BigBurger's Timber v2.0 [Update 06]

[BigBurger]

Hello Everyone!

I've just released the first version of Timber and now I am starting a new thread again. There will be some differences to the first version:

The first of them will be what you see in the poll. Many of you complained that the beams were way too thin and even shyguy would have used them if they wouldn't have been so thin. Sometime I will add all votes (of all forums) together and then let's see what comes out.

Second I'm going to make the texture looking better. A little bit of self criticism was enough to let me see I placed the texture very bad. There will also be a few new pieces, but really nothing special.

The support cleaner still is the set's problem, but I think that if it's not possible I'm just going to leave this piece out. I hope you don't mind - I don't mind at all.




Here's a first picture. Poor BigBurger made an object while MrPKI made an extremely cool set ( Clicky! ) and I didn't even notice it. I actually planned to make several tunnels (curves, slopes, etc.) but to be fair I'm not going to. MrPKI's Coaster Tunnels are useful, they look good, etc. so why should I include tunnels in my set? I'm going to let this one in and that's it!

Good Votes!

DOWNLOAD!


BigBurger

[coasterfreak]

I dont care what anybody else thinks about your first set, lol, it was a great set to me, and very useful. You took the time to make it, and that's all that should matter, no matter what! I think your next set should be just fine as well. I like that tunnel too. It looks like a box-crate, and you should name it "The Box-Crate Tunnel" lol

Good job! and Thanks!

[michielh3]

Nice tunnel

and yeah , MrPKI also made a tunnel set ..

but more then one can never harm though

[adamb241]

Nice tunnel, I love the texture on it!

[fathorse]

I would just like to see supports for curved track and diagonals and I'll be a happy bumblebee.

[BigBurger]

coasterfreak: Thank you for the kind words and lol.
michielh3 Thank you, too.
adamb241 Same goes for you.
fathorse As I already said in the thread for v1 the idea of this set is not create boxes for every single track piece. A lot of variety would got lost and you also couldn't use this set as beams for houses etc.

Som important news:
I decided to make 4 sets out of one. The first one will be called BigBurger's Timber 20cm and will contain all beams of the first set (with some additional ones) with a diameter of 20cm.

The second one will be called BigBurger's Timber 30cm and will contain all beams of the first set (with some additional ones) with a diameter of 30cm.

The third one will be called BigBurger's Timber 40cm and will contain all beams of the first set (with some additional ones) with a diameter of 40cm (not much variety in these few sentences...).

The fourth one will be called BigBurger's Timber Misc and will contain some extra pieces e.g. the tunnel, footers and probably (if someone only would help me with this) even the support cleaner.

This makes the set very (very, very...) large and it will take some time to create all these pieces, import them and make all these icon textures (I faint when thinking about these ). I would also like to use shared textures, but I actually don't even have a tutorial to look at and I think this would push the release of this set somewhere in 2008 (I'm just a pessimist )!

BigBurger

[Janitor 06]

Originally Posted by BigBurger

I decided to make 4 sets out of one.
BigBurger's Timber 20cm
BigBurger's Timber 30cm
BigBurger's Timber 40cm
BigBurger's Timber Misc

You are great. You pit a poll up to ask wich one to do, and you end up doing all!

[LightGrenades]

Make the 20 and 40 cm sets. As for the support cleaner/killer, I've figured out how to make one, but it seems to be very buggy when I try to work with it and only deletes one or two supports in a line of about 20. So more experimentation is needed.

[michielh3]

i totaly agree with ATH , you shouldn't make a 30cm set , that would be a waste of time , as the 40 and 20 should be enough ( imo )

[rideslover]

yeah I voted it.

[BigBurger]

Originally Posted by Janitor 06

You are great. You pit a poll up to ask wich one to do, and you end up doing all!

I had to laugh while reading this stupid burger...

Originally Posted by aroundthehorn

Make the 20 and 40 cm sets. As for the support cleaner/killer, I've figured out how to make one, but it seems to be very buggy when I try to work with it and only deletes one or two supports in a line of about 20. So more experimentation is needed.

