Calling All Vector Artists! Let's Make Stadiums Together

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by MidKnight

3D was definitely a thought, but unfortunately I'm not as proficient with 3D modeling. I might take a look at the UT3 editor though, since it's on my system anyway.

I've been wanting to do the same, since from what I understand the Unreal engine editor is easier to use now than was the case in earlier versions. However, I'd have to pick up Unreal Tournament 3 first (which I might do at some point. I own two of the previous three games in the franchise).

[tombair]

I'm going to try Blender - it's a free 3d modeling program. My Keystone Baseball league needs some stadiums.

blender.org - Home

It might be a while before I get there though. The KBL is getting 12 new teams and fantasy drafts are also right around the corner.

I'll post when I have something to report.

[Ceej]

Any news with regard to 2D or 3D incarnations of this project? I've tried Blender in the meantime but I just can't get into the interface.

On 3DS Max 7 I just made a box, modified a generic park file used for DMB and mapped it over top of the box to get a playing surface. Then I made a big brown sphere and submerged most of it under the pitcher's mound area with just the top poking out to get a little 3D mound. The outfield wall is just a half-tube with a tiny repeated map of a line over a light blue background that creates the illusion of outfield padding. With just a little more effort you could map outfield distance markers and ads onto the fences as well. I'm thinking once you've got seating "built", it would be pretty easy to "populate" your seating by putting maps of coloured dots over top of them; by swapping out the seating maps you could display your seating as full, half-full or nearly empty for any given game.

Well, the attached pic is obviously pretty crude, but the diamond itself already looks fairly good and I can see it having potential if anybody wants to help go this way. I've never been any good at lighting in any 3D program, I'm looking at the edges of that outfield wall and thinking that the lighting might be a challenge if you're trying to make a park look convincingly dappled in summer afternoon sun. (hmmm)

[tombair]

Ceej, that looks great. I have mainly been mainly trying to get a 2D (overhead) image of exactly what I want, what goes where, how deep and tall the fences are, etc. I figure that unless I know exactly what I want before I try to get it into a 3D model, I could spent a lot of time just wandering around.

I'm pretty much designing a ballpark from scratch which is a lot of fun but also requires a lot of thinking about where the seats go, etc. I figure once I finish the first one, the others will be easier.

My first park is located in York, PA circa 1950. It's going to be similar to a smaller version of Ebbets Field with a tall RF fence that has a big scoreboard and lots of signs. I am trying to be somewhat historically accurate w.r.t. the signs, etc.

I've fooled around with Blender a bit but I'm still pretty much lost there. That's going to take some time.

One thing. The mound is not spherical and symmetrical. That's one thing I figured out. Here are dimensions for it.

http://www.diamondpro.com/fielddimen...quaremound.pdf

I have designed some of the signs that will go in the OF. I tried to go for a local flavor but I'm going to also have some national ones (Pepsi, Maxwell House, etc.). Here are a couple of them.

[satchel]

Ceej, that looks like some good work. This is something I'm really interested in.

How did you get the DMB field to tilt back, three-dimensional? Is that a feature of the new program, or can Blender do it?

[Ceej]

Originally Posted by satchel

Ceej, that looks like some good work. This is something I'm really interested in.

How did you get the DMB field to tilt back, three-dimensional? Is that a feature of the new program, or can Blender do it?

The field is mapped onto the face of a 3-D box object, wrapped over it like a "skin". Once that's done you don't tilt the box object at all - well you COULD, but that's an awkward way to do it. It's the viewport that's been tilted in that shot. You can tilt the viewport with any 3-D program including Blender, you just have to get comfortable enough with the viewport that you can step beyond just using the top views and side views and learn to swing the viewport around to make your own custom views. There are lots of viewport tutorials for Blender on the web.

I'm thinking if we're going the 3-D route, maybe the best way is to make 3-D renderings of different components of the park and then save those components as separate layers in one big Illustrator and/or Photoshop-compatible file, bringing it all back to the OP's concept where talented vector artists can participate. Anyway, I'm going to see what else I can get around to by the end of the weekend such as foul poles and distance markers, maybe a first stab at seating and yes, revisiting the mound

[Ceej]

Here's what I was up to on the weekend. I shrunk the bases and foul lines to more realistic sizes, added a first base running lane, flattened the mound and put a texture on it. I put a map over the outfield wall to allow writing some dimensions on it, took a stab at a very basic scoreboard, and enclosed the rest of the field.

The warning track is pretty easy to do from there, I just traced around the walls to get the shape. The warning track is separate from the grass and so you see the foul lines are lost at the corners; there are several ways to fix that, but all of them have a drawback so I just left it for now.

I tried to do some seating but it's going to need more work, I did the seat backs only and the seats don't look like they take up enough space as a result. Those red blocks on the far left were an attempt at doing steps. The sloped seating is by far the hardest thing to do.

This camera angle suits my personal preferences best, as far as space allotted for the playing field vs. space for everything else. It's a bit more of a birds-eye view than you're probably used to seeing photos of, because it's from higher up then where a press box would typically be located. The playing field is roomy as a result, though it comes at the cost of probably not having much of a skyline to look at. You'll have to tell me if you like this angle or if you want to give up some playing field room in exchange for sky/horizon. (I would also point out here that if there's no sky in the picture, you might not need to keep separate day/night pics) If we can agree on a common angle, we could then work on coming up with things to fill up that dark space at the top of the picture with; interstate highways, railway lines, residential or commercial buildings, parking lots, etc. - all at a compatible angle so the user can swap them out for each other.

I have a very busy week so it will be at least a full week before I can do any more construction on this; I just wanted to get the ball rolling on the viewing angle question.

[riafkcin]

Wow, these are coming out very nicely. I can't wait to see some finished products. Good luck Ceej

[No Pepper]

Why didn't I think of 3dsmax? Argh...not that I know how to use it, well. Keep up the good work Ceej, you may be onto something here!

[tombair]

Nice work, Ceej. Quite a bit of progress in a short amount of time.

[dcpcarmona]

very nice!!!

[Ceej]

Well, this was interesting. Up to this point my park was mostly made up of a handful of boxes and half-tubes, but making seats required a huge increase in numbers of polygons. As I copied and pasted more and more seats, my computer started crashing like crazy.

So I can't make a fully realized 3-D park in Max alone. Instead, I made as few actual seats as I could get away with, and just copied images of them over and over with the magic of Photoshop. Then I dappled a whole bunch of coloured dots over top with the paintbrush tool to see if it would look like a crowd. You can see that cloning has created some problems in the upper right hand side that I didn't get around to fixing. Also, there are no steps in the aisles. But overall it looks OK I think.

I haven't tried to go back and refine it any further yet, because now I need to decide if it wouldn't just be easier to copy seating from actual photographs/renderings of real ballparks and use pieces of those for my seating areas. I mean, since I'm going to have to abandon rendering every single seat in 3-D anyway, that might be the best option, hmmmm.

[tombair]

It's lookin' good, Ceej!

I don't think polygons for the crowd is a good idea either. I plan on using a texture (at least that's what Blender calls it) similar to this. It's just a bunch of jumbled up people.



BTW, I started a new thread for 3D stadium construction since we had kinda highjacked this one and are a bit off topic. You can post there if you want. http://www.ootpdevelopments.com/boar...struction.html

[ShaneCarson]

Have you done any more work on your project midknight? Loved the look of the stadium you have and would love to see more!

[gbmoore121]

MidKnight, do you still have those templates? I am just now getting into vector art and would like to give this a shot.

I think it is a great idea. Did you continue to work on it?