Content: Slate Blackcurrant Watermelon Strawberry Orange Banana Apple Emerald Chocolate Marble
Background: Slate Blackcurrant Watermelon Strawberry Orange Banana Apple Emerald Chocolate Marble
Pattern: Blank Waves Notes Sharp Wood Rockface Leather Honey Vertical Triangles
Welcome to TerraFirmaCraft Forums

Register now to gain access to all of our features. Once registered and logged in, you will be able to contribute to this site by submitting your own content or replying to existing content. You'll be able to customize your profile, receive reputation points as a reward for submitting content, while also communicating with other members via your own private inbox, plus much more! This message will be removed once you have signed in.

  • Announcements

    • Dries007

      ATTENTION Forum Database Breach   03/04/2019

      There has been a breach of our database. Please make sure you change your password (use a password manager, like Lastpass).
      If you used this password anywhere else, change that too! The passwords themselves are stored hashed, but may old accounts still had old, insecure (by today's standards) hashes from back when they where created. This means they can be "cracked" more easily. Other leaked information includes: email, IP, account name.
      I'm trying my best to find out more and keep everyone up to date. Discord (http://invite.gg/TerraFirmaCraft) is the best option for up to date news and questions. I'm sorry for this, but the damage has been done. All I can do is try to make sure it doesn't happen again.
    • Claycorp

      This forum is now READ ONLY!   01/20/2020

      As of this post and forever into the future this forum has been put into READ ONLY MODE. There will be no new posts! A replacement is coming SoonTM . If you wish to stay up-to-date on whats going on or post your content. Please use the Discord or Sub-Reddit until the new forums are running.

      Any questions or comments can be directed to Claycorp on either platform.
Th3A1ph4D0g

Porcupine

15 posts in this topic

I have spent awhile trying to figure out how to make this model work. The quills have been the hardest problem I have had by far in my modeling. A porcupine's quills are generally very fine. This is difficult to try to convey with the blocky-ness of mine craft. I would like to get all of your input on this as well. In earlier versions I had used full boxes for the quills. This created a far too bloated look. For the quills in this version, Darmo suggested transparent planes. This reduced the amount of boxes used by roughly 30 boxes. The transparent quills make for a finer look. I have attached the model and texture below. Please give me your comments over the design.

Porcupine New Style V3.png

Porcupine.png

MCMCPorcupineV1.MCModel

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I really like it. The model looks great. The only think I can think of, is that the quill texture should be a bit more banded, as the porcupine quills I have seen are, but other than that it looks really good.

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Here's a question for Bioxx - one thing I thought might be useful to get a finer quill texture, would be to scale the entire mass of quills.  Similar to how the plan was to scale down the horns on Konlii's ibex, while leaving the body alone, in order to keep the fine detail of taper, but at a correct scale.  In theory we could do the same thing on the entire quill mass of the porcupine - if Alpha built a body box 2-3 times as large as the 'actual' one, built a mass of quills on this oversize box, then made the oversize body box 'NOBOX' and all the quills are children of it, then this entire mass could be scaled down 1/2 to 1/3 or whatever.  This would make the quills appear much finer, while allowing the head, legs, and so forth, to remain in a scale more in line with other mobs and the world.    If this sounds like a good strategy, would it be possible to get the ability to perform this scaling in MCMC?  It would make it easier to create and visualize such a strategy.  Because as it is, Alpha would just have to make a gigantic quill mass and hope that it all looks right when scaled down in code.

As for texture, I think it's mostly African porcupines that have the alternating black bands.  American ones I think have black tips.  In any case, the quills as shown may be a bit coarse for that to look right.  But if we can use the scaling strategy described above, the quills could effectively be twice or however many times as long in pixels, and that would probably look much better, in terms of banding.

Edited by Darmo
0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Performing a global scale would probably be doable in MCMC, but in this case, I would probably recommend using a larger texture to allow for smaller pixels per quill. Then just use 2x2 pixels for each individual pixel for the rest of the porcupine. Or alternatively just make the quills thinner, they do not HAVE to be 1 pixel wide.

