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Needs more knowledge to ZEQ2-Lite modeling and 3D animation?

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D_guard_d View user's profile Send private message

Reply with quote Friday, August 25, 2017

Hello,
I though that I will need more knowledge to modeling and animation.
All the time that I was doing before, it was "Administration of computer systems in network" course. In this course, I learned making web sites on PHP, Javascript, SQL and C# languages; administrative languages in the operating systems as Batch (MS-DOS) and Shell Script, knowing how is the compilation and how to create servers, networking and administering operating systems. I approved and completed this course.

For now, I will enter a 3D animation course, the people who teach this course advised me to draw. Moreover, they teach with Blender and Unity the game engine in this course.
I don't know if I have to learn more things about this. I know how to make a map in ZEQ2-Lite, using shader scripts and I used 3DS Max for this, but I don't have much knowledge of modeling in 3DS Max because I modeled only rocks and simple objects to make maps. For now, I don't know how to modeling a character and I'm looking tutorials to learn the modeling.

The course that I was doing is a Professional Formation (sorry, it's a teaching system that is available in some country as Spain, France, ...), it takes 2 years to complete the course and takes you to work in the company. The next course that I'll do, is a Professional Formation, too. More information: https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formación_profesional (sorry, the available languages are Spanish, France, Deutsch, ...) , I don't know if it is called "vocational training".

Please, could you give me advices?
Do you believe that I have to draw all the life instead modeling at the work in the company? Because I would like 3D modeling and animating.
What do you recommend? Do I have to use Blender or 3DS Max?

Kind Regards

Shenku RiO Incarnate View user's profile Send private message

Reply with quote Friday, August 25, 2017

This is going to be a long response, but bare with me...


*Deep inhale*


Generally speaking in the industry, or at least in bigger studios, you would be hired for one specific job, and be only responsible for the tasks in the workflow that fall under that job.

Prop modellers only model props, concept artists do all the concept art including character concepts, and character modellers generally focus specifically on just modeling the characters from modelsheets they're handed from the concept team.

If you're working for a studio as a 3D modeler, you shouldn't generally have to come up with the concepts for anything, because that's the concept artist's job. They make the concepts, the art director decides which ones are best, then they hand said concepts off to the 3D artist to model.


Now that said, if you're looking to model characters or complex environmental props, it definitely helps to have an overall understanding of the shapes and forms that make up any given subject that you would be modeling, and being able to draw with moderate proficiency can definitely help with that. You don't have to be Rembrandt good, just good enough that you know things like basic construction of 3D shapes, human anatomy, and the ability to interpret a 3-Dimensional object from a 2-Dimensional concept drawing.

As far as the tools themselves go, 3DS Max, or Blender, they're just that; tools. A lot of studios use 3DS Max or Maya, but some smaller studios may use Blender instead because it cuts costs by a lot. So my advice if you want to be the most flexible, would be to learn all three if you can, or at least learn one extremely well, and get a basic understanding of the bare-minimum tools in the other two.


Now, as far as learning how to model characters, that takes a good understanding of basic human anatomy (as mentioned above), and a Lot of practice, so don't expect your first few models to look like anything spectacular, but if you keep at it you'll eventually get there.

For a good jumping off point, once you learn the basic tools, I'd recommend checking out the Joan of Arc tutorial, which is probably one of the best character modeling tutorials I've seen out there. It goes step by step, showing you exactly where to extrude, which edges to cut, how to move the geometry around, exc., and best of all, the tutorial is freely available. I think it's taught using 3DS Max, but the concepts for character modeling that it teaches can apply to any 3D software.



Lastly, and most importantly, it's not easy to get into the industry as a 3D modeler, as your resume has to be really spot on, and your portfolio has to be amazeballs, so don't expect to get hired on anywhere right away, especially with the way the industry has been the past few years with studios closing/merging/dissolving left and right. So this brings me to the most important thing. Never. Give. Up. Keep improving your skills in your chosen field, keep practicing when you have free time, keep making new models for your portfolio, and keep yourself motivated by reminding yourself that it's what you want to do.


*Exhales then inhales rapidly to catch breath*

There, that wasn't so long was it...?

*Passes out from oxygen deprivation*

Eagle The Purpose View user's profile Send private message

Reply with quote Friday, August 25, 2017

Holy cow! I found my clone from the future! I've done professional networking studies too (more like a does it all IT baccalaureate, in fact) and am now entering advanced networking/programming (BTS/HND).

