New Hornet model

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 3:46 am

This is what I could reconstruct from my Blender crash that took away my lovely model. Guess I should save more often.

862 faces and climbing.
The unsmoothed look is growing on me.
I am very tired now, so the cockpit and the weaponry will have to wait.

EDIT
two more renders with better lighting. Was playing with smooth values in Blender for the second one to see If I could get close to an opengl look.

Obviously I also need to work on attaching the wings.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 4:32 am

Splitting the smoothing groups; you just gave me a perfect example...

Those artifacts are caused by having sharp angles on the edges of smooth surfaces. If you select the polys along the rim of the wings, and press Y, and say yes to Split, they'll go away.

By the way, you got jaggy lines because you're not using oversampling in the rendering. Press F10, and under OSA click on 8 or 16. Then, each of your materials, make sure you click Full OSA for it.

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 12:36 pm

Next time I will give the model a material so the jaggies should disappear.
By the way shouldn't the Blender viewscreen and opengl renders give me the result that would compare with the ingame result?
There are quite some differences with how the model looks in opengl and the render (actually the opengl ones look a lot better).
Is there a convenient viewer I could use to see how the model would look in game? One that works with linux or wine.

This is a whole different ballgame compared to subdivisionmodelling and I am running into a new set of problems alltogether.

Is there a way to align the vertices of a quad-face or to flatten a face?
I am getting tired of these miniscule adjustments of individual vertices.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 5:12 pm

You can use Smooth, but don't.

You can use Subdivide Smooth, proportional editing, deformations, and there's a gazillion scripts; but at the endo of the day, nothing quite substitutes for manual adjustment. Look at Brad Mick, he builds meshes vertex by vertex manually, sometimes.

The artifacts I pointed out have nothing to do with the material you use; nor do the jaggies, unless you turned off Full OSA on the material.

A renderer has many capabilities that real-time OGL rendering can't hope to come to par with, like specular reflections, radiosity, etceteras.
Having said that, texturing can do a lot to approach rendered quality in real time. The radiosity and ambient lighting/shadowing can be baked into a texture by Blender. You then multiply (modulate) the diffuse texture by this radiosity baking, and use the result as the base for your emissive texture. It adds tons of realism. For now all you need is make sure the geometry is good; and for that you don't need fancy texturing.

Privateer Ferrius · Post by **Privateer Ferrius** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 9:26 pm

Everything I've done in 3D is vertex by vertex. Which works, but takes a hella long time. 'Specially these days. Never really got the hang of modelling any other way.

Anywho, you don't need my (or anyone elses) fancy-smancy textures yet, need to fix the smoothing first

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 9:57 pm

Took me forever but finally the wings are finished and the smoothing is corrected.
That front wing was deceivingly difficult to get right, with all those odd angles.

I'll render some more views in a minute for your thorough review.

Privateer Ferrius · Post by **Privateer Ferrius** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 10:02 pm

Looks good from what I can tell in that shot

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 10:41 pm

Nice job, Dual. You got the hang of smoothing groups pretty quickly.

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 11:13 pm

Thanks for the help, this would have taken a lot longer if you weren't helping me out.

Two more views.

By the way it's looking a lot better now that I am not using the standard blender material (with full OSA turned off) and raytraced shadows.

A lot of the artifacts in the previous renders were probably badly configured buffered shadows.

Currently I don't have an armour plate in the back between the engines.
Didn't do one because there wasn't one in the references.
However the hud does mention an back armour in the form of those nice little bars.
What do you suggest I do?
We could use the opportunity to have a nice glow to show off the inside, however your engines should be turned off to able to see it.

Privateer Ferrius · Post by **Privateer Ferrius** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 11:16 pm

You can bake the texture to do a real nice glow, if you want

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 3:56 am

The engines turn on and off automatically, anyways; like, whenever the ship accelerates they come on, so you'd get to see the glow.
I can't answer your question on armor on the back; it's your model, your call, really, as wherever canon is inconsistent, it becomes a value judgement and a personal taste thing. I'm usually for departures from canon when canon is in the wrong, or when we can do something a lot more realistic, given current computer technology; but some people consider canon a sacred thing. I've seen a lot of heated debates, like whether Draymans are too weak and should be given some turrets... Horror of horrors, scream the canon heads. Endless debates.
On the other hand, and in this particular case, if all that's visible from the back is the engines, there's not much room for armor, is there?; I mean, you can't cover the engines with armor.
Maybe there's a reason why one tries to avoid a bogie on one's 6...

