I might do a few more Borderlands 2 inspired guns…

Quite happy with this, tried some new techniques and they worked very well. I’ve perfected them more in the guns that were made after this one.

Not all that terrible looking at it now. I had spent a few months converting existing GTA:SA cars to Crashday before I attempted this, I had even already learned to UV when I had to redo textures on some cars (I remember manually painting Ambient occlusion once LOL).

To be honest, I think this is my best car so far…

The problem is that I kept getting useless bake results: a (red) wireframe, and not a proper bake!
I’d checked the help dozens of times, trawled all the forums,etc… Nothing helped.

Now after rebuilding the code again, I found the issue:

the INodeBakeProperties have almost nothing in the way of proper default settings. You have to explicitly set a few things, if you don’t, it doesn’t work without any explanation why.

Take the following sample code:

--set up bake properties

bp = obj.INodeBakeProperties
bp.bakeEnabled = true
bp.bakeChannel = 1
bp.nDilations = 1

This is the key piece of code. If you don’t set bakeEnabled, it won’t bake. Easily overlooked. Bakechannel I’m not sure of the default, but you most probably need to set this explicitely. nDilations was my problem: this is the “edge padding” value: not explicitely setting it results in useless bakes! There is not a single warning on this in the Max help anywhere!

bp.removeAllBakeElements() --clear all to be safe and clean
dbe = DiffuseMap()
dbe.enabled = true
dbe.outputSzX = 128
dbe.outputSzY = 128

bp.addBakeElement dbe


For completion’s sake, here’s the rest of the essential code. The Bake elements have VERY generic class names such as “DiffuseMap”. They have to be enabled explicitely again.
The filename and filetype properties of the bake element are again very important: failure to set these and your bake element will not be able to create a bitmap. You’ll get a non-descriptive “Error Creating Bitmap” message. It doesn’t actually save them to that location though…
Also, very important to note: Edgepadding, or the ndilations value, is not applied when you set just “.tga” as filetype. If you set “filename.tga” it will apply them. The actual purpose of filetype vs filename is very vague and unclear.

Hopefully that will help out anyone who’s running into this same issue!

I picked my little BT-2 in fall camo since I always have the most fun with it ingame. I decided to just scratchbuild it from wood and do the interior as well, to set myself apart from the competition.

Here are some pictures I took yesterday:

And here’s the entry video, showing the build process:

Fingers crossed I win something nice!

I got first place! Sweet!

So here’s what i came up with so far:

http://www.laurenscorijn.com/Sirius.swf

It’s the start of a spaceship game that should have everything random generated (well except for the names). I based the spaceship generation code on Dave Bollinger’s PixelSpacehips. (site’s dead, hence wayback). Keep refreshing, it’s different every time! It also cycles between 5 types of country naming types, US, Japanese, Russian, German and French (it’s so fun coming up with the names).

Plus, I just found out you can do shaders in Actionscript, so now I can manipulate graphics faster and even easier!

I was inspired by the “Gerund” AR, it had nice contrast between green, yellow and orange. The fish drawing was cool too.

I never tested if it shoots, since it requires an insane amount of batteries. (6 D-type)

It feels like a big improvement in technique, which is exactly why I did a smaller gun first.

It’s got a working Red Dot scope where the carrying handle used to be (I cut that off).

The band-aid was taken from an early concept by LD Austin that didn’t make it ingame in that form.

More on Flickr.

I was trying to think of a good theme, when it dawned to me that I work at a company who’s got some amazing, very unique looking guns in their latest game, so it made sense to try and make a BRINK Resistance inspired pistol!

It still shoots, I removed the air restrictor so it’s more powerful than stock.

I filled the space for extra darts with a functioning LED flashlight and Laser module. There are separate switches for each on the back of the housing.

You can see some nice highres shots of many weapons from the game here:

Polycount – 3Point Studios Brink Art