Showcase: Destiny Strange Coins

For the gamers out there who follow this blog, there's a good chance you know what I'm talking about. For those who don't, here's an explanation. In the latest videogame by the game company Bungie, called Destiny, there's a currency called Strange Coins. Used to buy certain rare weapons and armour. They're quite rare, but also very liked among the community.

 Today on the official Destiny Forums over at Bungie.net I found someone who made a very accurate 3D model of these coins. I don't dare to say they're 100% accurate to the game, but accurate nonetheless. This nice person, going with the name of Adkos, made this model free to download, which I'll link to later on. It's set into a printable file, as he intended to make a complete, accurate physical model of the coin.

This file can be read by most, if not all, 3D printers and almost every 3D designing software. If you have access to either, I do encourage you to take a look and have fun with it. Just be warned, it is modelled after an object in a game. There might be copyright on it by Bungie or Activision. So I strongly advise to not try to distribute it. And while it's not needed, give credit where credit is due.


 

 Above are two of the official coins, front and back. Which I believe Bungie made themselves. Below is the original Adkos created, printed and painted. It looks very accurate to me.

 

And below that, the 3D model. A clean version and the one I textured. I don't own a 3D printer myself so I can't print a physical version sadly.

 
  


I plan to make a tutorial how I textured it early next week, to give everyone a look at how I texture empty models.

The model can be downloaded right here:
https://www.myminifactory.com/object/destiny-xur-s-strange-coin-two-sided-high-resolution-12964

You just need to make a free account on the Myminifactory site and download it. All files will be downloaded as a .stl file, which might look strange. But like I said, that file can be read by 3D printers and 3D design software.

I might do more showcases if I find more interesting models I'd like to texture. For now, this is it. I hope you enjoyed this new type of post! If there are any questions, feel free to comment.

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Tutorial: Looping animation

Animations is used a lot in Design. Usually with a simple turn, but through paths as well. I'll do paths later though, as for this one I just want to make a simple looping animation. Which I'll turn into a GIF file. These kind of loops are usually only for models to show a 360 degree view, which you sometimes see in games. Here's an example.

So we'll start with making one cube, sphere or other object you want. It won't matter per se, as it's just a visual guide. I'd suggest either cubes or spheres though. I'm going to use Cubes, as they're slightly harder to work with and I've seen a slight example of what I want it to become.

1) My Cube will be thinner than how it is now though. I won't shrink it because I want to use a camera anyway. Might as well place one already. I'll just slide the X-size to 50.

2) Next I'm going into top view, making the next steps easier. I follow this up by dragging the Cube up the Z-axis by 250cm.

3) Now I'll make a circle of Cubes, which can be done really fast. Simple make a duplicate of the Cube by holding CTRL and dragging the cube. This new Cube will be at -250cm.

4) Making it easier and faster, I'll just select both Cubes, go to my Rotation tool and hold CTRL again to duplicate both. And I'll repeat this until I have the amount I want. With Shift you can get a clean 90 degree turn, and 30 degrees afterwards. I'll go on till I have 12 Cubes in total, positioned as below.

5) Next up are the textures. I want to go for a rainbow circle animation, so I'll make 12 different colours. The only changes I make on these materials are the colour and selecting the Glow. Inside the Glow all I'm doing is selecting the "Use Material Color" option.

6) I'll join all Cubes in a Null object, which will make the animation easier to make. I'll place the camera in front of the cubes now, and I'll add the [link]white background as well. With a Sky object for the background.

7) The upcoming steps are Good as equal for everyone, no matter what objects or textures you're using. I prefer to use PAL settings, which is 25 fps. So we'll go to Project Settings to change that.

8) Now we have 3 seconds on the timeline, which will be enough, but not enough. We'll want some time before and after, which we'll need to make the animation smooth. So right above the Material bar, we'll make the 0 a -15 just in case, and the 75 a 90. Every 15 seconds on the timeline I'll rotate the Null 90 degrees, lock it with the Key symbol and move on to the next 15 seconds.

Now that that's done, we'll be going in the Render Settings.

9) The Frame Range will be the only thing to change here, as I won't meddle with the ratio. That's fine for now and won't matter at all. The ratio I will set will be 15 to 74. The first and last frames tend to slow down automatically and there is a fix for that, however I'll leave that for a differnt tutorial. The 75th frame is the exact same as frame 15 and We don't want to slow the animation down even 1 frame, which is why we cut it down one frame.

Anti-Alias will be set to Best just in case. And we'll be adding a Global Illumination, which will bring the colours in a better contrast this time.

10) Now we'll just render it! Pick a location to save it. I prefer to save it as a TIFF Format, as those easily load into After Effects.

11) The rendering might take a while, depending on what you made and how heavy it is on your computer. While it's rendering you could take a break or read on ahead. Once that finishes we'll have several separate frames, we just need to put them together. That's why I'll open After Effects and import the files.

12) Drag them in to load them in the scene of course.

