I'm back, so Bengal first, spirit?

[klauss]

@Klauss:
I don't understand... How would the GI stuff be applied to subunits from having similar spheres in the original mesh? I'd have to have each gun sub-unit refer to the ship's UV-map, no?

Let me be clearer, say things I didn't, and then add a final comment

You can, if you don't want to have the spheres in your model, do the following:

Have the spheres while baking GI. Don't map the spheres to any texture, though. Just use them to occlude ambient on the model that will remain. That baked GI info for everything but the turrets will do great.

Whenever you have the turret model, unwrapped and all, you can do one of two things:
a) do a rough estimation, and add an occluder box where the base hull would be (on the base of the turret), to do a similar thing as with the ship but for the turret. That is, use a dummy occluder while baking. This I bet will look good enough.
b) if you want more precision, you can place the turret in a dummy bengal (the true bengal or a simplification - I'd suggest a simplification, for performance's sake - at least remove greebles). For each setup, compute GI. Those textures will (in the engine) be shareable by one mesh - that will be part of the model specification: material overrides. Even if it wasn't, you can always generate N turrets. In any case, you don't need to have the turrets right now, or in the same model.
Note also that you can make compromises: don't do the baking for every position, do it for some "representative" ones. ie: those in radically different situations.

BTW: Holy neutralizers Starchaser...

[chuck_starchaser]

Okay, if my understanding is correct, your GI does dynamic occlusion, not only diffuse, but specular as well, right? So, my line of thinking goes like this:

1) Premise a: Gun shields should be fairly specular in a world with lasers.
Premise b: So far, nothing else is very specular in the ship.
Sort of premise c: I don't want flat specular surfaces, unless they are true mirrors.
Conclusion A: The gun bubbles are a fairly good choice for use of a specular material.

2) Premise d: The UV map for the ship cannot rotate.
Premise e: The UV map for a moving sphere cannot stay fixed relative to the ship as the sphere rotates; it must rotate with it. (Unless you (or I) implement dynamic UV mapping (which I can't remember who it was was asking for, years ago)).
Premise f: The GI texture coords for the turrets need to stay fixed relative to the ship to enjoy dynamic diffuse and specular occlusion.
Premise g: The non-GI (standard) texture coords for the turrets need to rotate.
Conclusion B: I'd better choose between texturing or GI. I choose GI. But I have a problem: Need to somehow make it look like the spheres rotate, even if they don't... :-/

3) Premise h: Perhaps a reflective surface (or any smooth, featureless surface, for that matter) does not need to show non-GI features IF such features can be replaced by rotating geometry to give a hint of rotation.
Premise i: Adding rotating geometry features that protrude a fixed sphere is trivial.
Conclusion C: Forgo normal texturing for the turrets, go for GI instead. Ergo, go for ship-UV's, rather than turret UV's. Ergo^2: Make the spheres part of the ship.

Conclusion D, from A, B and C: Add the spheres to the model. Make them black in diffuse, white in specular, no bumps; let them participate of the ship's GI UV map, then give the turrets round frames that protrude the sphere, to make it look like the spheres are rotating.

In other words, I think what you were suggesting was a lesser GI for the turrets; one that doesn't account for the main tower, for instance. That might be okay for turrets far away from the control tower, but there are 5 turrets pretty damn close to it. I say "no way".

Appendix i: Perhaps the protruding, rotating frame, can use paralax to show features that look as if they were inside the sphere!!! Now *that* would be a good test for the paralax shader...

By the way, I had a brief meeting with Brad on AIM, and he convinced me to get rid of the fins on the "wings" for the side guns. Didn't have to twist my arm too hard, since I wasn't happy with the look of them, myself. I think the the pipes on the side guns are going to go also. They don't make any sense, since they could go through the inside of the structure.

It's hard to greeble a model for a game universe that doesn't care for any realism whatsoever. I mean, guns hanging from "wings". What could it possibly mean? These guys at Origin were smoking something really strong. Maybe I need to get some of that...

Just kidding, Spirit; no thanks, don't ship me none to Canada...

[chuck_starchaser]

Here we go:



I tried making the turret bubbles chrome-like:



Unfortunately, the sky being poo color and featureless, makes for rather dull material to reflect. But a dynamic scene would deliver the message.

