A Brand new model for TPB3D is underway and so far I've only get the basic framework for the main wheel in place. More detail needs to be added to the wheel, plus the support, hub cars and platform. What's here so far is the third attempt, after redesigning the texture several times- and probably won't be the last.

The wheel itself has 8 stationary cars and 16 "rolling" cars that each travel around their own oval shaped tracks from the outter rim to the inner rim. This ride, when ready will need to be a combo flat and track ride, since the traveling cars should move as if affected by gravity.


More To Come

wow vodhin, i cant wait....... is this just the plain ferris wheel? or the one with swinging cars as in coney island and california adventure?

Swinging sliding gondolas like in Coney Island and Disney's California Adventure. I think there is another one in Australia or that area of the world. Anyone who can nab pics of it that would be great too.

The Giant Wonder Wheel should be doable in the new FRCS. I am thinking the sliding gondolas would just be animated on a vertical elipse each in the wheel itself and applied to the individual tracks. Too bad WC boogied again till next holiday season to pretend to come back. Ghosts of xmas past

This looks amazing Vodhin, wish you the best of luck.

Nice thing is that the ms3d stuff can go officially into the repository for the game now, cause we will be allowing importing ms3d into the game besides .3DS and .AFS files officially.

Krakatoa_Coo Wrote:wow vodhin, i cant wait....... is this just the plain ferris wheel? or the one with swinging cars as in coney island and california adventure?

The famuous Cony Island one (I've been on it a long time ago, and I've got a nice reference pic- including a street sign that tells me it is the CI one I am referencing)

slickdude Wrote:...I am thinking the sliding gondolas would just be animated on a vertical elipse each in the wheel itself and applied to the individual tracks....

If it could be done with a combo ride/track, it would behave a little better and have more options for how it runs. I can do a fixed animation sequence if needed (It's already done, actually )

Eagle Eye Wrote:This looks amazing Vodhin, wish you the best of luck.

Thanks! Hopefully we'll be able to ride it soon

slickdude Wrote:Nice thing is that the ms3d stuff can go officially into the repository for the game now, cause we will be allowing importing ms3d into the game besides .3DS and .AFS files officially.

Excellent news. MilkShape is - in my opinion, just right for this type of stuff... We just need to bug Meete Ciragan over at Chumbalumsoft to add Spline capabilities



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A quick update before I turn in for the night:



The texture is taking shape, still a bit of little tweaks to make all the alpha sectionsalign just right. Just so you know, the main wheel - with all it's section in place, should be under 600 triangles, leaving lots of room for more details on the cars and supports

Looks amazing Vodhin! I really need to start posting in the forums more often...But anyway, brilliant!

Excellent detailing. If GermanTaco gets his latest ride done, this will be a neat park compliment. Also for those wishing to reenact Coney's famous parks or even Disney's California Adventure, this should do very well. Hopefully we can get more older Coney rides going soon. One ride I was hoping aelf2004 would have nailed was "The Whip" before he disappeared again. I know people have wanted a Whip on the main list for a while now.

Well this looks great as always.

I can't wait to see that in the rendering engine, man that's sharp

bennyboy-92 Wrote:Looks amazing Vodhin!

Thanks. It's getting better

slickdude Wrote:Excellent detailing. If GermanTaco gets his latest ride done, this will be a neat park compliment...

Thanks- you know me...

AlabamaCajun Wrote:I can't wait to see that in the rendering engine, man that's sharp

Thanks. Glad to see you around again. Hopefully this weekend :) It needs testing: once I got the final planes in the model (the tracks that are just two 2D planes on each side per track oval) MilkShape started lagging. A render ntest will definately need to be done: it is heavy on alphas and uses a texture that is huge (working texture 2048x2048, probably can go down to 1024x1024) I'm considering alternatives. The entire model you see below is 788 triangles/1202 verticies, so there is room to reduce alpha usage and increase polygons if needed.

Textures are nearly ready for the main wheel, and preliminary animation tests look good so far.

More To Come

Vodhin, I love your work. This is just amazing! This might just be one of the first rides I play around with in-game.

Should be doable in the new FRCS. As for Cook's version FRCS, it will have to wait as an oddity ride version.

That will definitely test the limits of rendering.
I would like to test 100 of them in the testbox to see what it does.
Is there a way to reduce the texture size to 512x512

[speculation]
Later it may be possible to reduce the size further with a shader which would mean loading a script with the compiled ride.
[/speculation]

Actually from what I am seeing here, Vodhin you have very little to do, the frame and name placard aside this is about ready to be nailed for the community.

The Wonder Wheel is starting to take on a finished appearance with the addition of the main supports. It's taken a lot of hours to shape the texture and add all those little rivits

AlabamaCajun Wrote:That will definitely test the limits of rendering.
I would like to test 100 of them in the testbox to see what it does.
Is there a way to reduce the texture size to 512x512

[speculation]
Later it may be possible to reduce the size further with a shader which would mean loading a script with the compiled ride.
[/speculation]

Well, this uses Alphas quite heavily and I'm using a "master" texture (larger than what would be in game). Consider the height of the wheel: 150 feet in reality. From the hub to the rim it's about 24 units (72 feet). I's using a resolution that is only about 96 pixels per unit, or 32 pixels per "foot."

Right now (as of this post) the model is just under 1000 triangles and about 1600 verticies. The cars will bump that up a considerable amount when they get added- I'm guessing about 42 triangles per car, with 24 cars total.

Having moved the texture for the inner track to another texture image, I noticed that the smoothness of the animation improved. This is just MilkShape's lowly rendering, but it might hint at a better way to assemble the model.

So my question is: do I break the texture apart into pieces, thinking that there may be 'number crunching' issues with a large area UV map or do I plow ahead with a large (1024x1024 in game) texture? Or is it more efficient to actually model more faces (the orange parts would be one candidate)? Remember: this is a large ride, and will likely only get placed once in a given park.

Here's the map of the texture, reduced for the web:



As you can see, I planned to use the the pizza slice idea so I can easily create Low detail versions. Even once the rest of this texture is filled in with the remaining parts, there will still be a lot of dead space...

Dude Oh wow this is just incredible! Can't wait till it gets secured in the main repository for the game.

Wow I have stood right under it, that looks amazing great job! If you need reference pics I put these up for wc.

http://www.csfontheweb.com/wwpics/

I took them my self so if you want to use any of them (thinking like the one of the sine) for a texture fell free.

I think what we will do for cars and pie sliced stuff is load them into the video card one and replicate then on the fly.
That reduced the poly count considerably and throws the major load of high polys in the Vid card which can handle it better.
As for the texture size, you might just leave is as is and let us get the app running then see what is will take to make it work.
The main concern is will video cards have enough memory to handle close to 100 textures and all the geometry?
I'm willing to do what it takes to make master pieces like this work.