All space stations are the same

Oblivion · Post by **Oblivion** » Sat May 06, 2006 6:28 am

You play morrowind! Hehe

It's the same here. And they even steal or replace parts if the owner is not particularly knowledgeable about hardware. Like moi.

Wish my dad was that tech-savvy. hehe.

Good luck with linux. And windows if you get to reinstalling it.

Kangaroo · Post by **Kangaroo** » Sat May 06, 2006 7:03 am

Won't instal Windows again. I've heard that an update to XP will soon be sent to all the owners of Windows XP and if they have an unregistered verison, then, well, they will have to suffer from popups.

And if there is a free os that is as good as Windows, why not to learn it?

too bad Morrowind won't run on it.

Oblivion · Post by **Oblivion** » Sat May 06, 2006 7:13 am

Yeah. That's the problem with linux. Most popular software won't run on it. Microsoft is easy to hate. And I hate them for making software so expensive.

But I don't have the patience nor the know-how to tame linux. so, I'll probably only try it if I really want dual OS.

If Windows XP thinks they can trap us with that update...

haha. Shhh, my OS is pirated. Cloned by the most distributors of PCs here, but I don't have internet anyway, so It's not a problem.

Kangaroo · Post by **Kangaroo** » Tue May 09, 2006 6:43 pm

To anyone who uses Blender - Did you experience errors with Blender while pinning verticles in unwrapping mode? I already had two Blender crashes todat while experimenting with low poly models in unwrapping.

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Tue May 09, 2006 7:30 pm

Actually Blender has been solid as a rock for me for a while now.
I've been doing a lot of work with the uv-editor and texture-paint lately and haven't had a single crash.
Some python-scripts are unstable for me, but that's mostly because I tried to do some unsupported stuff (like running scripts that were meant for python-2.3 and older).

I did notice some problems with Blender if you have some errors in your mesh. Check for free vertices or double-polygons and such.

Kangaroo · Post by **Kangaroo** » Tue May 09, 2006 7:40 pm

Didn't find any errors in my mesh.

Strange.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Tue May 09, 2006 8:02 pm

Kangaroo22 wrote:Won't instal Windows again. I've heard that an update to XP will soon be sent to all the owners of Windows XP and if they have an unregistered verison, then, well, they will have to suffer from popups.

I was paranoid that sooner or later it was gonna happen. That's why I never choose Standard in the updates dialog; always Custom; and this time I saw the update would update that Genuine crap Advantage trojan horse of theirs, so I checked it off, and told it not to remind me ever again. XP is certainly my last OS from the 666.

Kangaroo · Post by **Kangaroo** » Tue May 09, 2006 9:01 pm

Um, a little help, please!

I don't seem to understand the way how to correctly unwrap this.
I have unwrapped it so far like this:

I used Unwrap from screen.
The side edges are incorrect; that can be seen in this picture:

And when I try to LCSM it as described in Chuck's tutorial, nothing happens.

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Tue May 09, 2006 9:30 pm

First you'll have to unpin the part you want to unwrap.
Make sure you've got enough seams for the unwrap to work.
Then do lscm.

You'll only actually need the unwrap from viewport step if you are unable to get decent result with plain lscm and pinning. The object you showed in the screenshots doesn't have any exotic angles as far as I could tell, so lscm should work just fine.

Also don't forget to put at least one pin in every uv-island.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Tue May 09, 2006 9:38 pm

Exactly as Dual says; perhaps I should have clarified this in the tutorial: Unwrap From Window unwraps exactly as you see the stuff from your (orthogonal, presumably) perspective. If you see one of the sides from the edge (like a line) it will unwrap as a line (zero area). From Window works for unwrap groups that are fairly flat from your window view. For a shape like that, you could use Cylindrical unwrap, or like Dual says, simply LSCM.

Kangaroo · Post by **Kangaroo** » Wed May 10, 2006 8:44 am

I'll post a screenshot of what happens when I try to lcsm it when I get home, it unwraps in completely random angles with the faces intersecting each other. And cylindrical unwrap spoils the face proportions. (height 10x normal against 0,5x with)

p.s. I unpinned the faces, you can see that in the screenies.

What do you mean by putting at least one pin in every uv-island?

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Wed May 10, 2006 10:17 am

Kangaroo22 wrote:What do you mean by putting at least one pin in every uv-island?

I don't know an easier way to explain it. Unless you've got one big unwrap (very unlikely), you've got several islands in the uv-editor. When you start pinning you'll have to put at least one pin in each of these islands.

Otherwise you'll get an overlapping unwrap that looks like it's random and intersecting

.

