DescentBB

Any other Engineers out there have it and/or have played with it?

Here are some renderings I have done just for fun:

Triforce, using a no background:



Triforce, sky background:



Can you tell which bottle is fake (rendered)?



It seems that a weakness of the program is rendering surfaces that emit light. The nixie tube below was a big disappointment as it took some time to put together. First, PV 360 didn't have an orange neon glow to apply, so I had to use yellow. Secondly, no light is reflected in the glass or off of other parts inside the tube. What did turn out well was the glass effects, especially the sealing bead at the top of the tube.



Does anyone have any Descent stuff, either an existing solid model that I could import or approx dimensions with which I could model something cool, such as the Pyro, weapons, robots, etc?

Nice Triforce render!
as for the bottle (rendered)-
the Red one (I think)

Sapphire Wolf wrote:Nice Triforce render!
as for the bottle (rendered)-
the Red one (I think)

yup it is the brown one in front

Does anyone have any Descent stuff, either an existing solid model that I could import or approx dimensions with which I could model something cool, such as the Pyro, weapons, robots, etc?

He thinks? Of course the one that's sharp with no label is the one that was rendered!! If you had done some post-render editing and blurred it to match the background then the only easy way to tell the difference would have been the lack of any label.

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Some quick renderings...





Flying through a warehouse looking for robots to nuke...



And something completely unrelated to Descent, but completely related to today's date.

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EngDrewman,

I'm a SolidWorks applications engineer for a reseller with a background in manufacturing (machining, welding, fabrication, etc...). As a hobby I use SolidWorks to model props from movies, tv shows and video games. If I'm inspired enough I go the full distance and build them.

Last year I built the radio from the game portal for my kids.



The full story on the radio is found here

I have also modeled the weighted companion cube and one of the turrets, both shown here rendered in PhotoView 360





PhotoView 360 is an ease of use renderer. For more options (and complexity) you will need to use the PhotoWorks add-in in SolidWorks

As for Descent models, I found Michael \"Eagle\" Dorner's Pyro model in 3ds format on the old

Descent2.com site.

You can import this model If you have SolidWorks Premium. Go to Tools - Add-Ins and turn on the \"Scan to 3D\" add-in. Then when you go to File - Open you will find \"Mesh Files\" has been added to your file types which include 3ds.

I was not able to import this model in perfectly. The textures wouldn't load and many of the meshes are misaligned, requiring some tweaking in SolidWorks to re-align them.

I started to work on it a while back but found that while the model is highly detailed, it didn't match the cinematics from D2 and the PS version of D1, and abandoned it for the time being. At some point I will pick it up again.

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Spooky wrote:Justin Krentzs' Pyro imported from his 3DS file needs no "tweaking" and the textures included work.

Well, the only problem is that Solidworks can't natively open a .3ds file, so as PyroJockey described it does take A LOT of tweaking to get it to work right. You can see this in the first two pics in my last post- there is a triangular hole in the top of the canopy (which is why I said "A few quick renderings"). There are also gaps between surfaces that I have to fix as well. Also, none of the curved surfaces are truly smooth as it would be if it had been natively created in SW. (See below: yuck!)



Interestingly it opens perfectly in Blender, except the textures are MIA. Too bad I don't know squat about Blender and there seems to be no straightforward way to send a model from Blender to SW.



PyroJockey:
Nice Portal renderings! Looks like you didn't have the heart to destroy your companion cube. Does the radio actually work or is it just a prop?

I also use SW on the job. I'm a Mechanical Engineering student in my last semester at Sac State. I also work part time for a very small engineering company doing drafting and rendering in SW.

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EngDrewman

The radio works and plays the salsa version of \"Still Alive\" from the game. Details of it's construction can be found here

I dabble with Blender but just as a translator. I really don't know how to use it otherwise.

My current project is to build the most realistic Portal gun ever. I used Blender to import SMD files converted from the game's MDL files.



Once in Blender I save them out as DXF files that I can import as SolidWorks models.



The models come in as 3D wireframe curves with surfaces, primarily lofted, between them. I found that if I import the models with the units specified as meters they import to scale.



The models are faceted and some of the surfaces may need repaired but all the base geometry is there and to scale. This saves me countless hours of work.



I use the base geometry to create the various solid bodies and rebuild the coarse faceted model with smooth surfaces.



This is a work in progress. Once the model is complete, I will make a set of detail drawings and patterns for fabrication.


Spooky,

What modeling/rendering program(s) are you using?

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