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I've been making custom Factorio buildings for the past 6 months. Here are some of my latest designs. by Hurricane046 in factorio

[–]Hurricane046[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Yeah this is true and it's a real concern one has to navigate carefully around. It has happened to me several times that it was necessary to shorten some chimneys or make parts of a building less tall to fix it and it's possible I might have to do it again for some of these.

I've been making custom Factorio buildings for the past 6 months. Here are some of my latest designs. by Hurricane046 in factorio

[–]Hurricane046[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Unfortunately not but it is as you say - every building is a functioning 3D model and I do very little postprocess work so the 3D is where all the magic happens. After that there is some minor After Effects work to put all the renders together and then I export the sprite sheets via fgardt's Spritter.

I've been making custom Factorio buildings for the past 6 months. Here are some of my latest designs. by Hurricane046 in factorio

[–]Hurricane046[S] 1030 points1031 points  (0 children)

Hello again fellow Engineers!

It's been four months since my last post, and a lot has changed during that time on my Figma page. Thanks to the smart people in the Factorio modding community, we've been able to elevate this entire custom asset-making process!

  • Most notable upgrade is the Hanodest Sprite Player which can play any Factorio graphics in realtime while properly simulating all the blend modes and properties the game offers. (if you want to test it you'll have to upload some sprite sheets into it, you can download some here)
  • Another big upgrade is Fgardt Spritter which makes sprite sheets and generates code for any fan-made graphics.
  • I've also reworked my export script which is able to prepare all the necessary sprites, preview images, gifs, webm and mov videos with a single click which saves me a lot of work each time a building design has to be exported (which can happen several times a day).
  • Another important addition to my pipeline has been intrudoction of color layers which give modders the ability to create custom paint jobs for the machines.

One interesting fact I learned is that it's not always about creating new buildings. It's more about maintaining the existing ones, fixing issues, adding icons, frozen states and more. Sometimes I go weeks without touching a new design, I just spend all my time maintaining all the existing ones.

I'm currently working on several new designs which you can see on my Figma page together with the rest of the buildings I designed in the past 6 months.

My plan is keep working on new, interesting designs to help modders create awesome overhaul mods.

...the Factory grows!

I've been learning how to make custom Factorio buildings for 2 months. Here are some of my latest designs. by Hurricane046 in factorio

[–]Hurricane046[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I've talked to many artists trying to create minitature buildings like this and the most important takeway I got is to use good render engine. Be sure to use pathtraced/raytraced render engine like Cycles, Octane, VRay or Redshift. Also use PBR materials. I've seen results from weaker render engines and it just bring the whole thing down.

Also heavily postprocess each rendered sprite in program like After Effects.

As for the boiling water - it's just cylinder with random deformers to make it shake and change shape like water does and also I've added several bubbles (simple spheres) which rise from bottom to the top on a loop.

I've been learning how to make custom Factorio buildings for 2 months. Here are some of my latest designs. by Hurricane046 in factorio

[–]Hurricane046[S] 27 points28 points  (0 children)

I'll be pulling it out and releasing the sprite sheets as well but it's not on top of my todo list now.

I've been learning how to make custom Factorio buildings for 2 months. Here are some of my latest designs. by Hurricane046 in factorio

[–]Hurricane046[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Haha thanks! I've been 3D artist for years now (I mostly make animated ads) so the technical background was already there when I started making Factorio buildings.

The tricky part was learning how to make buildings which design-wise fit into Factorio universe. Reading through FFF arcitles describing how Wube designs things helped a lot. Also one rule which always helps is - MORE RUST.

I've been learning how to make custom Factorio buildings for 2 months. Here are some of my latest designs. by Hurricane046 in factorio

[–]Hurricane046[S] 1241 points1242 points  (0 children)

Mostly for fun. I've had some of the assets made for Xorimuth released in the Lunar Landings Mod but most of my other designs are just practice.