I don't really get the problem with the 30cm beams (and the link between them and the support cleaner (which prolly won't be included )). The only problem I see is that the 20 beams look great to me in SketchUp, but ingame they seem a little thin, the 30 beams look fine in SketchUp and ingame too, but the texture is a littler problem (I have faces with 0,3*0,3 and with 0,3*1;2;3;4;5;5;6;7;8; 2,829 and even more weird proportions), the 40 beams look too heavy.

So if I left out the 30 beams most would still only use the 20 beams, I think...

Work begins.... (+ summary)

Well, the project called BigBurger's Timber 2.0 got part of an anniversary pack for the Fastfood Productions. I didn't have the time to show it to you, but I will sometime start a thread and then you'll all know... I'm going to present this set here anyway. After finishing the object list on tuesday and learning how to make shared textures on the weekend I'm now fully prepared for this set.

I'm going to add objects strictly in the order of the list and a few minutes ago I imported the 30th object of 134!

Why so many now? You know I'm going to release 3 kind of beams. It appeared best to me and I really like the idea of having thicker vertical beams and then some thin ones for the rest of the wooden structure.

How can I work with so many pieces? I try making the set as user-friendly as possible. There will be 4 different categories in game. BigBurger's Timber 20cm, BigBurger's Timber 30cm, BigBurger's Timber 40cm and BigBurger's Timber Misc so you only have 44 pieces at once. The last category will include the footer and the tunnel I showed you above. I'm also going to add numbers to the beams' names so they will appear in a more logical order than the alphabetical one. Of course, this set will have icon textures.

When will it be released? On 31.03.'08. It's because of the anniversary of the Fastfood Productions. I have to model and import 104 objects, make 134 icon textures and do something around 10 tests myself.

I'm not a fan of pushing threads so I show you a liitle picture now which only shows the first 4 pieces with the new beam texture. There will be many in the near future

[biogal]

Looks great! Very useful stuff, BigBurger.

[skacoaster]

I love the timber! As long as the new stuff doesn't mess up the old stuff, then keep up the great work!

[BigBurger]

biogal: Thanks for posting and the kind words!
skacoaster: All old pieces will be included apart from two. These are the square footer and the support cleaner because it doesn't work anyway. Thank you, too

Update

Progress
All 20cm-pieces had been imported succesfully! I've also finished the models of the not-diagonal 30cm-beams. Four of them are already imported. I have made no Icon textures yet.

This picture shows a problem of Timber v1.0. My beams already disappeared at a distance of less than 20m because of my bad LODs. As you can see it is fixed now

I also faced up to some realy wooden structures so I can show you this picture pretty proudly. The vertical beams are 30 and the rest 20. If you build higher, closer etc. you can vary the diameter. The edges on the top will be hidden by pathways or wooden coaster tracks so they don't matter.

Finally here's a very close screenshot of the small difference between 20 and 30cm. I think I'm on a good way with my new concept!

BigBurger

[michielh3]

that is looking verry nice !!

[BigBurger]

michielh3: Thank you!

Important Note:
I decided to leave out the 40ies. Well, the 30ies are quite massive and I can't believe anyone needed 40cm pieces of wood! In return I will add a lot of footers because I noticed there are so many and the difference is stunning. The tunnel also is out because I have lost the model and the OVL



I think I'm getting better and better in building wooden supports. It's because I now really look up very closely at photos and I even have a headache now because I tried to find El Toro's supports' way down to the ground...

BigBurger

[phewh]

im very impressed

[BigBurger]

phewh: Thank you.

Well I just finished one of the new 12 footers (though there are still 22 beams missing).



Oh, man, I fell in love with these transparent pictures!

The lower part will be fully recolorable. It will also be available as a square instead (as a kind of low-poly-version). These vertical pieces will hold the beams. There will also be some for the 30ies. I left out the inner face to save polies because it's already hidden by a beam. It will be imported after 20 more pieces


I hope you like it. This should be enough for today (I'm away all day)...

Gruß
BigBurger

[Dr.Pest]

really nice man !!!!
it's perfect for a lot of objects !

[michielh3]

wow , those supports .. that's looking very nice indeed

btw , if you ever want to model some corners , i still have the dimension for them

[n747]

I think this set is invaluable - It's a difficult one, to be sure, but invaluable none-the-less. If you release this set without angles, or corner pieces, it'll be like every other wooden set - We need angled corners, flat, banked, and down-sloped. Basically any combination of wood!

