Welcome to my video tutorial series on Eve Online in 3D. First things first, credit where credit is due. I’m not a master at Photoshop, nor Cinema 4D. In fact, everything I’ve learned has been from years of playing around, as well as making use of other great avenues of education specific to Eve Online in 3D.
- Eve Online TriExporter Forum Thread – very smart, very helpful people that can help you with more than just Cinema 4D. 3DS MAX, Blender, UDK and more – you use it, they’ve got answers.
- Eve Outtakes – brilliant 3D work from a professional 3D artist and Eve player. Psycho is helpful, friendly, smart as hell, and hands down makes the best Eve 3D fan art I’ve ever seen.
- Greyscale Gorilla – The single most useful resource for learning C4D and After Effects I’ve found. Very active blog, tons of video tutorials – Nick simply can’t be beat.
Know some other awesome resources I’ve missed? Let me know.
Tools you need for these tutorials:
- Eve Online – CCP’s flagship space simulator MMO. One of the most visually stunning games I’ve ever seen while maintaining an aggressive and risk filled game with the most dedicated and loyal player base you’ll ever encounter.
- Triexporter – A player made tool for extracting assets from Eve Online. Hosted on a player run file repository for Eve Online of course!
- Photoshop – Adobe’s mainstay. Any image editing program that supports DDS import will work, but I know and enjoy Photoshop.
- Cinema 4D – Maxon’s incredible 3D package continues to become more and more the number one choice of hobbyists and professionals everywhere. Find out why.
- NVidia DDS Plugins – The perfect companion for any 3D enthusiast/gamer. 32 bit and 64 bit support.
- Black2JSON – A little app to read those pesky .black files. You can thank me for the ease of reading. That was my contribution.
Got everything you need to get started! Then please enjoy and let me know if anything is unclear, or if you have questions.
Lesson 101 – The basics of the process for extracting EVE Online assets from the game using Triexporter, to basic texture manipulation in Photoshop, to finally importing it all and putting it together in Cinema 4D R13.
Lesson 102 – A full introduction to using the provided ship materials from CCP Games in Photoshop, and then in Cinema 4D to create gorgeous and believable artwork of the game Eve Online.
Lesson 103 – What good are ships without engines? And what good are engines without engine trails? It just wouldn’t be Eve Online without glorious, vibrant, streaming engine trails. Still and animated, pick your flavour.
Lesson 105 – Submasks. A way to customize the look of your ship easily and a handy guide to mounting turrets.
ROC'S RAMBLINGS 
great tutorials could you make some sort of tutorial for the planets aswell?
i have been following your tutorials and trying to follow the steps into 3ds max which work amazingly well.
But since im working on animations i would love to be able to use the actual planet maps.
best regards.
joe
The planets are procedural but I will be covering how to create nice planets in the series. Thanks for the comment. I’m glad you’re enjoying the series.
Also i found out that in the _pgs files there is also the reflection mask in there.
this reflection mask can be found under the blue channel.
Will have to look into that. Thanks.
Sent from my iPhone. Attachments may not be downloaded. Thank you.
The red and blue channels in the pgs house paint masks, which you need to use for diffuse, specular, gloss and reflection masking.
Hey T’Amber, good to see you’re still alive. Can you elaborate? Maybe a screen or scene file?
here is what it looks like in 3ds max with correct color values, engine trails, mining lasers mounted and a test of the mining laser beam itself.
let me know if you have any suggestions on adjustments.
At the end of the day it all comes down to artistic interpretation. Looking at your image, the reflection seems to shiny and granular to me and your turrets need a little diffuse colour matching.
I’ll be doing a video on turrets soon, as well as lasers and projectiles.
I’m going to open up some files now and play around with your reflection idea. I will get back to you on my findings.
Yeah, I definitely the Blue Channel of PGS to be far too bright even when reduced and blended. I like a gritty look to my EVE ships so I’ll stick with duplicating the colour channel methinks.
Also, for the engines, take a look at this:
Yours looks nice but I think if you increase your intensity you might get a nicer glow.
