Base art wanted !

[esgaroth]

I have been quite busy for getting bases and planets working, and now its possible to land there and i finally got (with a lot of help from those guys from Priv Remake!) even those python scripts to work. But we are seriously lacking Trek-Style base art. Landing pads on volcanic worlds, in federation, klingon, romulan and cardassian style, the same for desert and all other kind of worlds. Interior landing space on starbases etc.
For the moment, i played around a bit with Bryce and made some place holders (see below), but we need way better art. So anyone who has a nice klingon base or whatever could be suitable for us please help !
Some examples what I have done quick and dirty:

[Halleck]

I could tell those were bryce textures from a mile off, but hey. Something is better than nothing (and the ships look great as always.)

Glad you were able to get bases working finally. I'll try to write that wiki base documentation as soon as I get the rest of my VS base assignments done.

Are there perhaps some Star Trek fan artists who have already made base interiors that could be used?

[esgaroth]

I could tell those were bryce textures from a mile off,

Yeah, Bryce can be recognized blindfolded. But we havent something better yet.

Glad you were able to get bases working finally. I'll try to write that wiki base documentation as soon as I get the rest of my VS base assignments done.

That will be great. What Vegastrike needs is a good documentation.

Are there perhaps some Star Trek fan artists who have already made base interiors that could be used?

That what I hope for. Hey Trekkies, where are you ?

[Fendorin]

i did some test with blender for Background : some simple mesh and light effect

I m not sure if it could be used by VS but maybe for Vegatrek.
I never watch Startrek (never diffused in national tv channel in France)
But i remind some of Star trek "spirit" is like "new age" 70' sci fi? no? something strange and open: large view, clean space...
if you are interressed for have bigger size image i should post the Blend.files and you will bake the render in bigger size :my computer is limited and old






thank

[chuck_starchaser]

Nice! Looks to me like a Salvador Dali universe
Not sure if maybe a Borg world might have floating cubes; but then again I know noting about StarTrek, myself.
Looks very nice, tho.; and I'm sure if not the Borg there's probably a few lesser known races for which there's no canon on what
their worlds look like. I remember some guy I some ST episode I did see who could disappear from one place and appear in another
at will, for instance; they were supposedly far advanced relative to human technology.

[Quork Q'Tar]

This wouldn't fit any humanoid ST-race I'd know of.

As I said, humanoid. But the Founders, the Dominion homeworld, it looks a bit like this. There is no reference in HF about the Dominion (we use Hidden Frontier (and Helena Chronicles and their other projects) as canon source, as it is the latest-playing series), but it could possibly be, that due to Odos influence, they start some contact with other races; I think, those above pictures would fit the Dominion well.




PS: I see, You upgraded to phpBB3... I just hit that #*&&% "save" button. I administer a board, and had to use phpBB3 and can't get rid of that... It's very good, apart from this, but that button makes many users curse, with everybody being used to hitting always the left button.

[esgaroth]

Yepp, Quork is right. A founder homeworld might be the best use for them. A kind of welcome place in the midst of the great link. But how about taking your excellent backgrounds (lava, bio simple etc.) and just incorporating a few buildings ? I´ve found free to use meshes of sci-fi buildings in the net and could send them to you and then lets see what we end up with ?

[Fendorin]

hi

But how about taking your excellent backgrounds (lava, bio simple etc.) and just incorporating a few buildings ?

It was made with unregistred Terragen version = 800x600 (TG2) or1280x960(TG1) and bad antialiasing option and i haven't any knowledge in this software (for the moment)

I can't use on my laptop (so many software and i won't remove them) and the rendering time of TG2 is very very long for a simplest picture (theb i remove all Terragen software for gave more memory to other software)
terragen2 is good for generating a erode terrain mesh and after exporting via LWO.file to Blender (more than 1 600 000 triangle per field)
but again my computer can't work with this high mesh

i work on template/placement/background for VS (see the thread on future development begun by safemode) maybe when the template will be finish i will produce some background by adding the ST building (post in this public area like that maybe some other contributor like Dunkelheit could use for produce for you some other background...by adding your building instead of VS or Rlaan building)

you will need to wait for have a better background untill i buy a new computer.....