It's looking fantastic so far man!

[BigBurger]

Dr.Pest: Thanks.
michielh3: (the first time I wrote your name without copiing ) The sizes of corners a available on Belgabor's site. So if I wanted to make corners I would have done already Thank you, too.
n747: Thank you, but what you wrote there is impossible (if I understood you). I'm one of these cs-makers that want any structure with there pieces to be possible. If I did this with all these pieces, we would end at around 500 pieces!


I have good news to tell: All 99 pices of Timber 2.0 have been imported successfully so I'm only missing a few (102) Icon Textures.



I did some tests with the footer and beams yesterday to avoid problems after importing. It was its time worth...



Apart from 11 footers I also had to model 22 beams. As I already told, now everything is imported! This structure here is diagonal - I was surprised it all worked at the very beginning.



Here's a close up view of the footer/base/beams. The whole set only uses three different textures (footers, bracket and beams) which are all shared ones so the set only has a size of less than 1MB

I hope you like it

BigBurger

[michielh3]

that's .. wel .. WOW .. amazing !!

[n747]

Hehe, well - true, if every piece was seperated, it would be impossible...

However, there are some pieces that don't need separation - like corners. You could import that into a single top piece, with bottom extensions, and even a set of corner buttresses. This set should look complicated when constructed, but easy to build.

[godsmuffinman]

Are you done with the update? and is it downloaded with the same link?

[BigBurger]

michielh3: Thank you.
n747: The last sentence makes everything a lot more complicated than it actually is. I know what you want me to make and probably I'm even going to make it. Something like a version 2.0 AddOn that would fit with the current supports. I know how wooden supports are working so this should be doable, but it would take a lot of time and I wouldn't release 2 versions like now but only the 20ies.
godsmuffinman: This is no update and please read what I post so you understand what's going up


The annoying work with the icon textures begins + all my little footers

Now, here's the big final, the boring part of making cs, here are the icon textures! I already announced they would be more intuitional than ever before.



All icons will be/are transparent, of course. They will be the half size of what you can see here in game (that's why the writing "Footer" is a little bit soft). You can also now see all footer pieces

I hope you like and enjoy it!

BigBurger

[godsmuffinman]

I'm sorry for not reading the whole thread. Thanks for making the new sets also. I found the first set to be very useful and I can't wait for more.

[adamb241]

Nice work, the footer looks awesome!

[Nethero]

Alright! It's like an early christmas present. Thanks!

[BigBurger]

michielh3: Thanks.
adamb242: ditto
Nethero: rather a very late one




This picture shows a very small part of my testing coaster. There are few sections "supported", but the rest of the coaster still is naked. I'm pretty proud of the lifthill construction.

In the background you can see some bottles of compressed air and in the foreground there is a tank of oil (don't know if a wooden coaster with a chain lift really needs this stuff) and a fly wheel from Gizmos (Thank you very much, Vodhin!). I actually never wanted to use this Gizmos wheel for wooden coasters, but here it just looked great! The fences around are from DasMatze's Fences & Railings and the "roof" is the conforming sidewalk from shyguy's Mainstreet Set 2.

I also wanted to use the new set JackyX' Wooden Coaster Stuff, so I used its brakes, friction wheels, control borders and the lifthill cover. The station and the end of the track are supposed to be something unique.


Looky! The basocs for a realistic wooden structure:

I colored all pieces to make understanding easier. I bet you don't even have to read the text



First build a structure of Z-shaped beams. I left some space for the footers at the bottom, but I am actually not going to show them here. I suggest leaving a space of 1m between track and the highest horizontal "orange" beam. The "Z-squares" are 4m wide and 4m high.



After this we now add some horizontal beams. I noticed that they are placed 1m above the horizontal beams of the Z-structure. I can't tell you why, but I guess it would look too confused and maybe there would be problems with the statics.



Now we can add some blue struts. They make the structure seem more resilient. Try it with the "ping-pong-style". This means building the route of a ping-pong-ball between the green beams. You should plan this in advanve.

I don't know how to set up the triangular supports. I'd like to ask Intamin, but on their homeage I can only find a e-mail-address for the delivery if coasters and most of them are a little bit too large for our garden... I hope they will tell me

BigBurger