3D Game Programming All in One- P18: During the past several years while working on the Tubettiland “Online Campaign” software and more recently while working on the Tubettiworld game, I figure I’ve received more than a hundred queries from people of all ages about how to get started making games. There were queries from 40-year-olds and 13-year-olds and every age in between. Most e-mails were from guys I would estimate to be in their late teens or early 20s. | The Base Hero Model 417 Arbitrary Extrusion Arbitrary Extrusion has much in common with Axial Extrusion except that you extrude your base primitive shapes in whatever directions are necessary. Like Incremental Polygon Construction this approach to modeling can be seen as similar to sculpting in clay. Machinery lends itself well to modeling with this technique. Topographical Shape Mapping Topographical Shape Mapping is a method usually used to model terrain like Axial Extrusion often is except that Topographical Shape Mapping is best suited for automated operations rather than manually modeling. In the geographic sense topographic data can be obtained from various government and private sources. The data consists of at a minimum a coordinate and an altitude for each mapped point on the real terrain s surface. There are various algorithms and many programs available that can read this data from a file and render a 3D view of the terrain in question. The data files come in various formats depending on the agency that produces them DLG-O DEM SDTS and DRG to name just a few from that acronymic world. Normally this approach is used in one of the many available Geographic Information Systems GIS and there are tools that can convert this data into a format you can use for modeling in games. Hybrids Well the Hybrid category is the catchall category. Often it is prudent to combine techniques in a single model use the approach that works best for the component being created. If you find yourself mixing techniques most likely you will be doing a little bit of Incremental Polygon Construction mixed with many shape primitives or using a few primitives mixed with a great deal of Arbitrary Extrusion. The best point to be made here is that you should use what works best for you in your current circumstances. The Base Hero Model The technique we are going to use is basically the Shape Primitives approach. We will hand-modify various shape primitives to get the results we want. The .
