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S-23 "Prophet" Tactical Reconnaisance Armour


Max_Caine

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  • 2 months later...

Due to a lack of resources I've had to put the mod on hold. My subscription to Maya ran out and I currently don't have enough money to renew it. I do have a completely rendered out and completed set of spritesheets for the Prophet with a rifle. But without access to Maya I cannot render out the rest of the completed animations. They're all ready to be rendered out - I just don't have the tool to do it! If anyone has a copy of Maya and is willing to render the files out, I can send you the scenes. Each frame takes 5 seconds to render in Mental Ray.

Edited by Max_Caine
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  • 2 months later...

I don't know if this'll help, but there seems to be a free trial of Maya available here:

http://www.autodesk.com/products/maya/overview

I was trying to find out how much it costs, to see if I could afford to chip in some, but saw that instead. Will that do, do you think?

EDIT: Wait, this might just be a free trial that adds features from the newest edition to the old ones. I'm gonna try installing it to make sure. Please hold until we know how clueless I've been.

REVENGE OF THE EDIT: Well, unless the updates are almost 4 gb, it's a 30 day trial of the full product. Is that gonna be enough time to do the thing? If not, I just installed it anyway, so I can help out.

Edited by MortuusSum
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....

The 30-day trial is a trial of the full product, so it will be more than sufficent.

....

(more dot dot dots later)

Mortuus, if you could pm me your email, I'll send an invite to the dropbox folders which have the animations on them,

(*worships Mortuss's feet*)

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Out of wonder, Max, would there be any benefit to multiple people working on this? I.e. I could probably afford a day or two to devote to this in the next couple of weeks if that would be helpful (and if the process isn't too complicated for me to pick up quickly).

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kabill, the more people that work on it, naturally the quicker it gets done. That's how render farms work after all. Lots of processes working in parallel to render out all the frames at once.

The process isn't too complicated once you understand how Maya works, and you only have to understand a small bit of Maya to learn how to batch render. But Maya itself fearsome - it's like learning C++ or C# when you've never coded before. Thankfully there are lot of tutorials (both video and written) which I used to help me, and I can pass this information on. And it still takes a while to grasp the nuances properly!

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Ok, sounds not impossible. Perhaps, as a suggestion, you could send me a file that needs processing for me to play with (I learn best by doing). I can then try it out and see how I get on. If that proves a success, we can then maybe see about distributing the remaining workload between us?

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Is it really required to do batch render in Maya for this project ?I may have a friend who would be interest to help but he has 3DS Max, he is in phase of learning (or sharpening his skill,how he likes to call it).However I can't promise anything for sure.

Edit:Removed unrelated stuff.

Edited by Sentelin
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I think that some explanation is needed of terms used in Maya to fully describe what needs doing. I am in severe pain at the moment, this is taking a long while to write, and after this I am goign to crawl into a ball and whimper.

Traditionally, when an animation is made and completed in Maya, Maya does not take that animation and directly translate it into a video clip or other such item. What Maya does natively is take each individual frame of the animation and render those frames out into ready-made pictures so other software can take all the frames and animate them. Sophisticated 3d game engines like Unity can directly import models and animations, but a game like Xenonauts which relies on 2d isometric sprites requires each individual frame.

Now, there are two ways to render out frames in Maya. The first way is to manually select each frame and render it. This takes a long time, as you have to set up each frame individually. The second way is to do what is called a batch render. This is tells Maya to render out X number of frames from Y frame to Z frame. On average, each weapon/armour set requires 680-720 frames per facing so rendering each frame individually is impossible unless you wanted to spend all year doing it. For reference, it doesn't take that long per frame. On my 7-year old computer (not even a i-series!) it takes on average 5 seconds per frame. On anything faster - even an i3 - I'm certain it would be very quick to render.

Sentilin, it's entirely possible to import Maya files into 3ds Max. I know this because I've just typed "import Maya into 3ds Max" into google and come up with a lot of returns. However, all the Maya files I have are saved as native Maya files, and I'm not sure how you would do it otherwise.

Right, god, that took ages to write. I shall write more when I feel healthier.

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kabill, I will send you the details you need as well as the access you require. The painkillers have finally kicked in but this stuff makes me sleepy so I would rather do it tomorrow when I am more compos mentis.

Cool, though there's no rush (I'll be unable to look at anything before the middle of next week anyway).

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  • 3 months later...

Funny you should mention that. Yes, I am. I paid the original modeller to fix problems with rendering, and he's been rendering out complete weapon sets. However, 1) the process of converting individual sprites into spritesheets of the correct size is painfully slow because I don't have the right tools so a lot of work with the spectres has to be done by hand. (Actually converting sprites into spritesheets is very quick, but there's a lot of fine-tuning has has to be done). 2) the modeller now works for Nexon America, so he's doing this work in his spare time. I do have a finished set of spritesheets I could show everyone if they were interested.

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Funny you should mention that. Yes, I am. I paid the original modeller to fix problems with rendering, and he's been rendering out complete weapon sets. However, 1) the process of converting individual sprites into spritesheets of the correct size is painfully slow because I don't have the right tools so a lot of work with the spectres has to be done by hand. (Actually converting sprites into spritesheets is very quick, but there's a lot of fine-tuning has has to be done). 2) the modeller now works for Nexon America, so he's doing this work in his spare time. I do have a finished set of spritesheets I could show everyone if they were interested.

This is a good answer! At least the project is live and running!

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