Where are all the unlicensed graphics resources?

General Discussions
#1

As the topic says, where are the free/unlicensed graphics (and sound) resources to be found?
Sure there are sites like 3D Cafe’s Free 3D Models and Polycount, but most of the things you find there are basically crap. Where do I find a collection of basic reusable 3D models that I can use in a fantasy game? Compared to the amount of free/unlicensed/open-source 3D engines, the artist community is very disappearingly small.

Since I’m almost completly free of artistic talent when it comes to drawing (the result is almost as good as a 3-year-old kid with broken crayons), I have to rely entirely on the free material available. Its a little like bit like Salieri and Mozart, I can recognize good art when I see it, but I can never create anything remotely as good myself.

Is the 3D artist community less anxious to share their work compared to software developers, or are there some other reason? I would really like to see that I’m wrong about this and that I’ve missed a couple of really great sites with free models and sounds. Anyone else recognizing this problem?

#2

I don’t know where you have looked, but I would say your best bet would be to search out forums specifically for artists. I don’t know of any off hand. The http://www.gamedev.net forums have a section for art, but I am sure there are more specific ones out there.

#3

[quote]I don’t know where you have looked, but I would say your best bet would be to search out forums specifically for artists. I don’t know of any off hand. The http://www.gamedev.net forums have a section for art, but I am sure there are more specific ones out there.
[/quote]
Looking more closely at gamdev.net’s 3D art articles one will see polycount and 3D Cafe listed (along with a couple of other sites that doesn’t work anymore). Sure, polycount is good if I want models for an FPS. But I want a modular fantasy-character ala Diablo II, and a complete set of landscape models, and trees, and houses. All in the same theme. 3D Cafe have some good free models, but nothing that comes close to what I’m looking for.

Given google a try will result in a wide variety of sites of different quality. However, there doesn’t seem to be a good 3D model archive online that actually provide sets of easy-to-use models for free.

Then there is the problem with open-source 3D tools. If I find a nice model that I wish to make some minor changes to I’m out of luck again.

Am I actually the only programmer with this problem?

#4

You could always learn to make good art. Art is primarily a learnable skill rather than anything innate (sure, there is a small proportion of people who can never tell the difference between something that looks good and something that looks bad except on the most superficial level, but they are very few and far between).

3D modelling is a heck of a lot easier to learn than something more freeform (like sketching) which has no aids to restrain your drawing motions beyond pure hand-eye-co-ordination and learned control.

#5

[quote]You could always learn to make good art.
[/quote]
But this takes time - and in same way as you don’t want to reimplement all libraries you can just use, it would be nice to have at least enough free models to bootstrap something playable, without using crude proxy objects.

What do you think about http://www.negdesign.com/ ? It looks quite easy, but trick is to get reasonable sketch of thing you want to model from two directions. And here we go back to art skill again :slight_smile:

#6

[quote]What do you think about http://www.negdesign.com/ ? It looks quite easy, but trick is to get reasonable sketch of thing you want to model from two directions. And here we go back to art skill again :slight_smile:
[/quote]
Ugh. While that may be a competant modeling program, their beginners tutorial is painfully difficult. Its obvious that they’ve rushed it and not ‘tested’ it on a proper beginner, they keep skipping over important commands and bits. :o

I did try Silo a little while ago, thats one of the easiest modling program I’ve ever come across. http://www.nevercenter.com/ Personally I find drawing/sketching easy, but 3d modelling uncannily hard due to never really finding a program that didn’t annoy the heck out of me.

#7

[quote]You could always learn to make good art. Art is primarily a learnable skill rather than anything innate (sure, there is a small proportion of people who can never tell the difference between something that looks good and something that looks bad except on the most superficial level, but they are very few and far between).
[/quote]
I disagree. Sure, I could learn how to use the tools. But I lack the artistic talent to make anything that actually looks good. Besides, I don’t have time to both create good looking 3D models AND implement my own hobby-project 3D games…

#8

The comparison with libs is somewhat off. There are alot of identical programming tasks, but graphics are a different thing. Sure there are some free models, but unfortunately they (usually) suck.

Garagegames.com sells some model packs (10-25$) with a bunch of good models and textures. However, they are somewhat small (only a handfull of models per pack) and usually not the thing you are looking for. Well, it’s cool if you have a landscape and need some trees and stone formations… but that’s it.

The thing with 3d games is that you need alot of content. Just look at Quake3… open pak0.pk3 and look at the insane amount of textures (thousands) and all these models(md3). A game like that is just out of reach for you or anyone else who doesn’t have a team of artists and several years to spare.

Nowadays blockbuster 3d games contain so much media. You just won’t be able to do something like that in your whole life. 100 people working fulltime for 3 years = 3600 man month… 300 years duh (numbers from a 4 year old F1 racing game).

But I want a modular fantasy-character ala Diablo II, and a complete set of landscape models, and trees, and houses. All in the same theme.

Well, that’s too specific and it’s also quite alot you’re asking for. 20-30 models plus textures. That’s several month of work for a skilled artist.

I know you don’t want to hear that, but think smaller. Try to start with a doable game, which has rather small media requirements. Why? Because you’ll learn alot. You’ll get a better feel how much work it actually is, you’ll see the magic of feature creep, and of course it will be alot easier to find an artist (or artists) if you have something to show off.

And sounds… over at the sound board was a thread with some urls some days ago. The sounds there aren’t that bad, but they are somewhat generic. So if you need something specific you’re out of luck again.

