Modern

Yes, fortunately there are some decent quality models available for free. One can't be too choosy about porting such content though, especially when we're limited to low poly models. I wish, for example, that there were more low poly statues available with decent quality texturing. Those tend to be either very high poly or use unmodified textures with no baked shadows. The Blender decimation function isn't good enough to reduce the poly count down to the required level (or else I'm just not very skilled at it).

Usually all I need to do is convert the texture files, trim hidden faces, add some LoD parts as needed, resize door openings to the standard size, then add the collision meshes, hook points and the walk mesh. It's a lot faster than doing it from scratch, although making new models can be fun as well. I've also learned a lot about how to make better models (and what to avoid) just by examining other people's works.

Sure, these parts could be useful for a modern fantasy module. I too enjoyed the Shannara Chronicles series on MTV. It received mixed reviews and had room for improvement, but I've seen worse. Apparently the series was renewed for a second season, so I'm looking forward to that. 

Meanwhile, it was a moderately productive weekend:

From left to right: waterfront small industrial building, dock, street light, concrete bumper, concrete staircase, wharf, small aerospace vehicle, various scaffolding parts, a wooden wall, and a carport.

Chass -- This set become available once I release it. The two previous sets (Modern Industrial and Modern Furnishings) are already on the Vault. (See my .sig.)

Here's a few experiments in modern-styled doors:

Apart from the handles, the door surfaces are otherwise flat. For the doors at right I created height maps in Gimp in order to generate the normal maps. I'd say it was fairly successful. Too bad there isn't a normal door model with a round knob.

Thanks. Yes, what I want really to do is make some stone and metal doors for Undermountain. But that's another topic. 

Here is a small set of modern-looking doors.

Just a few more new placeables this week. From left to right [t= tintable]: an abandoned building, scout craft (t), residence (t), Dodge Viper (t), construction shed, concrete bridge, and dockside stand (t). They look pretty decent, I think; I'm happy with the way they turned out.

Thanks. The way things are going, it's going to be a very mixed bag. There are no consistent themes, other than being a general 'street' set. There are some office building models available, but they tend to be a little too high poly for NWN2. Maybe if I break them down into stackable stories? Hmm.

I got to thinking that some of the stock building sets could be retextured to look more modern. I.e. reskin them to use brick, concrete, metal, modern windows, and standard roofing tiles. Might be worth an experiment...

Here are some more bits and pieces. In front are a set of five alien-looking drones with glowy green spots. Behind them, from left to right is a dumpy house, apartment block, fountain, garage, rustic well, apartment, silo, and some sort of house-building. The texture on the apartment block doesn't look great up close, but it may be useful for background decoration.

With that, the total number of modern parts is now at 500. Whew!

Oh, when I'm satisfied with the content, I guess. There's a few dozen left to go through. Thanks.

Here's set #7:

It's lacking a wub-wub-wub sound...

Here are some more additions:

The Egyptian pillars don't quite fit the theme, but they look really nice so I wanted to include them. Perhaps they can go in a museum or something? There is a small railroad station in the back, several dock/hut/shed/cover pieces from a tropical set, an old 1950s building, and another sci-fi fighter spaceship.

Thanks. I'm continuing to wittle my way through my four lists; I'd say I'm about 2/3 the way there. There are fewer vehicle models than I wanted, in large part because those tend to have too high a poly count. Just one decent-looking low-poly fighting vehicle would have been nice. I'll keep looking.

I encountered a few more Ancient Egypt models this weekend. Maybe I'll toss them in as well.

Also one of the stock nwn1 tilesets has some quasi egyptian stuff iirc.

Yes, I ported a set of those NWN statues for PJ. The texturing isn't very good, unfortunately. One of these days I need to level up my texture painting skills.

The current set is now posted:

• Nexus
• Vault

I hope they are useful for you. There were some models I wanted to include, but I couldn't find suitable content to port for various reasons. Ah well. It's on to the next thing now...

Here's a little experiment. I took some free planetary cylindrical projection textures found on the net and mapped them to a spherical model.

I could imagine having a ship model on a spelljammer "overland" map of space, travelling from world to world. It's very easy to make more, given suitable texture files.

Yes I'll probably do something along those lines.

This is me experimenting with one of the available skybox textures, called "interstellar". Initially I tried mapping the skybox texture to a dome shape, but no matter how careful I was it always showed seams along the folds. Instead I switched to a simple box shape and now it seems to work fine. I'm thinking I may end up using various sky domes for some of the planar regions.

> Can you see the corners of the box?

I haven't been able to see the corners. The software must be using a projection algorithm that changes a spherical scene to a cube. There's no shading to the skybox surface either, so it just looks like a dome. The one problem I did run into is resolution; for sharp points of light, you need a fairly large texture file or the lights look pixely.

No problem. I figured these would get used selectively, if they get used at all. Thanks.

Found a pretty decent guillotine model:

Yes, that could be useful.

More piles of modern goodies...

Ed.: WTF Photobucket? It lost my image?