create a basic UV-map. After UV-mapping the polygons of the truck, you can directly export the outlines to an image-file and then create a texture-map in an imaging-tool (I used Photoshop for the textures).

This is how the final result came out. It took me some hours, but as it was the first time I made something with gameSpace, it still was kind of fast :

(clicky for bigger view)


Ande here is the same model in action using my current (unreleased) version of the playgound. The truck and the trailer are connected via a universal joint and it's driveable (although there's still a bug with the vehicle joint in Newton, which will be resolved with the next patch) :


So once again a big thanks for that great price. Guess it's time to now do the final switch and forget about 3DS MAX, especially since gameSpace costs only a fragment of 3DS MAX (and that's why I was still using an older version of 3DS that has been very unstable since WindowsXP SP2).

[cairnswm]

Great work

(Except the truck looks like its flying )

[Traveler]

Hey thats pretty cool!

Are the truck and trailer two seperate objects?

[Sascha Willems]

cairnswm :
It looks flying cause there are no shadows, but actually it's touching the ground and driving very nice thanks to newton

Traveler :
Yes, the truck and trailer (as I wrote above) are two parts. They're connected via a unversial-joint (a joint with which can rotate around two pins). So driving around feels like it's a real truck with a real acting trailer.

[cairnswm]

It looks like its flying because the back wheels are on the grass - I expect it to be on the road so it looks like the truck is in the air and I can see the grass behind the truck.

[savage]

The model looks quite good. I own trueSpace 4.3 and though I never really play with it very often, when I have, I found the interface to be quite easy to use.

If you have some time, you should put a tutorial together. Maybe you could call it "Creating programmer models with gameSpace".