Do I need to be good at graphics to build a 3D game?

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Chris Corbyn
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Do I need to be good at graphics to build a 3D game?

Post by Chris Corbyn »

I signed up for the iPhone Developer (Standard) program recently and want to put the money to use.

Just for fun I'd like to play around with building the engine for an iPhone game using OpenGL. The only thing is, my graphics/design skills are terrible. Usually somebody else does the graphics in any web projects I work on... I just do the programming.

I'm not sure this is the right place to ask these questions but I guessed maybe some people here are 3D-graphics buffs too.

Question 1: I know I'll need to understand the basics of how to create the 3D models, but I'm wondering if I need real graphics skills in order to build something like this, or (like with web design) can I just wireframe the elements of the game and get somebody else to do the graphics afterwards? I'm not sure how it tightly coupled the 3D models are to the application itself.

Question 2: Any suggestions for 3D graphics software for Mac?

EDIT | Free and open source is always good when you only want to play around :) http://www.blender.org/
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greyhoundcode
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Re: Do I need to be good at graphics to build a 3D game?

Post by greyhoundcode »

I've played around doing some stuff in 3D via Ogre, nothing too advanced, but basically the meshes (wireframes) and materials (textures) are loaded in and combined into entities, checks for collisions etc are handled by the lib, so yeah I imagine it is quite feasible to separate the graphics from the code, at least at a basic level.

Afraid I've no specifics on OpenGL, I'm sure someone somewhere will though.
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Chris Corbyn
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Re: Do I need to be good at graphics to build a 3D game?

Post by Chris Corbyn »

Thanks for the link to Ogre.

I'll hopefully start playing around with some simple concepts tomorrow. Not that I'll be able to do anything particularly useful... I'll be excited if I can rotate a cube in a 3D space of something with OpenGL :lol:
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Re: Do I need to be good at graphics to build a 3D game?

Post by josh »

I think it would help to have someone with some design experience. One thing I did with my flash games was sketch things, scan them, and illustrator can actually identify the lines & colors and transform that into vector to work with, kind of how I made my avatar
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Re: Do I need to be good at graphics to build a 3D game?

Post by Paul Arnold »

I seem to remember your brother building a 3D racing game in Java Chris.

Give him a shout :P
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Re: Do I need to be good at graphics to build a 3D game?

Post by mintedjo »

MAKE AN ORRERY!

They made us build one at uni in OpenGl using GLUT. It sounds like a boring pile of crap but it's quite satisfying when you get everything working.
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Chris Corbyn
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Re: Do I need to be good at graphics to build a 3D game?

Post by Chris Corbyn »

Paul Arnold wrote:I seem to remember your brother building a 3D racing game in Java Chris.

Give him a shout :P
He did, as part of a uni project, you're right.

I'm actually learning to use blender now so I can at least knock something together. The ironic thing is that I'm quite creative and artistic (I can do some pretty arty-farty things on paper/canvas)... it's just the tools that I'm not versed in.

I've been sidetracked... because I work on a MacBook (the newer ones) I have no numpad, and blender distinguishes the numpad keys different from the ones along the top of the keyboard. So like any real nerd, I've begun the process of writing an iPhone app to turn my iPhone into a numeric keypad over bluetooth. Once that's done I'll get back on with blender :P
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Re: Do I need to be good at graphics to build a 3D game?

Post by tanja »

3D Graphic is not such an easy as you think. Ypu nedd to have a great experience in it to ba good at it
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Christopher
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Re: Do I need to be good at graphics to build a 3D game?

Post by Christopher »

Chris, if you look around you may be able to find existing 3D models and textures that you could repurpose for your game. There are lots on the web -- many free, even more for sale. You could probably tweak the textures using GIMP or Photoshop yourself to customize things.

I wouldn't recommend trying to learn a 3D package as an experiment. You'd be better off finding an interested artist and sharing the royalties.
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Re: Do I need to be good at graphics to build a 3D game?

Post by pickle »

Also not a 3D graphics guru, but I think generally 3D games don't use 3D models with the textures built in. They have a wireframe that is the model, then they stretch a skin overtop the model. This is useful when you want to use the same model for different things.

I'm thinking of Unreal Tournament where you could re-skin the male and female models. Regardless of the skin, the model was the same. Now, it may be more complex now with different light rasterization techniques, but I doubt you'll be doing anything that fancy in your first go.

Long story short - I think you can just make the wireframe models, then get an artist to build the fancy skins for it.
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