Vega Strike Forums

...and detail textures.

JackS could you give us a guide for greebling on Aeran Bases and Ships? I am currently working on a aera Mining Base, and would like to know what kind of greebling I could add to it. I have tried to follow the other Area models for style.

Greebling Aera vessels is going to be an exercise in subtlety. The greebles can't clash with the otherwise somewhat smooth and molded form. So, lots of subtle greebles - extrusions for hatches, intrusions for "texture this like something interesting." Necessary blemishes: escape pod launchers, sensors, docking moorings, cargo bay doors. Focus disproportionate attention to the docking regions - internals are more readily "greeble-able" in most whatever way is desired - and, assuming one isn't trying to destroy the ship/base, that's going to be the part of the model that tends to be seen at lower speeds for longer periods. Long pipe-like structures can be subtly segmented - normal greebling approaches still apply.

For the mining base, you have the particular advantage that you can add features rising out of the underlying rock, or running over expanses of some part of the underlying rock, thereby giving good opportunity for visual contrast, even without greebling. One note, if you're going to redo the Aera miningbase, please do us the favor of making the base/rock ratio something more interesting for an actual mining operation than the current mining bases (which, while very pretty, need to be connected to a whole cluster of additional rocks, one or more really big rocks, or situated in a field of similar sized objects somehow to make them seem worthwhile investments)

Thanks for the reply, it will help me work more on the base. Should I copy your reply into the wiki under the Area artsyle guide page?

While I agree that proper details and greebles can do a lot to the sense of scale, they are not the only factors. I remember playing X-Wing, and though the level of detail was extremely low by today's standards, there was still a pretty good sense of scale when attacking a star destroyer fro instance.

This was discussed in an earlier thread I believe, and one of the things to come up was the viewing angle. When I look at my monitor, from the physical distance between my eyes and the screen, I perceive a angle of vision of about 30degrees. If the viewing angle of the rendering engine does not match this, and particularly if it is larger, then you get a feeling that everything is much smaller than it should be.

In short, relating the real world window of the screen to the virtual window of the rendering engine can do much. Of course, please do include multiple LOD with gory details.... I will enjoy them lots. and they will undoubtedly add both a sense of scale and realism to the models.

I agree, viewing angle is one problem. The other is acceleration, IMO: If I'm stopped near the back of a capship, and I hit the afterburner and get past its front end in a matter of seconds, how can I possibly believe it's the size of Manhattan? The fact is, right now that's how it is: At accelerations of 9 or 10 G's or more, you do travel many kilometers in a matter of seconds. And I've argued, appearently unconvincingly, that this is irreconcilable with our personal experience, unless we're astronauts. We just cannot, or at least I cannot "picture" that I'm accelerating so fast. It just seems to me the capship is only a few hundred meters long, if that. And I also argued that to have such high accelerations, we need to come up with a good story about how the engines work, and how the pilots survive, as well as that it causes the battle theater to expand so much that you never get to see the ships you're fighting with. But this is stuff I said in my first post I wouldn't talk about here...

I think the problem is that acceleration is too fast. Even with pressure suits, the human body just could not take 10G acceleration lightly.

theguyfromsaturn wrote:While I agree that proper details and greebles can do a lot to the sense of scale, they are not the only factors. I remember playing X-Wing, and though the level of detail was extremely low by today's standards, there was still a pretty good sense of scale when attacking a star destroyer fro instance.

Of course, it could have been because the intro to episode 4 cemented in our heads just how big a star destroyer is...

hurleybird wrote:Of course, it could have been because the intro to episode 4 cemented in our heads just how big a star destroyer is...

Not to mention the size of Space Ball 1

You mean the Bad Year Blimp?

"We Brake For Nobody"

Ever looked at the stats and/or flown a Dostoevsky? 33 gravities of acceleration! And yet its governor is half that of my Schroedinger, which has some 10 gravities acceleration. The Dostoevsky can go from zero to governor speed in a split-second. Perfect shuttle for visiting bases in an unmanoeuvrable capship, but still crazy. Splat!