Keep up the amazing work!
Thanks for the comments and advice, I’ll see what I can do to the turrets and reflections later today once done with work.
Best regards, joe
hey roc been a while since i did some stuff but finally managed to get stuff sorted 🙂
have a look here at the armageddon model :
Good stuff! I’ll soon be showing you how to create EVE environments as well.
nice. when do you think this will be going live?
It’s all as time permits. Sorry. No promises. Hopefully this year.
Love the tutorials i see nothing has been posted in a while however i saw your stuff a few months back. I did figure out how to use the mask/submask thanks to your base and just playing around with things. I’m still a noob at C4D but its fun none the less.
Damn Nice tutorial ;D
But the TriExporter will not work after Odyssey Patch. other versions will crash, and this version will only show ascii code or something like this, but no 3D models. 😦 (XNA FW4 and .NEt FW4 are installed )
Hmmm, I just extracted a fully functional Rifter along with images. Did you download the TriExporter from my links? Which ship in particular were you having issues with?
Hi,
thanks for the quick response.
I do it with the TriExporter from your site. I have this problem with all ships.
The path seems to be ok and the Exporter starts without any menu on the left side and a lila main window.
regards panic
I saw your other comment with the two EVE Files lnks, but left it marked as spam.
The link above for TriExporter: http://dl.eve-files.com/media/1202/TriExporterNET_14555.rar
I’ve just downloaded it and installed it fresh, and am not having any issues. There could be a conflict on your system maybe? Not really sure how to help you debug this, but happy to try.
now it runs ;D i used the “TriExporter 2009” with the “granny2.dll” from “TriExporterNET_14555”
Good stuff. And you’ve motivated me to add some tutorials. Thank you.
Hi, great Tutorial(s), thx a lot.
I only wish, you make one for extracting the planets or their textures and put them together to model/render eve planets. this would be awesome !
greetz
Firstly, thanks. I’m glad to see they are appreciated.
The planets in EVE are actually procedural, meaning they are generated via code in real-time and no textures are used for them.
There are some fantastic planet tutorials for C4D. At some point, I may do one of my own to make this series more robust and not just about ships.
Ok, maybe you can use the textures from eve planets?
I’d really like to setup a scene, that got eve-like planets included!
Have a good One and fs
It’s the textures that are procedural and projected onto a sphere primitive. That’s how they do the nice lightning and subtle animations on planets.
Here’s a good one to get you started:
Some high rez planetary maps:
http://laps.noaa.gov/albers/sos/sos.html
Some city lights tutorials:
http://planetpixelemporium.com/tutorialpages/earthlight.html
http://ere4s3r.deviantart.com/art/Shaders-Planet-Night-Lights-136199279
Ok, Thx a Lot for the links – i’ll give them a shot soon.
Could you explain more in depth, or more precisly how this “procedual” Planet processing Works? Or give a overview about this?
Maybe there is a Way, to use the eve Textures for creating a non procedual Planet?
Have a nice weekend and thank you so much for sharing you Knowledge!
Thank you, man,
awesome tutorials, very simple to go through!
Hey roc, love the tutorials and they aided me in alot of ways. Now there is only one problem on which I’m stuck. The latest version of the black2json app on the eve-o forums seems to be out of date and isn’t able to convert the new faction bc’s. Any idea if there are other applications that can be used to convert or read the black files?
Hey Roc! Hope this finds you well! Was wondering when you are going to put up some more tutorials for us. Love the new rig!
I’m actually working on version of this tutorial as CCP keeps redoing things every release!
Great series! I’ve been searching for days looking for a way to set up a rattle snake to use for a custom back ground, however I cant seem to zero in on the gurista texture, am I missing something obvious?
Nope. The models use base textures. If that model has variants, they are in the same folder. If not, use the submasks (which I haven’t covered yet) and read the .black file for colour values.
Thank for the reply. I took a peek at the .black file and nothing overtly using a “gurista” re-texture for the model ( at least that I found).
so of course NOW i find something: its in the gurista pgs like in the green channel. how to use it though. experiment I shall.