Added more windows to the tower:

[chuck_starchaser]

Welded the wing to the hull:



Next I'll weld it to the gun box.

[chuck_starchaser]

Done!





Next is to do some work for my daytime job, before I get fired...

Klauss, I was just thinking, if you have specular occlusion, that's probably two or three instructions away from having global self-mirroring...

[klauss]

Klauss, I was just thinking, if you have specular occlusion, that's probably two or three instructions away from having global self-mirroring...

No. Self, is the keyword.
The main simplification made is that reflected things are "away" from the model, that simplifies the math a helluva lot.
Self-mirroring must take into account a lot of nasty situations, but I was thinking of limited self-mirroring. That is, the features still away from the model... but closer. If I ever implement it, I'll show.

Ehm... about the turrets... I see the point now.
So... if you want the tower... what can we do?
I'll have to think a bit.
I'm thinking an "ambient mask" - I'll get back to you later.

[chuck_starchaser]

Nah, don't worry, Klauss; the tower is not as important as I thought. I realized that after I made the bubbles reflective in the renders, what you see of the tower reflected on them barely amounts to half a dozen pixels. Not worth it.
The landing platform, that's another story, tho.

[Privateer Ferrius]

Thank you. Just the front looks good, though; everything from the middle to the back is a disaster.

I disagree, strongly.

[micheal_andreas_stahl]

Are the buble things turrets? GIENT turrets.

[chuck_starchaser]

Thank you. Just the front looks good, though; everything from the middle to the back is a disaster.

I disagree, strongly.

Well, because by now I've fixed most of it . Seriously, the old "wings" were hideous. Just the very back plate, now, needs something, donno what. Maybe I should go back to the idea of an open back. Maybe a shallow depression, or a depression that contours and avoids the engines. Not sure.

Are the buble things turrets? GIENT turrets.

They are pretty big; the size is in scale with the turrets depicted on the Claw Marks schematic. Remember that the Bengal wasn't really a "carrier", but a "strike carrier". A carrier is a ship that is optimised for carrying. The Bengal has very limited carrying capacity, but it has something carriers don't usually have much of, in great measure: Weapons for ship to ship fighting. The Bengal can go into combat against capships. It's something between a carrier and a cruiser. If you look at the front grill, you'll see 40 torpedo launchers. The position was my choice, but the size and number of the launchers are canon, from the literature. A couple of those torpedos could take out a capship in many cases, so this thing, indeed, has a lot of killer capacity for a "carrier". On the other hand, it carries a rather smallish compliment. I'm no WC conosseur, but if I were to take a guess, Bengals should often be accompanied by destroyers, for defense against swarms of smaller craft.

[spiritplumber]

The Bengal was actually the first carrier supposed to be able to operate solo actually... I think ^_^;

[chuck_starchaser]

Thanks for the info. Actually, what I meant is that it would still be pretty vulnerable to large swarms of small ships that include both interceptors and bombers, as it can only launch a relatively small flotilla of interceptors, and its guns are too big and slow to be able to target them. On the other hand, its guns are long range and adequate to defend against bombers, and the fact it carries missiles sort of makes up for the reduced interceptor compliment...
Yep; pretty bad ass ship; that's why the kats needed to develop cloak to be able to defeat it.

Question: Are there any graphics to be found anywhere for WC weapons? Or do I just go with the Privateer images for inspiration? E.g. laser:



Mass driver:

[mkruer]

I don't recall any other modular weapons other then those in Privateer. All the other ones were integrated into the ship itself.

[chuck_starchaser]

Okay, thanks, so Privateer guns they are...

Meson blaster:



Neutron gun:



Particle cannon:



Tachion cannon:



Ion Pulse cannon:



Plasma:



Whole lineup:



Next is making a laser turret...

[chuck_starchaser]

First turret experiment:











Problem is, right now it's 9424 triangles heavy...

[chuck_starchaser]

Down to 1488 triangles!!! From 9424 to 1488; that's 84.2% reduction

[chuck_starchaser]

Lots of hard work brought it down further to 1340 tris; but this is pretty much the limit; it wouldn't look at all the same if lowered from that.