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

 

3 hours ago, Bioxx said:

Or alternatively just make the quills thinner, they do not HAVE to be 1 pixel wide.

Wait, what?  I didn't think we could make a box smaller than 1 pixel.   Double scale texture is doable, but it either requires Alpha to do a bunch of detail work making 4-pixel groups to simulate a lower resolution texture on the body, or we just use the finer grained texture for the whole thing.

Edited by Darmo
0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

It looks like I enforced them to be integers(may be a requirement in mc i can't remember), you're correct.

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
7 minutes ago, Bioxx said:

It looks like I enforced them to be integers(may be a requirement in mc i can't remember), you're correct.

I found a Minecraft Forge Forum post discussing some code for allowing ModelRenderer.addBox() to accept float values.

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Ok, so personally I think it would be a lot better if the quills were at a finer scale - whether via a scaled down quill cluster, or a double-resolution texture.  The only other clear-cut opinion we've heard is by Therighthon, who is ok with it as is.  I don't want to ask Alpha to do a ton of work just for my opinion, but if you don't mind Alpha, I'd like to try taking the texture after you're done with it, and convert it to an oversize version, with 1/2 thickness quills, and see how that looks.

Edited by Darmo
0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I plan on working on the model a slight bit more to try to add a little more density.

Edited by Th3A1ph4D0g
0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

If you want to try to make an up-sized version after I finish my few changes then go ahead Darmo. I would suggest up-scaling by three however. All the quill planes are odd integers so that they fit in an consistent pattern. An increase by 2x would make some of the textures have a weird orientation. 

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

On the concept of banded quills. These are not true rings around the quills but in the pictures I saw the lengths of the bands varied as well. What are your thoughts on this? A different view of the porcupine as well.

Porcupine Quill Change.png

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I like it.  Adds some interest to the quills, really draws the eye.

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Finally got around to going for thinner quills.  It ended up being much easier to just double the size of the texture, and simply reducing the quill parts of the texture to 1 pixel wide.  I first did this for The original model (left), but then I did try to rearrange the quill boxes, and also make them actual full 6-sided boxes (right), to reduce their numbers vs the multitude of 2d planes.  It also seems like the 2d planes in the original model make it harder to select other boxes sometimes. 

The problem with this is the backside culling makes them not show up on the 'inside'.  I remembered Konlii (I think) mentioned that actual minecraft shows the backsides.  After a little research, my impression is that the default is for backsides to be culled, but it's possible to cancel this behavior temporarily, to render boxes where you want the backsides shown.  So my question for Bioxx is, could we get MCMC updated so that each box has a check box option to NOT cull the back faces of that particular box?  It'd make the modeling end of things a lot simpler.

PorcupineV5&V7.jpg

1

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

This new version is loads better than the original at the top of this chain. The new sizing gives the quills a much finer look. We will never get it to look exactly life-like unless we blew up the model by something ridiculous like 32x and had Bioxx scale that down in post. I don't think MCMC could even render a texture that large.

One thing to consider on your new model is the positioning of the quills. In the original (the left) the quills started pretty much from the end of the neck. In your new version, the quills start in the middle of the legs it seems.

I also believe that the scale that you used for the quills is off. They look to be sticking out of the body by a box on each side. I see that the original stuck out of the front slightly on accident but not the sides. Maybe scale down the ZY-quills (Top) by two to make the box fit on the body once more. The XY-quills (Sides) seem fine but might need an adjustment in the X direction.

Overall, after the scaling gets looked at, this model is a big improvement.

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Ya, I noticed those position problems too once I posted the pictures side by side.  I spent a lot of time playing with different angles and sizes and apparently things got off without me noticing.     It'll be easy enough to fix, but I'd really like to find out if there's a possibility of getting a per-box option to have back face culling nullified before I spend more time on it.  If so, I think the full boxes route will just make things easier overall.  But if we can't do that, then we'll just go with your original 2d planes Alpha, as you did a good job with positioning those.  So I'm going to shelve this one until we can get a ruling from Bioxx on the culling.

Edited by Darmo
0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites