Monday, 10 July 2017

Ragnarok - Day 20

Well day 20 comes with a great shot of a completed shell.  After two video crashes and minor roll backs I completed the scroll work and modelled all the glass (twice if I was counting).  After looking at it for a little while I decided to go ahead and add the rampart effect to the landing platforms as well.  I'm glad I did as it looks fantastic!



How epic does that look!  I really wish I could do my own vids, it is really feeling awesome to move in and around it.  Unlike with the storage base this one I have loved from the very start!  


This is a good shot of a completed scroll work support.  Each support has a full spiral at the bottom, a 3/4 spiral for the top level and just half spirals for the supporting levels.  I could have done a full spiral on each section but I felt it was going to look far too busy.  This side on shot with the shaping of the slope sections makes them look much thinner.  As you move around and the shadows appear they change shape a fair...... ummm.  Well I just noticed a mistake lol.  That sloped section in the middle is wrong.  I've snapped the sloped tri's to the wrong bit <insert sigh here>  I corrected a bunch of mistakes I noticed today.  I had screwed up the positioning of two of the landing plats when I copied the first and instead of correcting the second two I altered the first.  So now there will be no glass ramp that I mentioned yesterday.  That was removed and a subtle alteration made it superfluous.


Ok so here is a 2 min correction of the mistake :)  I'm speeding up on making these now.  Something to note if your using tri roof's to make a larger area you need to start at the bottom.  For some reason they are happy to snap upwards to your hearts desire but they won't snap downwards the same way.  I tried to get nice flush looking snaps on this build but in all honesty its impossible.  I've ended up with some weird gaps in places that I can't fathom how they occurred.  I can only guess that I've made a couple of snaps off ramps and that ramps are perhaps a tad shorter than they should be.  I've had to just 'let it go' (don't start singing, no really don't).  Ceiling space gaps I understand pretty well.  No matter how hard I try I always seem to get one or two of them on projects like this where I have made raised structures.  There are ways to eliminate them but they do sometimes still sneak in when I'm not paying enough attention.  It takes a little more work as you need to snap walls to the bottom of ceilings before snapping the one above and making sure it snaps to the wall and not the ceiling.  Then you can remove the wall from the bottom and know that your heights shouldn't change as you go upwards.  But like I said mistakes happen especially when your half asleep.  The ones  I corrected this morning were minor but took a bit of time to do.  I've got a crazy amount of building hours in this game but even with all my experience I still screw up minor details :)  You just have to take a deep breath and learn not to stress about it.  I'm just glad to be able to build this with fly and ghost as it saved a stack of time getting some of the angles worked out.  I am more than capable of building from scaffolding or dino back but while in SP I'm going to utilize all I can.

For those of you out there learning to build (in S+) I suggest carrying on you 1 wall and 4+ ramps for scaffolding.  When you need to adjust something in a funny place just drop a wall place a ramp against it and then extend upwards from it.  I know plenty of people starting out (myself included) that would get frustrated if something up in the air needed changing.  These days I would just throw the scaffolding up in a few secs and be done with it.  There's no point dragging it out, just get stuck in and fix the problem.  With any luck it will remind you to not do it again lol.  OR remind you that Ark often likes to play musical snap points.  OMG I've had some horrible games of musical snap points!  If you are doing a lot of overlaying of tiles the snap system tries to give you an epileptic fit flashing between them all.  In this case I weigh my options and normally remove the most easily replaceable tile from around it.  The more you build the faster you will solve issues like this.  But they won't go away if your pushing the limits of what they will do.  Not a week goes by without someone saying to me they wish they could come up with ideas like I do.  I've said it before and I'll say it again, all the techniques I use are simple.  Its just a matter of trying something new with them.  If you don't want a square base don't build one.  Start simple, and have a go at making a tower in the round (hex).  Then try make a self supporting ramp.  Try combine the two so you have a tower at the top of a self supporting ramp.  Just start piecing together the things you have tried until something interesting happens.  Once you have a basic understanding of how these things go together you may have an idea for how you could make something interesting.  And it probably won't work lol.  But try it anyway!  Work out why it doesn't work and see if you can work around the problem as you may discover a more interesting idea.  I have huge ideas sometimes that end up looking rather Meh.  The rolling outer wall on this base for eg.  I envisioned something that looked epic from a distance but with the whole wall rolling, from the outside you don't see the spiral effect just the outer curve lol.  You can't win them all so don't stress when you don't.

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