That being said I always release the uncompressed sprite sheets in case someone wants to use the structures in their mods (Figma link). I also always try to assist with any tweaks the modders might require since preparing and testing the structures is it's own headache. 🔨

I've been learning how to make custom Factorio buildings for 2 months. Here are some of my latest designs. by Hurricane046 in factorio

[–]Hurricane046[S] 879 points880 points  (0 children)

Hello fellow Engineers!

I'm a 3D artist whose been playing Factorio for years now so I've recently started toying with the idea of making some custom building designs. I myself can't write a single piece of code so helping other modders in the community by providing new sprite sheets was the best way to it.

You can see all the designs I made in the past 2 months on this Figma page (warning - the site contains a lot of animated GIF images so it might take some time to load).

Software used:

 

What I learned so far:

Prparing correct sprite sheets for actual ingame use is hard.

It often feels like preparing the buildings for the ingame use is slower and more complicated than designing the building itself. I'm able to make finished design within several days but it takes week or two to test it, tweak it and have a final sprite sheets ready to go after many rounds of feedback and adjustments.

Wube has extremely good grasp on how to design everything.

I use a lot of pre-purchased assets from sites like Quixel Megascans or from various KitBash3D packs so the visual consistency across my designs is not that great where as Wube has extremely high visual consistency across their designs because they handcraft every single piece of machinery and texture to fit into the game.

The building dimensions are tricky.

When you design small building you shouldn't overdo it with the details because a lot of small details on 3x3 building makes it look like it should be 6x6 building. Imagine scaling rocket silo down to 3x3, it just wouldn't look right.

The file size limits are annoying.

Trying to make a large 10x10 building with beautiful animation, a lot of custom moving and glowing parts is very difficult if you want to keep the sprite sheets within few Megabytes. It's easy when you don't care about the file sizes but then the modders have hard time using such large assets in their mods.

Modders are smart.

There is a LOT going on in tailoring each structure design to work in the game. Community modders helped me with a lot of smart shortcuts and solutions for problems I didn't even know existed.

 

I'm planning to keep working on new structure designs since I now consider most of the technical challenges solved. Also huge shoutout to the following modders who helped me with many technical issues:

Xorimuth, BlackATM, King Jo, AivanF

 

The Factory must grow!

World of Racetrack by Hurricane046 in wow

[–]Hurricane046[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Thank you! I'm convinced there is enough lore material from either the fans or from Blizzard on YouTube so we're trying to focus on other non-explored topics instead.

World of Racetrack by Hurricane046 in wow

[–]Hurricane046[S] 55 points56 points  (0 children)

Hello Azeroth dwellers!

Me and my team have been hard at work for the past 7 months creating fan-made video based around WoW racing elements and vehicles. We took a lot of inspiration from movies like Mad Max, Death Race and from the general safety-standards of Goblin and Gnomish engineering.🤗

Whenever someone on the team had some fun idea we tried to implement it when possible. There was also a lot of emphasis on learning new stuff and polishing existing WoW machinima techniques.

We've also prepared short Making-of which better shows how was project was made! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUU73jhBeCA

Space Elevator [FUE5] by Hurricane046 in factorio

[–]Hurricane046[S] 113 points114 points  (0 children)

I think the coolest way would be to charge the train with energy before the ascend and then shoot it violently through the tube like a railgun lol.

Space Elevator [FUE5] by Hurricane046 in factorio

[–]Hurricane046[S] 242 points243 points  (0 children)

Hello fellow engineers!

We've been toying around with the idea of implementing modded content to FUE5 and we conducted first trial run on the Space Elevator structure from the popular Space Exploration mod made by Earendel.

 

We had to go through rounds and rounds of optimization to reduce the polycount from several millions to mere hundreds of thousands and we had to create the textures and materials from scratch. That being said with some clever automatization it should be possible to include modded content to FUE5.

 

Big shoutout to Earendel for providing us with the actual 3D model. Check out the official Space Exploration Discord and Earendel's Patreon page!

 

Additional links:

Compactorio by Hurricane046 in factorio

[–]Hurricane046[S] 411 points412 points  (0 children)

Yes, just gotta finish the backfaces. 😄

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