More on topic, what do you want to do exactly? This knowledge could be used for drastically different things. You could wish to make a game, some animations in specific programs, some scene showcase (architecture, photorealistic) etc...

If you still want to work on ZEQ2-Lite, I may have a "job" for you if you persist in this domain. Razz

Edit: Shenku-senpai beats me to it!!

Shenku RiO Incarnate View user's profile Send private message

Reply with quote Friday, August 25, 2017

Eagle wrote :
Edit: Shenku-senpai beats me to it!!



Like I said in the other thread. I'm always watching. Wink

D_guard_d View user's profile Send private message

Reply with quote Friday, August 25, 2017

Shenku, thanks for the tips. I understood it. Smile

Eagle wrote : If you still want to work on ZEQ2-Lite, I may have a "job" for you if you persist in this domain. Razz



For now, I don't know what I want to do. But, I want to know how to do 3D modeling and animating.

About "job", What do you mean? Does it offer job here? Is this a company?

D_guard_d View user's profile Send private message

Reply with quote Friday, August 25, 2017

I'm surprised that Eagle does the same as me. Shocked
I didn't know that he did the same as me. I saw programming moments about C and other languages for the game, I knew how to run those codes. But, when I was registering in ZEQ2-Lite and asking about maps and things that I want to learn, I didn't know nothing about compilation and programming. I was doing the "Administration of computer systems in network" course and I still was beginner. This was a year and a half(1,5).

Shenku RiO Incarnate View user's profile Send private message

Reply with quote Friday, August 25, 2017

D_guard_d wrote :

About "job", What do you mean? Does it offer job here? Is this a company?



To clarify, this is not a company, so there is no "job" in the traditional sense of paying positions.

Anyone who "works" here does so voluntarily, for free, out of the goodness of their hearts, and does so for the benefit of the project, the community, and the learning experience this project as a whole offers for anyone who wants to learn about video game design and development.

Your "job", if you were to accept it, would be exactly the same as anyone else who's ever worked on ZEQ2-Lite, and that is to contribute where you can if and when you can.

That said, I think where Eagle is going with this is that the project is in dire need of programmers to help with a plethora of tasks, more so than he can get to by himself (and I believe he's been trying to do it all by himself lately, too...). So he probably wants to recruit you to help him out with that. But that's just my best guess...

Anyways, if you really want to learn 3D modeling, find some tutorials, such as the one I linked in my post above, and follow along with a few of them until you start getting the basics down, then move on to trying other things, such as modeling from random modelsheets off Google image search, it's good practice (Don't forget to credit the modelsheet's artist/source if you do that though). If you need help along the way, you can always do searches on YouTube for some specific modeling tasks, or if all else fails, you can post what you're working on here, and we would be more than willing to give you feedback, and help you along.

And of course, if you really want, feel free to PM me, and I'd be glad to answer any questions about character modeling as soon as I can, assuming I can answer that is.

Eagle The Purpose View user's profile Send private message

Reply with quote Saturday, August 26, 2017

About "job", What do you mean? Does it offer job here? Is this a company?

I was speaking generally at the beginning. Though, even within the project, I still try to take things professionally, to get as near as possible to the real development experience (and without certain problematic details). You will hear me pretty often talking about "companies", development "jobs", legalties, "products" etc...

So, I meant that the knowledge you would get from learning in those development domains could be used for several kinds of jobs, with varying conditions.

Shenku beats me to it once again with a pretty complete summary.

As far as I am concerned with ZEQ2-Lite, I'm always open to give/receive help to/from anyone if some conditions are met. I have been carrying as much as I could so far to land a new revision that would change the face of the project, minds, and productivity altogether. But I also start to see my current limits in the two actual bottlenecking domains (namely programming and 3D arts; this last more likely the export process).
Not sure I actually made a post about this on the forums, and it would probably be better on a dedicated thread, but just for information, I will leave a "few" details that I hope will interest as much people as possible.

