JP's Gargamel Park

[Fraesh]

Alright, pokemon is done for now. This time, ill try to keep my stages separate and have a clean workflow (ye sure 🙈...)

 

Gargamel park was requested and after dabblimg around a bit with other stuff, I found that i really liked the freedom of arranging everything the way I want to. 

So here we go. What is this thing even?!?! 

 

Is it pinball or instant ramen? Theres a lot to do but also a lot of potential.

 

First, I made the lanterns a bit nicer. Its a good start an fun to do for a tuesday evening.

 

Bit of black metal, glass shader, and an emission shader on the inside. Looks much nicer. Maybe ill give it more detail but since its such a small thing, it should suffice.

Next I took some off the shelve materials and put them on metal and rubber to get stuff goin.

 

Blender is the best. Throw an HDRI in there, some materials et voila, everythings beautiful. You should really give it a try.

 

So far so good, I had some more time so i started redoing the playfield. Assembled some graphics and textures i googled and its starting to take shape.

 

Yes, the main playfield does indeed look a bit weird on the top part. Im not a pro so "stitching" graphics or illustrating myself is not something Im particularly good at but as you will see, itll do just fine. Theres so much stuff on top of this, nobody will notice. 

 

 

... and this is when i decided I wanted to proceed with the project  So far, I really like the vibe and theres lots of opportunity to really model some plastics and figures. I havent done much actual modelling so im excited to learn to build some gargamels and ferris wheels!! Hopefully this will somehow translate to VPX.... very scary.... at least Ill have a nice model in the end >.<

 

Until next time

[Fraesh]

Greetings! 

When the ball is rolling, its rolling. So I did a bunch of more stuff yesterday.

The plastics had very cheesy flowers. Luckily, I found a comic foliage texture that fits really well and used it in maaaany places

 

Nothing special. Just 2 illustrations, much much copy and pasting and some saturation/lighting on the foliage to blend between color grades.

 

Next on to tackle the platforms. They were just colored uniformely so i wanted to give them some more character. For that, I learned a new neat trick!

First Smart UV project the platofrm, then go to UV -> Export UV Layout

 

As you can already see in the final, guides were very helpful to draw some nice textures on there

Itis also nothing special. Found a dirt and a grass texture. Then I put a layer mask on the grass and slowly brought it back in with a medium scattered brush. All done with a plain old mouse, nothing but a mask  Ive seen this technique multiple times in tutorials but never used it. Its really as easy as it sounds!

 

For the top platform I wanted to do something special. The purpose of these platforms doesnt quite come to me but I thought, gargamel is on top with the smurfs. And usually, he wants to boil them (quite gruesome actually...) so why not make the ball dance on top of his cauldron? 

 

 

Cylinder, some extrusions, cast iron material. Duplicated the inner body, subdivide, wave modifier to make it swoosh and add a green material with some emission to it too make it extra toxic 😜

Good warm up for the things to come.

 

Nice!! This is developing great. Ramp cleanup is still a mess though... Gotta find a better way to fix these suckers. Hopefully VPE will bring better default ramps

 

 

 

Edited October 21, 2021 by Fraesh

[pacboy]

Congratulations Fraesh it's really very pretty and thank you for sharing with us your progress on this project. You did a big and superb job on pokemon and I'm sure Gargamel park will be very successful. I wish you good luck for the future 👍😄

[Fraesh]

Thx! Glad you enjoy Sharing the Ride

Wasnt feeling well yesterday so today, just a quick one:

 

 

I tried modeling a bit. Am happy with where the mushroom is goin, the house not so much. Appearantly, the house wants a bit more attention to look good, so ill propably rebuild it with a bit more effort in a separete file sometime

 

Ive also messed around with the cauldron a bit. Instead of having emission, it now uses a separate light sourse below it to have caustics and several vornoi textures to make more interesting bubble with displacement

 

 

Vornoi textures are crazy. 

Edited October 22, 2021 by Fraesh

[Fraesh]

Alright, not mush goin on today. 

Im actually goin to build my lockbar today (YEAY!) and fried my kl25z yesterday 😭

So thats that... i did put in some inserts on and added most of the "old" textures cause i got annoyed by all the white. 

Hopefully theyll all be replaced by something nice though  In the mean time heres a full on render of the table!

 

I think Its really starting to take shape. Also, ive done a bit of research looking at other VPW tables. They appear to be doin mostly bakes instead of the Projection mapping technique... Maybe ill try this approach this time around as the projection brings a buch of problems with it and, frankly, it makes my neck-hair stand up 😅

 

The thing is, with the projection, you also get specular lights and dont have to care for bump maps and stuff. If you dont know about 3D, heres a quick explanation of whats happening (as far as I can tell...).:

 

You got 3D Models. They represent plain geometry thats expensive to render.

Then you got textures, like the coat of paint on each element, cheap to render. 

An then theres lighting, the actual magic, computational reaaaally expensive stuff. If you see videos like "RTX in Wolfenstein" or ReShade mods of games you see the power that comes with simple lighting and low res models.

Vpx is not that great with lights. Blender is phenomenal. So we try to Cheat!!! MUAHAHA.

 

The projection mapping is what I did in Pokemon. Bord also teaches it in his tutorial, flupper tables are projected often,.... Its the 3D equivalent of projection mapping for houses, you know those? 

 

 

If your map is really good and you stand in just the right spot, it can be quite amazing to look at. But it has its caveats. You cant move around for example. Luckily pinball is very niche in that you actually dont have to move the camera at all  thats why it works here and not in normal games. But still, mappings off sometimes, you want to adjust your pov. some models are animated, meee.. Its cumbersome and if you change the slightest thing, itll break. 

