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morcroft · 02-21-2010, 05:35 PM,

I thought I'd have a go at a seashell house, as it's on the open model claims list and sounds interesting.

Here are a few screenies - am I onto anything here? The basic shape is a classic seashell spiral - started out as a Nautilus but morphed into a shape kindly described by my daughter as a "dog poo" - everyone's a critic.

[Image: shell01_test01.jpg]

General living area would be near the mouth, with a sleeping area at the inside end. I've put a bedroll there and the basic TestArgonian to give the idea. I've also stuck a couple of fungus stalks with gloshroom lighting as wall-lights. Very Ikea.

[Image: shell01_testSS08.jpg]

Not sure how to close off the mouth to isolate the interior, but real nautiluses (nautili?) seal off chambers as they grow, so I thought there could be bulkheads.

The UVs are horrid, the floor needs to be flatter, and there's not a lot of room inside. Added to which the exterior polycount is currently obscene! Still, I got the interior down to under 2000 triangles. Is that still too much?

I won't clutter the post with all my screenies - the album's here if you're interested.

I have a couple of other ideas for seashells - probably much bigger than this one, which I'm finding hasn't enough width but too much height.

So, should I keep this up, or are there better things for me to do with my time?

Any other suggestions?

By the way, I'm officially NOT claiming seashell homes - I'll have a crack at it as the mood takes me but don't rely on me if you need them urgently!

Catlemur · 02-21-2010, 07:30 PM,

Looks funny.

Koniption · 02-21-2010, 08:26 PM,

Dog poo!! Now if only we had a paper bag and a lighter.... :lmao:

Just kidding, lol.

I don't know if seashell houses are still needed. You might want to wait for Ibsen to reply, since he knows what is needed the most.

I see how you're trying to achieve the spiraling effect upwards with that interior picture. Also, 2000 triangles is not bad at all for an interior room, especially since you're dealing with more round-ish shapes for an interior (round stuff is notorious for always being higher poly, than say, a cube).

How much is the exterior polycount, btw? (You said it was obscenely high.)

I won't be able to work on seashell homes for a good long time, even if they turn out to be needed, so by all means go ahead and model them at your leisure if Ibsen needs them.

I found this site with great pics of shells and a section that has sliced shells for seeing what the interior looks like:

http://www.seashellworld.com/

As for suggestions...besides the above website I posted for inspiration...it might be nice if we had a variety of different, regular sized seashells to place along the beaches. If the seashell house idea turns out to not be needed, I think Ibsen would still appreciate having beach decor other than rocks. Just try to keep those regular sized seashells as low poly as possible, without taking away the ability to identify what they are.

Koniption

morcroft · 02-21-2010, 08:57 PM,

Thanks for that - at least I'm not completely off.

I'll certainly wait for Ibsen's comments - I wanted to get the idea out of my head and into a model before I brought it up here, but obviously I'm not doing any more work if it's not needed.

External poly's not quite as bad as I thought - I checked in Blender and it's just under 3000 (assuming I'm reading the right number). Still wouldn't want too many of them on the same beach, though!

I like the idea of a range of sizes of the same shells from pebble up to house - sort of explains where the big shells come from.

If we want a good selection of smaller shells for landscape then I think I'd need to achieve more in the texturing and less in the mesh.

I'll probably have go at a properly textured exterior as the next step, anyway - especially if it's good for landscape. If the interior's useful then it'll probably just be linked to a large-scale version.

That's another question for you, actually: how well do Oblivion objects scale? By that I mean: say I did model this seashell to be football-sized, and then scaled it up to house-sized. Any problems, or is the CS scale factor reliable enough for 100x scale to work cleanly? Is it better to make two models, one for small and one for huge?

Koniption · 02-21-2010, 09:11 PM,

For regular sized seashells, 3000 polys is a bit much. Try sticking with 1000 or less.

For the external house version, 3000 is ok.

You want to make two different models for football size and house size (this one being scaled up in the modeling program to correct size, before exporting). The CS can scale objects up a lot, but the collision can start to wonk out the bigger they're scaled up. Making an object go from football size to house size using the CS scaling function is not a good idea, imo.

Koniption

morcroft · 02-21-2010, 09:22 PM,

Thanks - that's all much as I would have guessed, and useful for reference. I also saw your similarly useful response to Shadowgame.

I'll treat a factor of 10 as a practical limit for scaling.

llamaranger · 02-22-2010, 04:12 PM,

be careful about what blender tells you,
if it says 3000 polys in blender that may be 6000 in game, as if you haven't already converted to triangles it will be telling you how many square faces there are, and the niftools exporter will then automatically convert that to triangles

x

edd

morcroft · 02-22-2010, 04:16 PM,

Good warning, thanks, but I'd caught that one. I've been remembering to convert quads to triangles (most of the time....)

Deeza · 02-22-2010, 04:31 PM,

As far as I know, all the beta settlements are covered by the existing huts, but hopefully we'll eventually expand into the southern sea coast at the very least. We could really use some new architecture there.

Ibsen's Ghost · 02-22-2010, 05:15 PM,

Yes, we could. I like the shape of this thing but it's not quite what I had in mind although that could be due to the way you approached the idea. It's quite unusual for a modder to go for the interior first. It may help you to gather ideas by working on seashells themselves. Moreover, if you develop seashell-rocks as Koniption suggests then they're likely to be used along the shore as well. Tbh I'm about to get the mangrove region sorted very, very soon but that's where I was planning on putting such things if they were to be made. I could easily have the normal rocks replaced though.

If you do start creating seashell-rocks then it would help me enormously if the approximate size and shape of the seashells roughly equated with those rocks which are West-Weald-shaped. This is difficult because, obviously, seashells are shaped much different to rocks but if you researched different seashells then you might be able to find some stuff that's very appropriate and you can probably hold open a copy of a West Weald rock as you model to give yourself an idea of the proportions.

As for the houses, it's as Deeza says, we could still use stuff beyond the beta. I'd take a different tack if you're going to try a seashell home. This was a website I originally linked to when I suggested the idea: http://www.geekologie.com/2008/02/seashe...evably.php . Pretty gorgeous, huh? And yet one hell of a task for even the finest modders! Nevertheless, a bit of research looking at different seashells and trying to imagine how they could be made into houses would probably go a long way! =)