Out of pure boredom, and a lot of nostalgic, presenting you: Brickland.
It's a 32bpp graphical set, which replaces Toyland to be playable. As we all know, Toyland hurts your eyes and make you go insane. Brickland will solve that by making it totally awesome.
Progress
- - 32bpp only!
- Replaces Toyland terrain (dirt and normal, and the two stages in between).
- - Don't load Toyland in 8bpp when you have this grf active. You will flame me for it. I warned you. Seriously. Don't.
- Shadows are wrong on tile edges, and needs fixing. This only is not as easy as one can hope.
- GRF Info is too bare. It contains no real version, nor description. You will often have to redownload the grf to get the latest, with no-way of telling you if there was an update or not, except for me telling you.
The models for this set are created with LeoCAD. LeoCAD exports as 3DS, which Blender then imports.
I spend a great deal of time in making a good Blender master file (from scratch) and writing some scripts to automate generation and re-generation of this set. Basically, after a model is made in LeoCAD, it only takes minutes (seconds?) to prepare it for export. Pressing the button: Run Script, makes it generate the correct images, and in the end the right GRF. The result is attached here.
I am far from any Blender artist, up to the laughable. The keys I learnt so far: CTRL+J, L, P, and a few buttons here and there All models you will see in this set are a direct result of LeoCAD, not of Blender Blender is merely a means to an end, meaning it make very very good renders with pixel-perfect lighting
Official LEGO colours are used to keep it as nostalgic as you can get it.
A lot of time and thought and experiments have gone into how much studs should go on a tile. Originally the idea was 4x4. It turns out this is not pleasant for the eye, nor really useful. A 6x6 (as it is now) turns out to be much better, and also easy to generate on a pixel-perfect level. With the introduction of zoom-in 32bpp GRF support in OpenTTD, it becomes even more cool, as you can just zoom in and see all the little details.
At this point I do apologize to Wolf01 for stealing the name of this set without asking him. You can read up on the old work on Brickland here: http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=34999
Future work
Landscape is merely a proof-of-concept. After this, work has to be done on stuff like roads, rails, trees, houses, trains, ... It will be a slow and painful process, and will take years if not centuries to finish. Mostly, it is meant to keep me entertained. If I don't like what I see, I will dismiss it.
Contributions
At the moment I am not really looking for any contribution. But if you have made this awesome train, house, or what-ever in LeoCAD, feel free to post it. I might or might not use it. Time will tell what a good scale would be etc, so I can't tell you anything about that yet. If you post any LeoCAD model, please do mention if you are the original author, or if you downloaded it from the Internet somewhere. Also, if you ever want your model to be included in this set, make sure you agree on the terms of GPL, as the set will be released under that.
Source
How cheesy, but at the moment I am finishing up the last bits and pieces of the blender files. Once done, I will upload them somewhere and put the link here, instead of this text. All will be released under GPL, or what-ever-the-f***-of-license holds for art work.