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Future Pinball Ramps In Visual Pinball - Tutorial


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It's common knowledge that default ramps in Visual Pinball are terrible

You don't get support rings, proper 3d lighting effects, hard to work with, and if you do create a wire ramp using smaller ramps to get the effect you need, you're hung out to try if anyone wants to convert your table to desktop, or adjust layback, or anything, because it's all oriented to one perspective. I did this on Sharkey's Shootout, and I think it turned out OK but it needs to be updated with Future Pinball ramps now that I have seen how easy it is.

 

The bottom line is: it's worth it.

 

Now, there's a lot more you can do beyond what I show in this video. If you're comfortable with Blender, there's a ton of great things you can achieve. Check out some of the videos here once you are comfortable with this step http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Import-Export/FuturePinball_FPx

 

 

 

 

 

Export your VP blueprint (File > Export)

Translate your VP table size to FP units (kiwi says 2 VP units = 1mm in FP, but technically it doesn't matter, I never scale my ramps properly and have to adjust the scaling of the object in VP)

Import your VP blueprint to FP and use as your table image

Create ramp in FP like you would in VP

Add your objects, and the exciting things are what you can do to the transform points - these are the rings. In FP there's like 15 different ring types.

 

After you get the ramp you want in FP, save it as a table

 

Open Blender (free, fairly complicated but you only need a few pieces of info to make this work)

Install the MS3D importer plugin 

Install the FP importer plugin

 

Import your .fpt table

 

Move things around in Blender if needed (I needed to move the end pieces to line up with the wire ramp, this is just moving it along the axis)

The lengthwise wire in FP ramps is imported as a curve while the rings are imported as meshes. Everything needs to be mesh, so select the curves and convert to> mesh from curve

Select your new mesh wires and go to edit mode > faces > triangulate faces (I have determined that all faces in VP need to be triangulated, otherwise you get strange texture issues)

Now select every object in your ramp and join it as one unit

 

Now you can export your wire ramp as an .obj - in the export options, make sure Write Normals and Triangulate Faces is checked, then export

 

Now you can import into VP! Easy. I use the Chrome-Silver texture but you can try different metal textures to get desired look.

 

XTzMadb.jpg

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This is great.  I'll have to give it a try as that is one thing that i find almost impossible to get to look right.

 

***edit - got home and was able to watch the video and see the outcome better.  This is fantastic.

 

Do you know if these can be made easily in FP as well?

 

I've been playing with ramps and walls but I can't get them to look right with the correct transparency.  Especially the clear ones.

 

1402160962.jpg

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This is great.  I'll have to give it a try as that is one thing that i find almost impossible to get to look right.

 

***edit - got home and was able to watch the video and see the outcome better.  This is fantastic.

 

Do you know if these can be made easily in FP as well?

 

I've been playing with ramps and walls but I can't get them to look right with the correct transparency.  Especially the clear ones.

 

1402160962.jpg

 

 

Oh yea these are easy, they're already objects in the FP editor, so you just export them the same way you did the ramps. I was doing these last night, trying to export whole posts & rubber - at this point, given my lack of texturing skills, it's probably better to do the posts and rubbers individually. This was done together and textured in photoshop:

 

h2rXRgP.jpg

 

So I was going to try today to export one post and then do all the rubbers separately and build it that way in VP (for some reason I didn't export the UV map for both the rubber AND the posts, it was always just the posts so it would be the same color no matter what)

 

In a previous attempt to do plastic ramps in FP, I know that transparent texturing can be done. I'll try it in a bit and share the results.

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Alright I put it down to 1 post and textured it... You can adjust transparency on the .png if it doesn't look proper

 

I just applied the chrome-silver texture to it to make it metal for 24

 

gGSXvEn.jpg

 

Here's a table with them in there, feel free to use them as needed

 

https://app.box.com/s/hcami9g8sntyho3hhhig

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Forgive my ignorance of primatives but once imported into VP can you alter it in any way? Or would I have to start over from editing from in FP? I know nothing of them. I'm going to try this and see how it works out just want to make sure I understand everything.  Thanks.

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You can only change it's size and rotation.  You can't make physical changes to the primative itself in VP.  I.E. - You can't change the bend of a ramp that is a FP model.