Maybe the armor *figure* for the back is in error...

forlarren · Post by **forlarren** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 4:26 am

Maybe "back" is subjective. You will most likely be taking shots on the tob/bottom back area, and that is what is armored.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 4:33 am

Hey, Forlarren; how's that story coming along?

forlarren · Post by **forlarren** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 7:51 am

Umm story? Did I forget something I was going to do/doing again? I have moved a couple of times and got a new job since I worked on any real projects and most have gotten forgotten.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 8:32 am

Yeah, that's life; I'm pretty busy too; anyways, one of these days we should get back to it. It was shaping nicely...
Sorry to go OT on you, Dual.

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 6:33 pm

The cockpit is also done, apart from the interior that is.
Had to cut it into the hull, because otherwise there was no way that you could ever see your wing.
To put it another way, the view was ridiculously limited, especially for a fast fighter like this.
The glass dome needs some more detailing and shouldn't be completely glass, but I'm not on that level of detail yet.

I should work on the lighting.
Speaking of which, is there a way for me to see how this model looks in game?
It looks fine in the render and in Blenders Opengl-view. but I have no idea how well this translates to the game.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 7:35 pm

To see it in-game, you have to export to wavefront .obj + .mtl format, use mesher to convert .xmesh format, add texture info to the .xmesh files, use mesher to convert them to .bfxm format, and it will look like crap without textures, so don't bother. Make it look good in the renderer; if it does, the onus is on the coders to make it look good in-game; and I think that with the new ogre back-end and klauss's spiffy shaders it might look even better than in Blender's renderer.

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 8:49 pm

Nothing new just went over every single detail with a looking glass.

Some renders with better lighting, if someone notices anything that should be changed feel free to say so.

Privateer Ferrius · Post by **Privateer Ferrius** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 9:03 pm

Nice

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 9:54 pm

Thanks Ferrius.

Close to 2000 tris now.
Give me a couple of more days and the model will be done.
My first game model ever.

Just took another peek at the ingame cockpit views and noticed that there's actually quite a lot of detail there.
The cockpit view will be much more demanding than the Hornet itself.
Does ogre do culling?
Would that mean that I can do a lot of detailing (say the complete cockpits interior) and that the ingame face-count is much lower?
This way I would have to make just the one version and not worry about keeping to models up to date.

Just occured to me.
Shouldn't we also make damaged models and debris, since damage plays a significant role in the game?

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 10:50 pm

DualJoe wrote:Nothing new just went over every single detail with a looking glass.

Way to go. Looking real nice. Boy, the curvature near the edges of those front winglets is exquisite.

Some renders with better lighting, if someone notices anything that should be changed feel free to say so.

Sure; the main body needs to be beveled. Even if it's supposed to be hard-edged, a tiny amount of beveling should be there. This wouldn't be true of small greebles, which can be fake-beveled in the bumpmap; but the main body needs actual geometry beveling; but the bevel tool is buggy. If you want, I can do it for ya; I know the tricks, but they are hard to explain. Basically, you need the shape to be closed, then you make it a separate object with P, then bevel, then select triangles only, deselect the good ones, delete the bad ones, replace your own triangles, then join the object back. I can do it all in like 2 minutes, cause I know the errors the bevel tool makes.. they can be hard to see, and then you notice them...

Privateer Ferrius · Post by **Privateer Ferrius** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 10:56 pm

I must be the one person who thinks we should keep the old 2D cockpits.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 11:10 pm

DualJoe wrote:T
Just took another peek at the ingame cockpit views and noticed that there's actually quite a lot of detail there.
The cockpit view will be much more demanding than the Hornet itself.
Indeed; it's a lot of work to a) get the seat and camera correctly sized and placed, and b) to design a 3D cockpit that matches the 2D cockpit from the camera's perspective.

Does ogre do culling?
Would that mean that I can do a lot of detailing (say the complete cockpits interior) and that the ingame face-count is much lower?
This way I would have to make just the one version and not worry about keeping to models up to date.
Ogre does limited culling (frustrum and backface, and uses octrees for inter-object culling I believe; but self-culling by an object like polygon splitting back in the days of doom's bsp's, no, because nowadays you store geometry in the videocard, so you can't touch it in real time. I had the same idea and argued hard for a single model, but was defeated... and for good reasons, but too long to explain, unless you really want me to get into it deep. Short answer, we need separate models; but they can actually be kept together in Blender, I believe... Can't Blender invoke a mesh in another file?

Just occured to me.
Shouldn't we also make damaged models and debris, since damage plays a significant role in the game?

That's tons of work, but, be my guest!

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 11:13 pm

Privateer Ferrius wrote:I must be the one person who thinks we should keep the old 2D cockpits.

Not the only one, exactly; but I'm *positive* you've NOT seen my HellcatV's cockpit model...

http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... &start=225

Privateer Ferrius · Post by **Privateer Ferrius** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 11:35 pm

It's npot that I don't like the 3D cockpits, I just think it'd be a nice throwback, especially for a WC1 remake, where the hand-rendered pixel graphics for the cockpits and pilots are simply stunning, especially for their time.