BTW you do know that lscm is just an initial step of the unwrap?
You'll have to do the layout manually. Add pins and then scale, rotate and translate the island.

Kangaroo · Post by **Kangaroo** » Wed May 10, 2006 1:14 pm

Dunno why, but this time lcsm unwrapped it correctly. I've got the whole unwrap, now I would like to take a deeper look at mipmap friendlines. Last time I've read it I didn't understand how to do all the things stated there.

Does the front-left, back-right rule apply for stations too? At least my station has no front or back.

Thanks for helping me, guys, see you later.

Kangaroo · Post by **Kangaroo** » Wed May 10, 2006 2:30 pm

Another noob question: How do I export the unwrap to a texture? pretty much finished the unwrap.

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Thu May 11, 2006 9:53 am

Don't worry I'm a noob myself.

I had some trouble understanding that MIP-map stuff untill I found this:
http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~alark1/cmsc435/ ... ing2_4.pdf
There are quite a few good lextures on that site.

To save your unwrap click on the "Save UV Face Layout"-button and enter the size you want the texture to be and the thickness in pixels of the wire.

If you have some materials on your model you can also try "texture baker". You can use it to make an initial colormap or do a radiosity-baking. On my setup I still have to do a lot of manual work afterwards because the baked texture is a few pixels off.

Kangaroo · Post by **Kangaroo** » Thu May 11, 2006 12:29 pm

Where is that button?

At leas in the tutorials it was under the UVs button, but I didn't see it.
Please tell me if I'm missing something.

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Thu May 11, 2006 11:50 pm

Yes you are missing a lot of scripts that are packaged with Blender. Set your path to the correct dirs (slide down the top bar for Blenders configuration) for python and the scripts. You can always open the .py-files with blender's texteditor and run it from there.

How could you live without those lovely scripts like bevel2center?

Kangaroo · Post by **Kangaroo** » Fri May 12, 2006 1:32 pm

I had this problem only recently; as I have problems downoading the yum for linux and I had to extract Blender manually - probably did it wrong. The extract command with archive manager didn't make a script dir although the package had it inside.

Kangaroo · Post by **Kangaroo** » Fri May 12, 2006 10:09 pm

Another experiment of creating detailed-looking low poly models.

Wireframe:

I decided that the renders are somewhat chaotic, so here is how it actually looks:

Mind that this station is more a training sketch then actual work.

Post by **hurleybird** » Fri May 12, 2006 11:17 pm

Looks weird and cool!

rockstar · Post by **rockstar** » Sat May 13, 2006 1:05 am

Weird is good! Cool is good! Beer is good! Keep on the good work!

Kangaroo · Post by **Kangaroo** » Sun May 14, 2006 9:27 pm

rockstar wrote:Beer is good!

Good against radiation, but not good when you are aiming for professional sport career.

Tried to make the last work bigger, rendered with ambient occlusion. (have no idea what it means)

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Sun May 14, 2006 9:40 pm

Ambient Occlusion is Blender's renderer's equivalent of abmient light baking. At each point on a surface it projects a shower of lines or rays fanning out and checks how many of them move freely towards the sky, versus how many of them strike some other part of the model. The former are considered un-occluded illumination lines, the latter occluded ones. Assuming the sky emits light evenly, the ratio of unoccluded to occluded rays is used to determine the amount of incident ambient light. This ambient light is added to the incident direct light, then multiplied by the color of the surface. I'm probably oversimplifying it, but for a general idea it should suffice. The higher the number of rays, the more precise and continuous the shading. The algorithm is not guraud shading (Set Smooth flag) -friendly, but it can sort of fake smoothness. To fake more smoothness, you raise the Bias slider.
Very nice, btw.

Oblivion · Post by **Oblivion** » Tue May 16, 2006 12:05 pm

Really good. Hence a question.

Why is it so important to be low-poly?

I honestly don't know.

Anyhow, I like the way it looks. What's it supposed to be? Better think of something...

But then again, stations need not have specific purposes. Just cool names.

And I agree. Beer is good!

Kangaroo · Post by **Kangaroo** » Tue May 16, 2006 5:33 pm

Oblivion wrote:Hence a question.

Why is it so important to be low-poly? I honestly don't know.

From what I think, art is to create a beautiful model. Professionality is to make the same model with the least polycount. I think it was 992 polygons.

And, knowing that the station's form has no real meaning, it could be a base for some aliens, maybe an old resupply station.

@everyone: How do you think - is it worth continuing with the base?

Vega Strike Forums

All space stations are the same

Do you want the space stations to look all the same?