[chuck_starchaser]

Actually, I managed to get it down to 1180 tris. This wasn't by typical optimizations, like vertex collapses, but by elliminating altogether one of the parts inside, namely a base into which the azimuth part with the guns was mounted. I figured that if it were painted black you wouldn't see it anyways, except by occlusion of the moving part; and I had already a black background and sides, so I extended it to include a few of the vertexes that belonged to that base, and removed the base altogether Now the interior is an air-tight, closed geometry. I put a yellow light inside to make the inside more visible in this pic:



Here's a few pics from the editor, so you can tell how it's put together:



That's the rortating base. The outside is metal finish; the inside is pitch black, and its purpose is to serve as background (otherwise the sphere would look transparent, due to back-face culling, and to occlude strategic portions of... The azimuth part:







As you can see in the open disclosure shot below, any polygons that aren't visible through the door have been systematically removed:



EDIT:
Whaddya know? Found further optimizations I could do with the base:



New render:



Tri-count now stands at 1163... --less than 1/8 of the initial tricount of 9424.

[chuck_starchaser]

Last optimization: Made the guns hexagonal instead of 8-sided. I can put a round hole at the business end in the texture. Also found two spurious, ultra-thin triangles in the dome and deleted them, and collapsed a couple more vertices in the black background interior. Tricount is 1156.



Next I'm gonna try it on the Bengal, see how it looks...

EDIT: Here's the current file, including blender and wavefront obj variants:
http://deeplayer.com/dan_w/WCweap/DualLaserTurret.7z

EDIT: A first shot of a turret on a Bengal. Note that the materials did not import at all, but just for a preview. Helps visualize the scale and level of detail it adds.

[chuck_starchaser]

Here we go:



Looks like we're REALLY going to need detail textures (and bumpmaps, and specmaps) on the ship... (as well as a bit more geometry; tiny little things here and there; otherwise too much texture detail on vast, plain, naked surfaces will look rather unreal..).

I've started looking into the landing bay. Everybody out there that have modelled the Bengal seem to assume that the landing bay is the same open space as the ship stalls, like where you see the hornet parked sometimes; same open space as where you see the mission debriefings; same open space as that kind of ramp where people form for death ceremonies. I certainly don't care to do something in a certain way just because everybody else does it that way, and frankly, since I noticed that workers walking in the landing bay, in the game screens, are wearing space suits, I've begun to suspect the Origin guys were not as stupid as everyone seems to assume. How do we know, after all, that screens in which you see what looks like open landing bay space, aren't actually in a separate, pressurized space? Or take the case of the death ceremonies: Do we have any proof there isn't a thick glass wall between them and outer space?

About this latter location, I was thinking the ramp could be a section of dropped ceiling in the bay. There's no danger to it, since the door is actually lower than the ceiling. So I decided to remove the bay ceiling, and then cut a hole in the hull, under the control tower. We've got a gargantuous amount of space to do whatever we want with...



Tho, I'm not even sure the death ceremony space faces the bay door at front, and not some other area, like at the back... Or even at the bottom side tower...

[DualJoe]

Damn Chuck, now you' ve hurt my feelings as an officer of the artillery.
I would have said something sooner, but sourceforge didn't work for me during the weekend.

That really doesn't look like a heavy turret. The dome doesn' t seem to have a function other than to be shiny.
It looks like a pimped up observatory where the telescope has been replaced by a machinegun.

First of all the dome design suggests that there has to be a protected space for personnel, munitions, vulnerable mechanical parts. It also suggests that the gun needs room to operate, i.e. has a pretty hefty recoil.
Traditionally the gun is also mounted on the dome. In other words it would make more sense if the guns were merged with the dome. The dome distributes the force of the recoil over a larger surface which makes live easier on the the rotating mechanism.
Lastely the dome should function as armor for more than just lasers. Even in WCU-canon it has to withstand missiles and mass-drivers and such. So I really feel that it should look less flimsy.
It also makes more sense, because the
Google some images for references of guns and artillery.
If you want I can send you some photos and videos of the automated gun that is being introduced at work, the Pzh2000.