but for waiting i did this siver city (very 60'):



Like you could see i still have some problem/unknowlege for setting a right/nice self-shaddow

[esgaroth]

Hi Fendorin,
very nice city. I´m trying to find a race for it.
You might want to have a look at sharecg.com (e.g. http://www.sharecg.com/v/37293/3D-Model ... -Base-city or http://www.sharecg.com/v/37218/3D-Model/City-pack ) where i have uploaded a city pack and you can try to use the cities from said pack- dont know whether you can use them, but it might be worth a try.
I will also try to upload a few ST specific buildings in the near future.

[Fendorin]

i had a look to the city package , is really interessant
if u can post your ST building too i will do some test with them too and produce some of background
do u have a to do list?


Edit picture

[esgaroth]

I have uploaded to sharecg some building complexes which should work nicely as federation buildings (texture them white), and i also have uploaded a city texture which might be worth a try for the texturing of the base city (klingon, definitely) and the city packs. However, Í have no real talents for making nice textures. So having a nice federation outpost with some trees, a nice landing pad and those buildings in the background would be a start. Same for klingon. I will have a look whether I find something romulan, ferengi or cardassian.
Unfortunately, I do not have romulan buildings (google for images with "romulan city") yet or ferengi so i fear i have to do them myself...
What I would really like to have is unique interiors, that is e.g. a nice spaceport arrival hall (like this one here, e.g. http://www.gamefox.de/perry_rhodan,vorschau,2235,0.html ), some unique bars etc.
Dont know, however, whether you have experiences with interiors.

[esgaroth]

OK, I have incorporated your silver city (and added you to the credits list). Do I have permission to use your other pics too ? Especially the bar and the water world (in the vegastrike proper forum) come to my mind.....

[Fendorin]

Hi Esgarotth


u can use all art posted around this forum


http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... 93#p107071
here you have a bunch of blanck background can be use too and match with this
photoshop assemblie 2 picture and hop u get some view;
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... 20#p108307
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... =4&t=13351
I guess with some hours of work you can already do 20 or more landings view

here again:
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... 05#p108070
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... 35#p109614

for the interior (i read your others post too )i can back bigger scene of this :
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... =a#p112016

In addition/exchange i would like to know if u have time to have a look and try to integrate xmesh the model in this thread:
the forsaken commerces station:
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... 15#p105643
picture are in page 1

Thanks feel free to contact me or pm

[esgaroth]

First of all, thank you for all that stuff. I will have a detailed look at them and integrate them as soon as I find a place/race (and time ).
With regards to the station, I can have a try. Just send me a pm (atreuter@aol.com) with the model and the textures, preferably in .obj format (or the place where i can download it), and I will try to convert it into a bfxm and integrate it (hope you wont mind if I will have some adjustments to the texture to give it a more trekkish look...).

[Fendorin]

This 2 "Forsaken"stations



The parcell contains more variation for texture and is not really as the picture :
http://www.divshare.com/download/5904157-0fa

For the Confed Base i need to pack them into compressed file and post
but you can already begin to try integration of the top Stations
the point is i wanted know if this model is Working into VS or if it's to much repeated mesh ...
or what can be the problem...

Thanks

[esgaroth]

OK, had a look at the station. First, the .obj file contained only the blinking lights - be aware to select everything in blender before exporting to obj. I exported them myself (thats about all i can do with blender...) and tried it. Generally, it worked. The textures were named differently in the folder you made available for download and in the materials file, so i changed this manually and, la voila, i had a nicely textured station (without normals-dont know the syntax to add a normal map in the .obj materials file). However, my framerate dropped to a lousy 5 fps- at least for my old laptop this is a bit much. I will try without those blinking lights.
More to follow in the next days...