 

freneticamnesic - Thanks for your help on the post too.  Looks like I've got a couple of things to keep me busy playing around with.

 
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Think I finally got this working.  Blender is a PITA to use.  Still can't figure out how to move the camera around well but after a couple of hours I've got my first ramp done.  Pretty cool little tool.

 

1402200556.jpg

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Think I finally got this working.  Blender is a PITA to use.  Still can't figure out how to move the camera around well but after a couple of hours I've got my first ramp done.  Pretty cool little tool.

 

1402200556.jpg

 

Nice

Use the middle button on your mouse to move the camera around (hold the middle button and drag the mouse)

Also use the ctrl+ and shift+ modifiers when moving the camera to adjust pan and zoom

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Fore standard fp objects that are available in the fp editor, like pegs, emkicker gate brackets, etc.

I have all the objects in their original ms3d format. They were provided to me by lio. The modeler from the fp dev team.

If you would like I can provide them to you guys. It will cut out a step so you would just need to scale them and place them on the axis so they are at playfield level

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Oh and for clear pegs like the ones above.

I usually table one of the fp sphere maps like chromewhite. Colorize it in photoshop then set opacity to around 65 to 75 percent.

Apps it to the pegs as a spheremap. This will give the look of highlig j ts and shadows. Haven't tried it on flat sided pegs yet, but on the ribbed pegs it looks nice

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When I get time I want to make a template table that has 1 of each standard objects in it so people can just copy and paste and alter the textures to suit their needs

 

Hope you can do this because I've been here before. Can't get on with VP units. Wish they would change this to mm at least.

 

Found it quite awkward to get an exact size from a FP mesh. Tried mostly with the T2 plastic pegs 27mm and when you're looking at it from a VP desktop view it's hard to assume it's the correct size.

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Could be milkshape but I'm thinking scaling down to .019 should be the same as blender. Default sizes for vp is 100 scale. Changed that to 10 to look similar but that is still too small. Hard to guess as you can see.

 

Just the right peg stand off 27mm should be looking at here, think the other peg is where I had been messing around before with it.

post-82-0-66544700-1402421384_thumb.png

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I personally never bothered scaling in blender, just adjusted size in VP... probably would save a bit of headache though. As you can see in my video, I scaled to 2 and 2.1, which doesn't seem much different than 1.9 but it is a substantial difference. Any idea why I need to scale to higher than 1.9 to make it work? My assumption based on what kiwi said was that 1mm = 2 VP units, so that was my unit conversion for building the ramp in FP.

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Just messed about with importing some walls. Was finding 1.88 was a good size to match up.

 

If we could ship every part of a FP table over (Walls, ramps, pegs, rubbers) in one foul swoop to VP, that would be nice, lol.

 

VP editor I find is Bohemion\Prehistoric and desktop view always looks the gash. It's not good. Fine in Cab view because you can get away with it and hide.

 

I think after saying that my minds made up on it. I'll build the fake 2D way, fullscreen only, using primitives for models/animation.

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Future pinball wire ramps built and installed.  Also installed the primative pegs and cross.  Thanks for the tips again!

 

Here's a pic showing progress with these things and incorporating the table that I blended with my art and freneticamnesics.  Still have a lot of cleaning work to do but I think it will be a killer release once it goes out of production and I finish it up.

 

 

1402545954.jpg

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Anyone manage to export a rubber?

 

Trying to steal my left slingshot rubber from FP, but have trouble with the uv error. Don't know whether this is overkill or not but this is one thing I never like about VP was such a mission to make rubber.

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Anyone manage to export a rubber?

 

Trying to steal my left slingshot rubber from FP, but have trouble with the uv error. Don't know whether this is overkill or not but this is one thing I never like about VP was such a mission to make rubber.

 I think the rubbers in FP use quads, you have to triangulate them for VP. If you want you can send me the FPT you want to steal the rubber from and I'll convert it for you and explain what I did

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Thanks but just managed to do it by uv unwrapping first.

 

post-82-0-59449400-1402709332_thumb.jpg

 

Only thing is it must be including something else in the scene because when you rotate you have to go find the object and move it into place. Moves it quite far away in the editor.

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