Custom Races GC3, Elemental and prerendering….

from GalCiv3 Forums

Let me start by saying I think that the rendered leaders so far in the game look great, but they also look pre-rendered and please tell me Stardock if I am wrong.

 

The issue with this is race customisation; one of the things that has always bothered me in these types of game is that custom races tend to have to reuse art assets like diplomacy movies from the base races. In a game like GC2 and now GC3 where you have so much freedom over ship design this can be especially jarring.

 

What I was hoping to see in GC3 was something like the leader and unit customisation available in the Elemental line of games applied to designing races visually at the start but with more variety of parts with animations rendered in game. This would allow for a large variety of creative visual race customisation without needing to use tricky external tools. Have Stardock looked at this possibility? At least for custom races?

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Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

From what I can tell from poking around the alpha files the leaders are indeed pre-rendered in Bink Video files (must say that the full size versions and the environments look fantastic though, I think the trade off is definitely worth it in this case).

 

Brad confirmed though that you can make custom races and share them through the steam workshop using your own still image instead of the video or you could perhaps make your own bink video 'moving' leader with a bit of technical wizardry.

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I agree 100% they look great and it's certainly possible to render your own movies in the Bink format but takes a lot of artisitic talent and time. A bit's kit for creating races similar to the ship designer could be very cool and much easier way of adding a hudge amount of customisation. Though I am pleased I can at least use my own still images.

 

I'm wondering if they could provived an in game rendered kit's part solution for custom races while keeping the main races as prerendered video.

 

Again though I do love the pre-rendered race art I've seen so far and can see your point about the trade off.

 

I'm maybe I need to think of creating a kit part type tool for making alien renders in blender.

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Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I agree, while I would imagine it would be pretty low on the priority list, some sort simple to use of race/character model creator tool would be pretty great. Understandably you wouldn't expect the pre-rendered quality but for those less technically inclined (like me) it would be nice to make a simple model that could use a set of standard animations and see them turn up in game.

 

Backgrounds are separate pre-rendered layers in the in game files so they could even be reused. Doubt this would ever happen as it would probably be a hell of a lot of work and may clash badly with the other races, but still....

Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

You see they did kind of develop technology to do something like this for elemental.  I'm wondering how hard it would be to port in here the main work would probably be the pallete of art asset parts.

I belive this uses the same basic engine as elemental. Mind you the art assets would take some time and budget.