I thought it was about time I posted a new WIP thread (unless I do this, I lose focus and get distracted...)

I've certainly learnt a lot since my first attempt at a chess set (my "WIP: Simple Morphing Chess Piece - Advice On The Knight?" thread here http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2810592 ) but there's still a long way to go.

I've decided to try and produce a more traditional low resolution chess set. No morphs this time, so I can work on each piece in isolation. Here's what I've got so far - just the king and queen (both still need some tweaking).

King - 220 vertices, 218 faces.
Queen - 252 vertices, 250 faces.

(Screenshots of the obj files, as imported into DAZ|Studio above)
I started with the king, and decided to use a cube with 9 faces per side as the starting point. My reasoning was that the square in the centre of the top face could be extruded a few times to create the cross on the top. I also wanted to put the little bobble on top of the queen, and this central square seemed a good starting point for that too, so I created the queen from the king by removing the cross and adding a second cut-down cube.

Any comments, suggestions, advice, constructive criticism, etc is most appreciated, as always.

Hopefully the rest of the pieces will follow quite soon. And I hope to include a solid board with two pull-out, baize-lined drawers for storing the pieces. At least that's the plan... !

P.S. I've also posted a similar thread over at the DAZ forums here http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=2708932

It seems it's been the turn of the DAZ forum this time. I've had quite a few comments over there, so to save duplication I've been posting progress over there too. But just to prove that the project's progressing here's a screenshot of what I've got now (note, no knight yet - the crossless king is holding his place)

And a Poser 6 render of the tray section in the drawer of the previous image, with a couple of procedural textures applied in the material room just to show that this isn't just a cheapo plastic set!

P.S. the ugly lines between the bishop and the recess are due to very thin/zero-width rectangles (according to advice I've had), so I know how to fix that!

Much talk over at daz with regard to normal maps. I didn't realise poser had moved on so much! It does look like a lamina face as well to me, causing the crease. The rook looks a bit tall but it's all a matter of choice.

Nice project

Excuse the lapse, but I was de-internet-ed for a couple of weeks. Nice break actually.

AirFlamesRed - yep, (and hello again!) I think both the rook and bishop need a bit of adjustment to their overall size. Already on the list of things to do. I'll be reworking the tray from scratch once I've got the pieces finalised, so I'll be actively trying to avoid those laminar faces (and undoubtedly making different mistakes instead! All part of the learning process)

In the meantime here's a Poser 6 render of things as they stand. Drawers parented to the box, so they slide in/out using just the Z Translate dial. And there's a knight too, still in need of some more work though.

Okay, I've made some final(ish) adjustments to the relative sizes of the pieces, and I've got the knight more-or-less done. Here's a single pic of all the pieces (there's Poser/DS renders of this at the daz thread).

Statistics - (vertices/edges/faces)
King - 248/452/206
Queen - 312/560/250
Bishop - 340/626/288
Knight - 300/543/244
Rook - 335/525/210
Pawn - 212/396/186

I'm more-or-less happy with all the pieces now. Any suggestions for final tweaks before I start on the tray (filled and empty versions)?

Looks great to me...makes me wanna play now.

8 )

Remarkable work.

Tom

Thanks Tom!

I can almost see the finish line now. Here's the latest Poser 6 render - a few problems to iron out (empty trays not quite right, bishop/knight/rook tweaks), filled trays still to do, then testing and Poserising the whole shooting match...

Looks good. It deserves a better render though. Did you booleaan those trays?

Boolean? D'oh! Didn't even cross my mind - I did it the hard way!

Better render? Definitely. I just used Firefly defaults (I remember reading somewhere that they need to be adjusted for a good render). And I played with the texture nodes in the material room - never really tried it before, and it shows!

Well, I take my hat off to the people who produce all those wonderful textures we see. It's not until you try it yourself that you realise how much work and skill is involved! I'm not lacking in the effort department, so it must be the skill that's the problem! 

I've had major headaches with the materials, fixing something in Poser only to have the fix mess up in DAZ Studio, etc...

The UV-mapping is a bit of a mess. It seemed sensible at the time, but in hindsight...

Anyway, I've decided to make it available to everyone as it is, since I think it's useable. Just uploaded to ShareCG, and in the process of uploading to Renderosity. No links to post yet as it's not showing up - should be appearing soon...

Plenty of scope for constructive criticism here I think! 

(P.S. obj files included at Poser scale, so you'll have to scale up by a factor of 100 or so to use in other applications)