Project Do228

Hey everyone!

When we posted those screenshots of the gauges (”Details baby…”), Tristan from Soleluna Airways asked us, what those pictures actually show. Are those the modelled gauges for the VC? Or just photos of the real panel? I gave a short reply in form of a comment. Now André suggested to create a short post on this topic, so you guys know what we are actually working on at the moment and what our work looks like.

So, what is needed to create a gauge? First of all, we need pictures of it. As we don’t have our own Do228 (not yet…), we have to rely on our partners. We request a picture - the next day we usually have it. Nice service, that is. The pictures we usually get look like this one:

Now, we use this photo to create a 3D model of the gauge. We use 3DsMax for that. A simple 3D model looks a little bit boring and much to clean, so we create textures. Here’s what a dial texture can look like:

And this is how it looks, when the texture is “mapped” on the 3D model of the gauge (the wireframes showing the structure of the model):

The final result looks like this:

As you see, we have a nice realistic dial, a little bit of dirt in the “corners” and some rusty screws. The pictures that we get here can be used to create background and needle bitmaps for the final gauges. So, when the Do228 is released and you have the panel on your screen, don’t forget that we modelled every single screw for you.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 22nd, 2007 at 4:42 pm and is filed under Screenshots, Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.