Discuss the Wing Commander Series and find the latest information on the Wing Commander Universe privateer mod as well as the standalone mod Wasteland Incident project.
chuck_starchaser wrote:Klauss, you said you want to take on un-wrapping duties. This is your chance I really don't feel like learning to unwrap right now... Care to?
Whoops... hadn't seen that. Sorry.
As I said earlier, that'll have to wait until I'm finished with Ogre. The bad knews is that I found some stuff that will be hard to do with ogre (that is needed to properly support older hardware without texture compression).
So... It'll take me quite some time to get it working, and in the meanwhile I don't think I'll have much time to do unwarpping without feeling guilty. Plus, the guys at work decided I had too much free time, and embarked me into adding our own cryptographic modules to Mozilla so that we may actually implement true HTTPS which, although very interesting and fun, you can imagine takes a lot of time.
So... would, I would. But I don't think I'll have time for it soon... perhaps it would be faster for you to try to learn. I'll be ready to give some advice, though, for what it's worth... for instance, how to select faces in Blender without it forgetting you did (I dunno, must be a bug... drove me crazy the first time, but I found a workaround by doing things in a particular order).
Hey, chuck. Ever tried this tutorial: UV-Mapping and Unwrapping? It showes you everything you need in 10 simple steps. (found via the Blender tutorials)
Allright, without counting the wheels and landing gear, it went from 6880, down to 3799 triangles... The engines suffered, though... ^^
EDIT:
Never mind. They just suffered even more... Tri count now is at 3312.
Notice the beveling. Where the beveling lines intersect, there used to be up to 5 or 6 triangles; now there's only one triangle at each corner. All fixed manually...
Shaded doesn't look too bad...
Brad is gonna strangle me, but I'm staying with 15 sides, tho; thing is, these rings are on a black background and front-facing to the chase camera view. In fact, even at 15 sides they look too polygonal still. What I'm thinking of doing is fading the periphery to black, using a filthy trick:
If I faded them with a longitudinal, back to front mapping, they'd look good from the side but polygonal from the back. If I faded them radially, they'd look good from the back but not so good from the side. So I'm going to use an average of both fading techniques. We'll see...
Hey Chuck, you could probably scrap the pipes on the top. IMO good texturing could create a good enough effect, and bump mapping (with ogre) would be a much better way to put in those details anyway.
Actually no. Bump-mapping is an efficient way to deal with very bumpy surfaces, such as asteroids or textured materials like sprayed stucco or thatch or cobblestone. If you have a surface that's 90% flat and has only a few little bumps on it, using a bump-map is highly inefficient. I wouldn't even use it for seams between armor plates. Most videocards out there sport 3 or 4 texture units; that is, can use 3 or 4 textures simultaneously while computing a pixel, in a single pass.
We've got:
That's heavy already, and if we were to add a bumpmap to it, many videocards would go to a double pass.
So, you'd want to add a bumpmap to an asteroid, for example, which doesn't use a glow map. Maybe to a ship's body that doesn't use environment mapping; or to a glossy, glass cockpit or chrome part that uses environment mapping exclusively --i.e.: No diffuse or glow textures.
Even for the more recent videocards with like 6 texture units, we're still not out of the woods: For each pixel (fragment, rather, if you turn on FSAA), we're having to read RGB or RGBA info from a lot of textures, and at multiple sampling locations, in particular if you turn on anisotropic filtering. So we tend to run into memory contentions.
The pipes on the wings are really cheap, geometry-wise; specially since I reduced them from 4-sided to 2-sided. Let me count:
4 sections each small pipe, 1 for the long pipe, that's 9x2 = 18 quads; and 3 pointy ends, that's 6 triangles, so 36+6=42 tris each wing, 84 triangles altogether.
That's a lot less memory than a bumpmap takes up.
I'm not saying tricount isn't important, but I think we're still going by traditions originating from the situation of 10 years ago, where videocards used to accelerate only the texturing, and the cpu had to do all the geometry computations. Back then it made sense to use any texture tricks that could possibly help minimize geometry.
Now the situation, IMO, is almost the reverse: Not that I'd use geometry to model every noodle on every plate at lunch time on the Concordia, but the main bottleneck in the videocard is the memory really; and while the bfxm might take 200k or so, at 1024 the textures take 3 megs each (4 if you use transparency), so like 12 megs for each ship type having the four textures... 15 megs if you add a bump-map. Of course I'm not taking compression into account, but still, I think even a doubling of the geometry doesn't justify a bump map, but I've been wrong before. Just my theory, for now; we'll do some experimentation soon.
My Moral Code:
- The only sin is to treat people as if they were things.
- Rules were made for people, not the other way around.
- Don't deceive. Real life is complicated enough.
- If all else fails, smash stuff.
3216 TRIANGLES !!! Down all the way from 6880... I would have been catmeat if Brad hadn't told me his secrets for how to reduce polys.