13) Now when you play it, you can see it runs just how it did in Cinema. However to make the movement smoother, I'll add a blur. A directional blur. This'll make the entire animation a bit prettier in my eye.

14) You'll notice the sides are slightly faded black now from the blur. Which might ruin the image, depending what background you're using. In this case, it does. The most simple fix is to just put a Solid under the frames

15) In the solid settings you can select the pipette and pick any colour on-screen. In this case, the background. Fun fact, After Effects will automatically name the colour as well to what it is. Apparently the background I'm using is a Pale Royal Blue.

16) Drag the Solid below the frames and you're done. Now all you need is Export the file to an AVI clip and we'll open up Photoshop to turn it into a .gif.

17) Import the videofile, which you can find under File > Import > Video File to Layers. Photoshop won't let me printscreen this part, so I'll have to guide it this way. Just select the video, let it load and load in the entire thing.

18) As a final step we want to Save for Web. Thanks to the size, it'll look worse when I zoom out to get the entire picture in screen. That's not a big deal in the end, just a zoom thing so don't worry if that happens. The quality will obviously be lower than the original of course. But the settings should already be for the best possible settings, or close to that. If not, try to match the ones I've got. Simply save it as Images Only and you're done! This is what it turned out to be for me.

As you can see, I got the result I wanted. The loop is infinite and smooth. You can do this for anything you'd like, as long as you make sure the loop is closed. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial! If there are any questions, feel free to comment.

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Tutorial: Chess - Part 2: Pawn

For our 2nd part of the Chess tutorial, we'll be making Pawns. They come in great numbers and have the ability to become anything. And because they take up half of the entire army, they're the most logic place to start off.

1) Pawns are fairly easy in design. They're basically a cone with a sphere on top. So that's where we'll start. Both can be found in the Objects section.

2) we'll place the sphere on top of the cone for now and tick it off, so we won't see it. The cone will be our main job for now. You can tick objects on and off by clicking the checkmark or the red X next to the item.

3) I want to edit this part in detail with my hands, instead of with numbers. It might be taking the hard way according to some, but it gives me a better feeling and more control over how it'll look. That's why I'm going to use just 10 Height Segments for now and move to the Front viewport, which will make it easier. It doesn't matter whether you go to Front, Back, Left or Right though. And of course, we'll make it Editable.

4) Next I'll zoom in a bit, select the Point Selection and toggle off "Only Select Visible Elements". This'll make sure I can grab everything behind my point of vision as well.

5.1) Since a pawn has a slightly bulb-like bottom, that is what we'll go for. Now I'll select the bottom row and drag it inwards, shrinking it with the Scale too to roughly 70%. This'll be a few short sections with more pictures than explanation, as it doesn't need any explanation.

5.2) The row above will be dragged down 10cm but stays at the original size. This'll be the first "ring".

5.3) The 3rd row goes about 17cm down, ending the first ring. Scaling it down with 90%.

5.4) The 4th will go 20cm down and scale up to 120%.

5.5) Row 5 goes roughly 25cm down and gets scaled up to 110%.

5.6) The 6th will just go down with 20cm.

5.7) And the 7th just moves down 10cm.

5.8) The 8th row goes down roughly 29cm.

5.9) And the 9th will slide down 20cm.

5.10) The 10th lowers 10cm and scales up to 250%.

5.11) Now I want two more lines to work with for the final part. So I'l use the Knife tool. Again, deselect Visible Only. I use Shift to make a straight line and cut two more lines on top. It doesn't matter where exactly, as you'll have visuals where I'll place the lines in the end. You can use that as guides to place yours if you want an exact copy.

5.12) Now that we have an 11th and 12th rows, we'll have the 11th line scale up to 180% and lowered roughly 7cm.

5.13) To match the size, the 12th row will be scaled up 380% and lowered 10cm.

6) We now have a very rough Pawn model. It still doesn't look that good though... very pointy. So let's see how a Subdivision looks.

7) A lot better already. But it still needs its head to make it look better. Thus we'll add the sphere back, by checking the X back on.

8) It's way too big now obviously. So I'm scaling it down to 50cm and dragging it down to be on the right height. Which for me is about halfway down the top section.

9) Now traditionally, the pawns head is a little dented on top. So let's just do that as well. But instead of editing the sphere and making it harder for ourselves, a Melt Bender would give a good effect as well. Any strength between 1% and 5% works pretty good. I'm going with 2%.

10) However for the 2%, it's a little bit too big again. So I'll scale the sphere down another 20%. This is more nitpicking from my side though, which is what I enjoy doing with these projects.

11) Any chesspiece does have a piece of felt under it. So we'll need to do that as well. As it's a circular piece which is the same size as the bottom, a simple Cylinder will do.

12) We'll start off with resizing it to 70cm radius and just 1cm in height for now.

13) I do want the felt to be more than just a cutout piece, so I'll give it a falloff as well. I'll scale the bottom down 2,5%.

14) The pawn is finished, I'll just name every object, add it all together in a Null Object and save it. Texturing will come later.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial! If there are any questions, feel free to comment.

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