Quote:
Originally Posted by Kendras
Hello 
Could you briefly tell us what you have done so far, and what you are planning to do during the month ?  |
Hi Kendras, sorry for my late feed-back I planned to reply at the beginning of the weak, but a cold kept me away from my usual activities for days
As you might have noticed, unfortunately my working method is a bit chaotic: I start a project, I loose interest, I start a new project and before I got it finished, I get back to first one, but not before having committed myself to a third project. The good news is that, with the motivation of some good subsim mates as you, soon or later I will finish them all
Talking about this mod, here is what I have done so far:
1) As I told you a while back, the Düne (Helgoland) leading lights are 100% ready. I know that at this stage you are mostly focused on French lights and that the Helgoland-Düne islands are poorly implemented in SHIII, but nonetheless I think they might make a nice addition to the game. Moreover, importing them might provide us with some additional insight on the best importing method, which will come in handy when we'll be ready to implement other lighthouses. If you are on it, I can import the models in a set of SH files, and send them your way
2) To be honest, I didn't work on the phare de la Vieille in a long time, but its model is almost ready. The main lighthouse structure is done. The concrete base, the rock and the
Temperly crane (added in 1926 and destroyed by a storm in 2008) are mostly modelled but some touch-ups are still needed (the rock must be extended below the sea level for instance), along with some UV-mapping and texture work. Ambient occlusion and normal maps are also in my todo list, but since I still have not fully clear how do they work in SHIII and whether we can have both of them on the same material or not, I think I can leave these features for a second moment. Extracting a generic lighthouse model from my representation of the La Vielle lighthouse should be fairly easy
3) More recently, I have started working on the
Tourelle de la Plate, also known as "Petite Vieille" due to its position, facing the phare de la Vieille in the Raz de Sein. Now it is a bit too early to show you a preview, but the model is coming along nicely. Completed in 1896, destroyed shortly after by a storm, and rebuilt 12 years later as a 26-m long octagonal solid reinforced concrete tower laying on a submerged rock, this lighthouse is currently painted/lighted as a cardinal west mark. I couldn't find any information on its usage during the 40s, but I can suppose it had to be similar to the current one. Let me know if you find any useful information on this topic.
4) Talking about the rocky reefs that you asked for a while back, I think there was a misunderstanding. All the lighthouses I plan to release will come with their own customized rocky base where it applies, so to make sure that the two parts are fitting together as best as possible. When you first asked for the rocks, I thought you just wanted some reefs models to be randomly placed on the sea bottom in lithoral waters, so to mimic submerged or semi-submerged unsignaled obstacles. If you agree on their utility, I still think that the Blender heightmap extrusion method I illustrated a few months ago, is the easiest way to quickly create a virtually endless number of reefs. All I need is you to point me to the heightmaps you like (there are many freely available on the web) and to provide me with the approximate dimensions that you expect them to be in game
