Blinky kart

[desmovalvo]

Hello!
I'm strongly in love with SuperTuxKart so I decided to start modeling karts for this game. I created a kart for Blinky (the FreeDOS' mascot), a nice fish I decided to create its kart (mostly) as a water motorcycle because Blinky is a fish...

You can download Blinky from here: http://salug.it/~fabioviola/supertuxkart/blinky.zip

I know that maybe my kart does not respect most of the guidelines, but don't be angry with me, it's only the first work
I hope you'll like it and I wait for your suggestions to improve the kart.

Bye,
desmovalvo

[STKRudy85]

I tried your kart and it works as it is. It's a nice start you can congratulate yourself

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I take an eye on your blender file, kart and hero have too many poly and vertex group seems badly made.

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Can you rename your license tou "license.txt" then you can upload this addon here :
http://stkaddons.net/

[desmovalvo]

Hi, thanks for your reply.

I'll re-model the kart and the hero as soon as possible, that was just an experiment so I didn't made everything so well

I already uploaded it to stkaddons. If I'm logged in I can see it in the karts list, otherwise no (maybe I have to wait for the moderator to approve it). The license is CC 3.0, BY SA (I included the License.txt file in the zip I uploaded to stkaddons).

bye,
desmovalvo

[Kinsu]

Nice one for a first try !

I would add a kind of bubble around the fish, a little as this (except the fact that this is a body and not a kart ) :

With a system like this one, it will also be possible to make fancy steering animations

Maybe it requires a little bit of ambiant occlusion on the texture ?

For the tris number, 2K is ideal, 4K the maximum for a little-config-friendly kart (cf. the wiki).

Keep us informed !

[Funto]

We just discussed the possibility of having this kart like yesterday or the day before on IRC, and then you bring it up
We were thinking it would be fun if this kart had a blocky, Minecraft-like look, reflecting the age of MS-DOS
I like the design and animations you made As Kinsu said, some ambiant occlusion would make it much better (see what it looks like on the new Suzanne kart), although if we end up with SSAO, maybe that would be too much occlusion, I don't know ^^
Also, when looking at the Blender file, it seems that there are too many polygons considering the quantity of details on the model, but on in the end the total amount of vertices is not that important (it's less than the Beastie kart for example).

I wonder what it would look like with Kinsu's suggestion about adding a bubble, but I also like it as it is
Maybe with some water recipient and a way for it to "breath" it?

[desmovalvo]

thank you guys, your advices will help me improve my kart
Ok, as I said I will model again the kart with less polygons, no problem I will also add ambient occlusion, it's a good idea
I will try to do the new kart with your advices and will let you know

[Arthur]

Looks good, keep it up.

[Funto]

Looking forward to the new version then

[Tuxfan]

Great first draft. I could even break some highscores with your new kart I like that the blinky kart doesn't look as a usual kart.

[Kinsu]

A little graphic brainstorming :

And for the steering animation, maybe the eyes of the fish could turn as they are pretty big

[desmovalvo]

Ok Kinsu Thanks for the suggestions

[Iridium]

A little graphic brainstorming :
And for the steering animation, maybe the eyes of the fish could turn as they are pretty big

I like your idea Kinsu. And also, change the spoiler design a bit - Make it lower down (so we can see more of Blinky) and wider too.

[xeno74]

I like the Blinky Kart very much Thank you!!!!!!

[desmovalvo]

Hello, I'm creating a new version of Blinky following your advices. I apologise for the delay, but it's been a long and heavy year...

However I'm having a problem and I hope you can help me to solve it. I'm modeling this new kart with Blender 2.63 (while the older version was realised with Blender 2.49). I created the fish and the water motorcycle, then a really simple (at the moment) armature. I use this armature to animate only the fish. No animation is needed for the water motorcycle. In blender everything works fine, but in SuperTuxKart the fish has no animation and the kart is deformed every time I turn left or right. I tried to put "Ignore" at the motorcycle type in the object data, just to see what happens and... the fish is correctly animated O_o

Do you have any ideas about what's wrong?

Thank you,
Fabio

[Auria]

Deformation usually occurs because of one of these :

1) the model is rotated or scaled at rest (it was rotated or scaled before the armature was attached to it)
2) the armature is rotated or scaled at rest (it was rotated or scaled before being attached to the model)
3) the armature and the model don't have the same center

those are known limitations of our exporter, I'm sorry. I'd like to fix them, but my math and my motivation aren't quite up to the task see the red note at http://supertuxkart.sourceforge.net/Sep ... ed_Objects for more information

[desmovalvo]

Deformation usually occurs because of one of these :

1) the model is rotated or scaled at rest (it was rotated or scaled before the armature was attached to it)
2) the armature is rotated or scaled at rest (it was rotated or scaled before being attached to the model)
3) the armature and the model don't have the same center

those are known limitations of our exporter, I'm sorry. I'd like to fix them, but my math and my motivation aren't quite up to the task see the red note at http://supertuxkart.sourceforge.net/Sep ... ed_Objects for more information

Nothing to do I fixed everything as you said, but I'm still having the same problem

[desmovalvo]

I attached some images to better explain my problem. Without the motorcycle everything's fine. With it, when I turn I get a garbled mesh and the fish receives no animation.
The fish and its armature have the same center and no rotation/scaling. I don't know what to try

[STKRudy85]

Please send us the blender file, I can check.

I had the same problem with "Proof" But I don't remember what was it..;

[desmovalvo]

Please send us the blender file, I can check.

I uploaded a zip archive here. I hope you can find the key Thank you

[Auria]

Hmm can you give me this information :

1) it's Blinky.blend and not blinky-low.blend right?
2) which version of blender are you using?
3) which version of STK are you using?
4) which version of the kart exporter are you using?

Because for me, with STK latest trunk, using blender 2.62 or 2.63, using the latest exporter, Blinky.blend works just fine for me, without the problems you mention

[desmovalvo]

1) it's blinky.blend (sorry, I forgot to delete the old one)
2) blender 2.63a
3) supertuxkart --version gives me:
Irrlicht Engine version 1.7.2
Linux 3.2.0-23-generic #36-Ubuntu SMP Tue Apr 10 20:39:51 UTC 2012 x86_64
[FileManager] Data files will be fetched from: '/usr/share/games/supertuxkart/'
==============================
SuperTuxKart, 0.7.
==============================
however it's the latest version available in the Linux Mint's repositories.
4) I installed the tools linked here

I'm going to compile stk so that I have the latest version. I'll let you know what happens..

[desmovalvo]

Solved! With the svn version of STK it works correctly... Ok, now I can begin to work seriously on this kart to make it better Thank you guys for the support

...however guys congratulations, the snv version is FANTASTIC !!!!!!

[Auria]

Solved! With the svn version of STK it works correctly... Ok, now I can begin to work seriously on this kart to make it better Thank you guys for the support

...however guys congratulations, the snv version is FANTASTIC !!!!!!

thanks

[hiker]

...however guys congratulations, the snv version is FANTASTIC !!!!!!

Thanks as well. And just out of curiosity: did you try the new skidding? Usually people hate it the first time they try, and it takes quite some time to get used to it (and we are still tweaking it).

Cheers,
Joerg

[desmovalvo]

...however guys congratulations, the snv version is FANTASTIC !!!!!!

Thanks as well. And just out of curiosity: did you try the new skidding? Usually people hate it the first time they try, and it takes quite some time to get used to it (and we are still tweaking it).

Cheers,
Joerg

Yes, I tried it and I like it very much. Really funny! At the time I am very slow and I lose almost every match, but I think it's only a matter of time

Fabio