[Fendorin]

hi Esgaroth

I m glad to know you achieve in few day some task i never could do.
i would like to see some picture or screen shot it will be great.
About the two forsaken after had a look to the mesh some day ago. I remenbered do it without the knowledge of overlaping texture into one mesh
but as i didn't make LOD for this installation (and i basiquely don't know how to do it) is still another problem for people have not powerfull computer.

now Maybe you can explain me how u integrate it, do you work under Windows XP as i read somewhere Obj converter doesn't work on Vista?
Did u use the Pyramid tools?
did u do it with the command line?


PS:
Im waiting for some pictures please....

Edit on 25/11/09:
I m just remenbered an advise from Chuck for integrations about mesh : it was to never be upper than 10000tris per meshed object
is why in the blender file the mesh is separate under group around 10 K

maybe it can help

[esgaroth]

Sorry for me being absent so long, but i had some private business to do.
Here is a screenshot made with my old machine (somehow the print screen button only prints the desktop with new win 7).
From 110 fps it drops to 20 on my new machine, so i guess you reconsider the poly load...

[chuck_starchaser]

From 110 fps it drops to 20 on my new machine, so i guess you reconsider the poly load...

Why do you automatically assume that a drop in frame-rate is caused by "poly load"?
The onus is on you to find out the cause of low frame-rates before telling an artist to "reconsider poly load".

Such a "reconsideration" represents many days of work; and what happens if after Fendorin works for many days reducing poly-count, you try the new model and you get the exact same drop in frame-rate?

It would only take YOU a few minutes' worth of experiments to discount other possible causes for the low frame rates, --such as substituting the textures with 1:4 reduced versions, for example, to make sure the problem isn't texture bandwidth.

Another likely cause for low frame-rates is flat-shading. If the model was set to flat shading, or exported to .obj without 'smooth groups', it would result in a mesh broken into individual triangles, and a vertex count about 5 or 6 times higher than it would have been if smooth-shaded.

Or it could be due to too many separate meshes and texture mappings. Or too much overdraw.

The first thing to do is to find out the exact cause of the problem, rather than assume it to be "poly load" and send the artist to work on it.

[esgaroth]

Chuck, Fendorin asked me to try out how this model looks in-game, and this I did. I reported my observations, and my suggestion. Nothing more, nothing less. I have no idea about flat-shading (dont even know what this is), or whether there are too many sub-meshes (which might be indeed at least part of the problem as this model was created as a kind of repetitive design), or what else. Just my 2 cents. I dont have the knowledge to suggest anything else except polyload which was rather high - therefore i will not suggest anything else.

[chuck_starchaser]

Ah, sorry. Well, FYI, flat-shading is when you set the mesh so that each face looks flat and discontinuous from the rest. THAT causes a very heavy load on the gpu. But if the polygons are smooth shaded, use a single texture, and there are no large hidden surfaces covered by other large surfaces, then, even 100,000 polygons display fast in gpu's as old as the 6600. A much more common cause of slowdowns in frame-rate is excessively large textures. A full set of 2048x2048 textures, even using a single texture map, is already a heavy texture load. That's 4 million texels times diffuse, specular, glow and normalmap... 16 megatexels total. I'm eternally frustrated at the persistent popular belief that polygon count is the major cause of low frame-rates. It is NOT; and I've been telling Fendorin to push up the polygon counts. He used to make 5000 polygon models, and it took months to convince him that there's no reason to try and economize on polygons so much; --just so you understand my jumping at your telling him to reconsider the polygon count.

[esgaroth]

Here are the results so far from my new improved base script (took the frigid mud planet script from vegastrike proper and modified it, so kudos for the one who made it in teh beginning...). It places the ships, according to their size, at different screens with different sizes.
So from tiny type 6 shuttles over danubes, maquis raiders and defiant class:

to large mirandas, excelsiors or galaxys (and yes, I do know that galaxys cant land, or at least havent been seen to do so...)

The miranda is too bright, it hasnt yet been adapted to the new shaders, but adapting all ships is a boring work I do intermittently when I am in a really good mood. Will be finished for the next release.....

[esgaroth]

And here are the new landing screens for tycho city at the moon:

[charlieg]

That looks really good esgaroth!

[esgaroth]

Thanx ! Glad you like it. Still need someoone to make decent interiors...