Oh and give modelling a try. It’s a pretty usefull skill and even if you won’t be a master, you’ll be still able to do simpler things like furniture, crates (::)), small items, bowls, whatsoever and eventually trees or other plants. Sure it will take 2 or more weeks, but given the scale of the project you’ve outlined that timespan appears tiny.

http://www.wings3d.com/

#9

[quote]The comparison with libs is somewhat off. There are alot of identical programming tasks, but graphics are a different thing. Sure there are some free models, but unfortunately they (usually) suck.
[/quote]
I don’t agree.
Best example here is big tileset for rogue/nethack-like games - called dgtiles or similar. This is a collection of hundreds of very nice 32x32 tiles, directly usable in your nethack clone. Of course, with time you will want to add your own graphics, maybe even replace them all at some point in future if your game is successful - but you can start NOW and your game will look reasonable (even if graphics are same as used in many other games). For me, this is the same as having some kind of 3d engine available on the net. I need resources (ready library, ready graphics, ready music) and I use them. With time, I will need to extend/replace some parts, but I have something working/good looking from very start. Only problem is that there are good tilesets available on the net, a lot of good programming libraries, and almost no 3d models (don’t know about music/sounds). But I don’t see any reason why 3d models are different from other kind of resources. Probably has something to do with mindset of 3d artists (as opposed to pixel artists for example).

#10

www.pixelperfectdigital.com

is a great free resource!

#11

Exactly my problem. I can’t start from scratch with my 3D models. I need a basic “framework” to start with.

To be more specific, what I currently need is a landscape. Small hills with grass, a few trees and preferably surrounded by mountains. As I see it, there should be tools to generate the basics (a relatively simple fractal generation should suffice). However, I haven’t been able to find anything remotely useful…

#12

You probably wouldn’t want to simply model your landscape would you? It might be a bit slow.

Kev

#13

[quote]You probably wouldn’t want to simply model your landscape would you? It might be a bit slow.

Kev
[/quote]
Well if you just model it and render it every frame, yes it would be slow. But you could want to model it to get it exactly the way you want it and get more details then autogenerated terrain and then do some kind of post processing, like building a quad/oct tree and use that for rendering.
…Or did i miss the point…? :slight_smile:
/Gregof

#14

To put this into perspective: Sony have a tool for that. They wrote it from scratch for StarWars: Galaxies. You cannot just buy this sort of stuff off-the-shelf (unless someone’s rushed something to market since then).

Landscapes are damn easy to create (i.e. generate and then post-process to create the effects you want) procedurally, and beyond any small size they are much easier to do that way than with a modeller. Sony had - I think - 3 people working on that tool for months, mainly trying to make the UI usable (but don’t take my word on that)

PS: IMHO it’s a great idea, and the best way to create landscapes: fractal seed + a small number of post-applied “tweaks”. It’s just that it’s an awful lot of hard work to get a usable system for doing it, and unless you have no intention of getting your game out, I would instead recommend spending your time elsewhere.

#15

[quote] It’s just that it’s an awful lot of hard work to get a usable system for doing it, and unless you have no intention of getting your game out, I would instead recommend spending your time elsewhere.
[/quote]
Of course, if you want to make a small fortune in gaming middleware, this might be just the way to do it…

On the DIY 3d design front I have found it is really hard to get good sketches from different elevantions that match up and look right. I have found it much much easier to create a model out of Plasticene and then take pictures of it from different angles and base the models on that.

Still confoundedly tricky though.

Content creation is one of the things that will only get harder as game engines get more powerful and better able to handle more detailed models and textures.

#16

Texture resources, lets see:

http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Resources.181.0.html

You could check out Blender resources page. There are toons of free high-res free textures in there.

You could also check VRML fan pages and in general, home pages for free modelers like wings3d and not so free modelers like Milkshape. They usually have plenty of good links.

If you are a complete noob at making textures like me you have two paths.

One use photorealistic textures. But correct them first with gimp or photoshop or whatever. Usually they need to be tinted, bright normalized and tiled to work together right. It doesnt make sense to have a cave with red rock hard floor and green-gray mudy walls, for instance. It also doesnt make sense if there are mismatch bright spots on the cave. Let your game illuminate the scene and remove all 3d effects from it.

The other is to use procedural textures. I use Blender for that. I create a p. t. then render it to the bg and save it as an image. If you want to try download the materials database (link in resources page):

http://www.geocities.com/pollythesheep/matlib_index.html

Then tweak with the many possibilities offered. Blender supports multylayer procedural textures that can be rendered from first to last using blending modes:

Mix, Lighten, Darken, Divide, Multiply, Add, Subtract, Screen, Difference

They can be blended to just one part of the texture:

Color, Normal, Color specular, Color Mirror, Reflexivity, Spec, Amb, Hard, Alpha, Emit, Transl, Disp, etc…

On each layer you can put one of these shaders and adjust its parameters:

DistortedNoise, Voronoi, Musgrave, Noise, Blend, Magic, Wood, Stucci, Marble, Clouds, Image, Plugin, EnvMap

You can transform each layer above (rotate, scale, transl) and apply a colorband to it (with alpha values possible). You can set options to make them sticky, render them has 3d textures or 2d textures, use a custom set of UV coordinates.

You can choose the type of noise basis used for any of the shaders above:

CellNoise, Voronoi F1/…/F4/F1-F2, Perlin

When rendering the image ignore shader options that depend on your game light conditions, like diffuse, specular and stuff.

In odler style games you would render a p. t. to a texture image of a relativly good size like 128x128 pixels. But with modern cards its possible to do what Blender does in real time with pixel and vertex shaders.

One idea for anyone who knows how to create opengl shaders and use them in games is to make a Blender python script to read a certain material created in blender and write a java program that compiles into an opengl shader.