 

Then theres the second way to cheat, baking. For baking, you take your model for exmaple a uniformily blue smurf, and basically paint the shadows on there that are heavily computed by blender. VPX is relieved of calculating anything on the fly since its already painted on the model. Then again, the model itself needs to be roughly rendered and theres stuff you simply cant bake. Specular lights for example. Thats the really white highlights on objects. They are highly dependend on the Angle youre looking at the object so you cant bake them. You can actually see this in my pokemon thread comparing the renders with the VPX versions. In VPX, speculars often look like this washed, really cheap plastic. Blender is mush crisper. With the projection i can take these from blender aswell, in baking I have to trust VPX with them.

 

So yea... Since its a learning project and VPW tables somehow always look great, theres gotta be way  Now im fixing my vpin.... have a nice weekend everybody!

[Wylte]

I'm not responsible (and not a blender guru at all), but yeah - VPW is swapping multiple baked textures to match different lighting/flasher combos and then doing on-the-fly modifications of lights, materials, and properties to fit.  Built uniquely for each table's needs!  Just wait until you see JD, it was a nightmare to plan out (for iaakki and Sixtoe)

[Fraesh]

Oh dear god 😅

Your doing a phenomenal job though! Im really really looking forward to VPE when plain old graphic design is basically goin to be enough to have a great looking table

Hopefully, output will be through the roof then.

Looking forward to Judge Dredd!!!

[Fraesh]

[ItchyRobot]

OMG! This is so awesome. This is one of the most played tables when friends come over. I have always wanted a graphics update, and you are delivering! thanks, I cant wait to see/play the finished table

[eMBee]

I really like following this WIP thread. Good work so far!

[Fraesh]

thx  taking a little break for now as I'm spontaniously working on a different vp related project. Will post once I continue here

[garhol]

Really liking the blender renders and this is looking very slick. You're spot on with your guide to lighting vs baked, let blender do the hard work then bake out a series of textures, pull them into photoshop or whatever you fancy as separate layers and you can start to test and control how they work by testing more/less normals, specular etc. until you are happy with them. 

[Manbearpig]

can I ask how you are getting the image to project correctly? 

 

I tried the box method that Scotty Wic has videos for, but it doesn't work well with organic shapes.

I have watched a ton of videos on blender and how to get a flattened out UVMap, but I can not get them to link/project in VPX correctly. With the box UVMap it just worked.
 

I have been searching for threads on this and even asked on VPNation, but I'm not gaining any traction

Any direction or works of wisdom would be appreciated.

 

[Fraesh]

Hey!

 

Still a bit on a break here, hopefully some blender time again soon

What do you mean by box method? Havent seen the Scotty Wic videos 😕

For the baking process I dont need to do much as the auto generated UVmap should suffice I believe/hope?

Well see, once Im at baking with this one Ill keep you up to date as per usual  

[mlager8]

On 1/11/2022 at 9:46 AM, Manbearpig said:

can I ask how you are getting the image to project correctly? 

 

I tried the box method that Scotty Wic has videos for, but it doesn't work well with organic shapes.

I have watched a ton of videos on blender and how to get a flattened out UVMap, but I can not get them to link/project in VPX correctly. With the box UVMap it just worked.
 

I have been searching for threads on this and even asked on VPNation, but I'm not gaining any traction

Any direction or works of wisdom would be appreciated.

 

Im not a blender guy so not entirely sure about the workflow there, but what I think your after is how to unwrap UVs properly.

Auto unwrap will cut into sections but not 1 big mesh like you'd need if your laying out textures in an image editor. (especially something organic like you say)

From a cursory glace it looks like blender has unwrapping addons like UV toolkit and ZenUV. I'm sure there's a native solution for unwrapping but like I said I'm not a blender user so I cant help you there.

[Manbearpig]

4 hours ago, mlager8 said:

Im not a blender guy so not entirely sure about the workflow there, but what I think your after is how to unwrap UVs properly.

Auto unwrap will cut into sections but not 1 big mesh like you'd need if your laying out textures in an image editor. (especially something organic like you say)

From a cursory glace it looks like blender has unwrapping addons like UV toolkit and ZenUV. I'm sure there's a native solution for unwrapping but like I said I'm not a blender user so I cant help you there.

Oh i suck at Blender. i was trying to use UVMapper but it sucks at organic shapes. what do you use? the cauldron and smurfs look awesome.

 

[Fraesh]

Afaik you mark "seams" on an object where it will cut the texture to unwrap it afterwards. Then again, I think this is only of importance if you wanna project a graphic on it these days. the baked materials, I dont care how they unwrap as long as they are projected back properly. Doesnt have to look pretty in the raw texture. I believe for more extensive "painting" you use stuff like substance painter? but i havent done that yet. Not much of an artist but i like chaining nodes to make materials  

[Manbearpig]

On 1/15/2022 at 4:03 PM, Fraesh said:

Afaik you mark "seams" on an object where it will cut the texture to unwrap it afterwards. Then again, I think this is only of importance if you wanna project a graphic on it these days. the baked materials, I dont care how they unwrap as long as they are projected back properly. Doesnt have to look pretty in the raw texture. I believe for more extensive "painting" you use stuff like substance painter? but i havent done that yet. Not much of an artist but i like chaining nodes to make materials  

yeah, i just had to find the right video and get a question answered on Reddit. i was able to finally figure it out in blander. its a crazy giant pain in the ass, but rewarding to see it complete. after marking all the seams you want and then doing the art in PS, its kind of rewarding. 

[Fraesh]

yea, thats the best part when it all comes together  hope to get some time in this week to do some blendering aswell!

[judremy]

Did this thread just end like this over 18 months ago?