I made a public fork of the ZEQ2-Lite Source repository to work on drastic changes without messing the official branches up and impeding others from contributing directly. I have firstly been working from the head revision as base, updating and working on libraries, supports etc...- but I finally went onto a short-term easier path from merging ioQuake 3's late updates to our engine along with new personal changes. So far:

• OpenAL Soft is slowly taking over SDL Audio. It is a much more powerful audio backend that gives a much better audio experience to the end user as well as a more familiar API for the programmer (based on OpenGL). My only contribution on it, if I recall correctly, was to add some ZEQ2-Lite specific stuff about attenuation, but I doubt it is the best thing to do for a supposedly "general-purpose" engine.
• SDL has justly been updated from 1.2 to 2, giving loads of changes to the API. That should probably be dug further to get the best out of it.
• Opus lossy audio is also doing a takeover, but on two libraries at the same time (maybe three with a bit of work); namely Vorbis and Speex (VoIP). This encodec has a better process that's both -- from memory -- faster, more compact, working on a gigantic range of frequencies, and with less loss of quality than Vorbis. Pretty much the ring that rules them all. As a side note and trivia, Opus is a standard that Discord, TeamSpeak and new medias on Internet are starting to use progressively.
• After quite some struggle with the renderer, I have lately started to base ours on a modified ioQuake 3 OpenGL 2 renderer, here made to be standalone (not an override of the GL 1 variant). This would drastically change the things we see on screen, balancing and even optimizing resources use, and of course simplifying how we work on visuals. Some cleaning will be done on formats, such as PCX and TGA, since they don't really serve much purpose against the PNG/JPG couple. DDS have also been added from the GL 2 base, but everything is highly instable right now, and radiant mapping tools still have to be updated to work with even ioQuake 3's new renderer. It's going to take time and efforts for sure, but it's worth it.
• This still concerns the renderer but deserves a whole point because it is as much horizon-pushing. IQM is the model format that will replace MD3. It works with Skeleton data instead of Vertex Snapshot encoding, and along with a few other features, this would also drastically change things in products based on this engine. Tags will be replaced with dummy bones, bone and additional data but even the more conventional ones could be coupled with shader programs from the GL 2 renderer, opening tons of new design paths. Additionally from generally being around a mind blwing -- estimated -- 1000% more optimized than MD3 on file size, IQM also completely erases all the old format limits we had to face before, making it a modern replacement almost comparatively as powerful as FBX, I believe.
• Other libraries have also been updated, but quite moderately, since some might as well be thrown to the bin.
• Tools have and are still receiving major changes with a different set of applications and batch files to work with the new formats and ease their production/implementation workflows. They can however already contribute a lot to even my current fork build.
• Some cleanup is being done to the codebase as well as syntactic standards have started to be applied for clearance purpose.
• On the QVM side (slowly becoming the prodcut code in it's entirety), not much has been done since the engine is what dictates a lot of things in the development of a product and has been a priority so far. I have however implemented pain sounds when receiving external damages, re-enabled footsteps sounds with plans for occurence frequency to be set by the character maker in some cfg file, removed some seemingly senseless chat filters, the full client VM has gone through it's first compacting pass, the UI has been modified quite a bit, but not that much, I mainly re-added an UI entry for idTech 3's directory override feature (presented as saga-separated sub-builds for ZEQ2-Lite. More details will be given to those who are interested). Character lightnings can now have a custom blended color from the tier config, like the aura. IQM models are also pushed to the tier system, so everyone can try to work on them on their side.

And probably much more that I forgot... There are also a lot of build changes and plans I didn't mention here, but there's enough in the task list for whoever wants to buttocks in.

Heh. After such a post, I find it funny as heck when I think about people coming to us and saying "ZEQ2-Lite is dead". Smile

D_guard_d View user's profile Send private message

Reply with quote Sunday, August 27, 2017

Now, I'm on vacation. My current status is student and I have the title of "Administration of computer systems in network" course.
The 3D animation course starts on September 22. They will teach me Blender and Unity only.

You can give me a "job", I hope that it can be helped for an user that works in 3D modeling to making maps and character modeling (I still don't know how to do it) and playing the game for testing the interface and his graphics.


Postscript. Do you have a hurry? Is urgent?

D_guard_d View user's profile Send private message

Reply with quote Sunday, August 27, 2017

Eagle wrote : SUMMARY OF PROJECT CHANGES


A whole part that I haven't seen it. Looks like that it's possible that it improved. Is this in GitHub? If it is, it'll have to test the game of these changes.

D_guard_d View user's profile Send private message

Reply with quote Monday, September 04, 2017

I'm decided to have a little "job" of this.
I'm going to to start learning.
Let's see what am I going to do about ZEQ2-Lite.

What do you say of this to me?

Zeth The Admin View user's profile Send private message

Reply with quote Monday, September 04, 2017

I'd recommend you come to the Discord server to discuss day to day things (like your personal growth) and only use the forums when you have more in-depth discussions or results/breakdowns to showcase.

You'll certainly get more steady feedback and help on things.

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