This was way more pain in the ass than I thought it has any business to be. One and a half hours just for this beam, and calculating the correct placement of the holes on the diagonal part.
And thank Pytagoras for online calculators for triangles where you just type the numbers you know into fields on a diagram. 😅
But now that I have this, I think I have half the work for a second building style done.
(He told himself foolishly.)
Yesterday was an almost total no progress day, but with stuff like this it immediately becomes a lot of fun again.
With this thing, I am willing to accept a little bit of cheating.
The holes on the vertical beam have a spacing of 251mm, and the ones on the horizontal beams of 255mm.
On the second crossbeam from the top, the two central holes are off by 14mm. The third and fourth are even smaller.
Total height is 12.5m.
Mathematically not perfect, but imperceptible.
This looks awesome.
Again, this is two beams, one floor plate, and lots of Arrays, Mirrors, and Booleans. Only thing still missing is clipping the floor that extend through the wall.
Is it still low-poly graphics?
Not really.
Does this increase rendering times by a factor of 100 and wreck any ideas to have real time dynamic lighting work even on a potato.
Definitely.
But it's really cool. 😆
10cm wide holes are really hard to justify in a low-fidelity game. You won't really be able to see anything behind them from 2 or 3 meters away, and I can see them increasing the rendering computations for dynamic lighting exponentially.
I think just putting black circles on the textures where the holes would be will get the idea across sufficiently and not look out of place.
And the cylinder arrays I made to create the holes are also necessary to accurately place the black circles as well.
Now I am very happy with how this came out. Using the Boolean-Array holes in the UV map to place the black circles and then turning the Boolean modifiers off to simplify the geometry worked great. And I think for mid-90s graphics, the black circles as representations of holes should fit with the other visuals as well. Even in the desert at full daylight.
Again, this is a fully modular system that now lets me build sheds, towers, and bridges of many dimensions with drag and drop.
Rendering time without the holes improved from 2m30s to 23s.
And that's with static lighting. I think for dynamic lighting, this will makes an even bigger difference.
The modular assembly system for metal bunkers is working beautifully and just as intended.
But doing corners is turning out to be a problem. Not a Blender problem. But rather an engineering problem how to put the beams together in a way that would hold up the weight of the floor plating above.
Things completely irrelevant for a #Raw3D game where things can just float in the air, but I want to do this right!
Yora
Misja van Laatum