[chuck_starchaser]

Well, I don't think recoil is an issue here: Lasers would have no recoil at all. Other particle beams would have minimal amounts of recoil. The idea is, if you shoot things as tiny as neutrons or protons, the amount of mass is tiny, probably less than a milligram, and with any amount of kinetic energy you put on them, the penetration is huge, due to the small size. In fact, most of the damage would be caused by particle interactions with the structure of the target. I don't know about "mass drivers", tho; but then again, I've no idea what the hell they are.
So, allow me to bypass the suggestion of attaching the weapon to the dome, though I certainly wouldn't mind taking a look at a picture of a real thing. I searched for references, when I started and found none at all; and I need to design a turret for my own mod, which is the real thing; --has recoil and all, so definitely I'd like to see a pic of one.

As for thickness, I've just given it like two feet on the dome, and about half a foot on the sliding wedge. Not very visible, though, but I hope it looks better.



Damn! I overwrote the previous render, accidentally. Oh well...
EDIT: No, I didn't

By the way, what I think will give a better idea of the mass of the dome is a pretty low cap in rotational acceleration. If I manage to convince Spirit to do it, that is... --she likes turrets that move around fast, like toys.

Another detail that might give it its "tinny" aspect is the coarse geometry. GPU's do a pretty good job of interpolating the normal, but they don't take paralax into account. I could use more subdivision, but that'really going to push up the poly count. Let me make an experiment; I'll be back.

EDIT:

Here it is with 1 subdivision of the dome:



Tri count goes to 1745; not as bad as I thought.

Another shot:



WRT protection of equipment inside, right now my backdrop inside is black, but for the final thing I'll put a lot of tanks and pipes and greebles on them, using paralax bumpmapping and all.

[DualJoe]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_turret
I think this page already shows the difference between the heavy stuff and the small-caliber stuff.

What bothers me the most is that I can see inside the dome. There's no armor at the one place it's really needed, namely the part facing the enemy. Not very motivating for the gunner (I assume you have a gunner, judging from the cockpit inside) when it's safer for him to not shoot at the incoming enemy.

I'm a bit confused about the purpose of the turrets. Are they anti air/spacecraft or are they meant for bigger things? Maybe you should do two kinds of turrets.

If you remove/adjust the dome you've got a pretty believable anti-air/spacecraft gun.
Like this and this, another bigger version
For more general landbased examples you can look here.

[chuck_starchaser]

Hmmm... I wish you had said something earlier. I see your point, but what can I do now? That's where the gunner is, and he needs to see the target. If I look at the French Navy turret, from your wikipaedia reference, the gunner is way at the back; nowhere near the gun; and the gun barrels pivot at the front. But with a spherical turret, where do I put the gunner?
But then again, in that Richelieu whatever turret, the turret doesn't cover the gunner, really; it's like a separate cabin, and there's nothing to prevent us from making the gunner's cabin (inside the spehere) stronger --less glass and more steel. Then the puropose of the dome is to protect the other equipment inside.

I'm looking for an easy fix, but I'm also concerned about making a non-spherical turret, since the only WC reference is the Clawmarks diagram, and it shows spheres (round in all views). Then again, I could put the gunner somewhere nearby, rather than inside, but the gunner's cabin would have to rotate in synchronization with the turret, and be heavily armored, but then why not put it inside, AND make it heavily armored?

By the way, the kind of stuff the turret will get hit by is lasers and particle beams, NOT shells. The material would probably be more radiation resistant than hard. Something along the lines of gold on lithium, would be my guess.

EDIT: Noticed you added to the post and looked at the new links. Pretty impressive stuff. Now, there's another angle to all this: A lot of these turrets I'm looking at don't even seem to have any kind of gunner window; and I'm sure that they are aimed electronically (computer controlled target acquisition and aiming), but in WC all aiming is done by eye.

[DualJoe]

Gunners don't need cockpits, because they don't need to see their targets. That's not a cabin you see on the richelieu-turret.
The only reason for a cockpit on guns would be for close-range rapid fire. That was not the look you were going for I presume.

Even anti-aircraft gunners don't see their targets and if then only with camera's mounted on the turret. WCU also has radar so I suggest putting a radar-greeble somewhere for the anti-aircraft stuff.

Not that much work actually.
Split the dome and your current gun-installation and make two seperate models. Make a simple swivelling barrel at the front of the dome for the heavy gun. For the anti-aircraft gun just add a radar-dish and maybe even remove the windows (make them opaque). Presto, two turrets with different looks and functions.