So, other than for the opening cockpit, this baby is done. Finito. Here's some shots:
I kept only what I *really* wanted to keep of the engines; nothing more...
Spent ridiculous numbers of hours flattening quads. This is the result: Ultra-flat surfaces, like the wing bottoms here:
Well, in this side-view you can see some faint triangulation on the vertical part of the wing; but mostly what you see is quads. Which is okay; it's what I wanted. No smoothing on the armor! Just the armor tiles in the texture will match the quads in the mesh, so the polygonal illumination and the texturing will fit one another. It will just look like it was built polygonal:
Here's your chase camera view:
The new cockpit consumes a lot less polys...
While waiting for the cockpit door details, I'll start modelling the cockpit interior. Stay tuned.
(sorry I haven't been around -- schoolwork, plus I've been drafted for some fairly cool AI work -- should be back in full force by winter break)
My Moral Code:
- The only sin is to treat people as if they were things.
- Rules were made for people, not the other way around.
- Don't deceive. Real life is complicated enough.
- If all else fails, smash stuff.
I don't like those inner rings in the engines floating... they look way off. I don't think a couple quads tying them to the outer rings would hurt the polycounts.
Otherwise... impressive cleanup.
@Klauss: You're right; I'll put, maybe 3 spokes on each ring should do the trick and it's only 9 triangles.
@Brad: The engines are mounted onto a black plane; there are no holes leading into the ship. In fact, I think you could pressurize this puppy
Is that what you refer to as holes?
BradMick wrote:no, i mean the open backs of the engine nozzles.
Okay. Then what kind of problems do they cause?
Cockpit work begins:
Assuming the original 2D cockpit to be a parallel projection would be wrong; and would force the camera to be below the sides (no way to see left or right.
But I can only import the screen orthogonally, so, I can trace the geometry orthogonally for now...
But after I extrude it, I'll have to turn the geometry to follow the correction to the camera position.
Last edited by chuck_starchaser on Tue Nov 22, 2005 12:31 am, edited 3 times in total.
Ahhh, I see. Is there no way to do something like projection, like straight from the back? I think I read of a script for Blender that does UV mapping by setting up cameras. Of course, I haven't done any kind of it yet. I'll see if I can find that post again. Actually the rings aen't textured. They are totally mirror-like, so like black color and bluish white reflectivity. I can use a special shader for them and the cockpit. But maybe you're talking about the like the exhaust flame. If so, that's gonna change, with Ogre; it will be a true volumetric effect.
Question, anyone, should I put a joystick and a hand?
Starting to take shape...
Not much to show yet, but the dashboard was quite a bit of work.
Well, the top thing on the dashboard needs to be wider and flatter...
Here's the original:
Here's an overlay. Not too bad considering I can't get the perspective right in Blender.
Camera position control is terrible; each click of the mousewheel you move like by a foot...
* Got the top piece on the dash quite a bit improved.
* Deformed the screens in 3D so they look a bit more square in perspective.
* Added rim for radar display.
Nice.
I don't think it needs much more, the rest can be done with textures.
But I'd suggest you clean up that puppy... the radar rim shows some strange things, as well as the screens.
Also, make sure the screens (the part that will be mapped with the actual screen) use a different material (each), so that later they can be rendered to.
Not sure what strange things you're talking about. That little gap on the lower right of the radar screen rim is in the original. And it sure needs much more: The seat, the sides, the floor, the surrounding ledge and gasket, the cell phone, or whatever that thing is, and there's a cable that runs under the left side of the round frame. The buttons around the square screens are too square to do with a bumpmap. Maybe the little round ones we can use a bumpmap for. Should I make a joystick and a hand? Would you have an easy way to move it around? All three screens with one material, or a separate material for each? What about fuel gauges, lock light, Overload, and all those little gadgets?
I meant the forward view doesn't need much... of course, the rest is another story - I didn't even have a chance to see what is done about the other view (if there's anything).
About the gap... I see what you mean, but a) the way you did it is... not nice. It's suppose to be just a recessed stripe. and b) I think it's there also on the left side (symmetrical placement).
About the screens and little gadgets, you have many ways of doing it.
Since I'll basically have "render targets" and any cockpit element (including VDUs, gauges and stuff) can be placed either directly on the screen as an overlay, or on one of the render targets, it's basically up to you. But, if you choose to use a single texture for them (which would help a bit with batching... not much, but a bit), then the uv-mapping must be carefully done to properly map each gauge. In a sense, it's much harder. I would use one texture for each VDU (or MFD, whatever you prefer), and one texture for small gadgets. Yep... because I'm not sure if I'll make VDUs interactive or Render Targets (there's a difference). With that setup (gadgets aside, VDUs on their own texture), my decision doesn't get in the way. Of course, should it need to be changed, it isn't such a big job anyway.
Last edited by klauss on Tue Nov 22, 2005 9:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I really don't feel like learning to unwrap right now... Care to?
Seriously. There's just so many of them...
