Because its Halloween or something...

Discuss the Wing Commander Series and find the latest information on the Wing Commander Universe privateer mod as well as the standalone mod Wasteland Incident project.
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BradMick
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Because its Halloween or something...

Post by BradMick »

Well, so...after seeing all the stuff going on about the Demon, I broke out my trusty resources and starting constructing a new one. all nice and accurate and what not, this represents about 30 minutes of work. When all is said and done it can be used as the test bed model or something. I'll unwrap it, texture it, yadda-yadda. Hopefully it'll help things along for any prospective artists over here. So, here it is as it stands right now.

Image

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Post by charlieg »

You demon, Brad. ;)
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Post by hellcatv »

send us thine mesh and thou shalt be spared the fury of my halloween costume, a devil ;-)

devil >> demon

;-) j/k

though it is a nice model and we'd love to incorporate it into WCU
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Post by BradMick »

will do. i'll release it fully uv-mapped and textured. i can't give an exact release date, sometime this week though as i won't have much time today, going up for my Warrant Officer Candidate Board, my moment of truth on my path to becoming an AH64D Longbow Pilot in the Army...shoo...i wasn't nervous until i said that...heheh

anyway, you'll get her.
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Post by BradMick »

Image

modelings all done. 4400 tris.

i'll work on unwrapping her later today.
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Post by klauss »

Damn you're good.
How long did it take? A couple hours?
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Post by BradMick »

all totaled about 2 hours. its not really hard when you're working from the original mesh though. being fast when all you're doing is building a lower poly frame over the old one isn't all that difficult. but, thanks none the less.
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Post by spiritplumber »

Cool! How many tris is this so far? Thanks a lot.
Last edited by spiritplumber on Tue Nov 01, 2005 3:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by BradMick »

....read the post. also, theres the little box in the middle of the screen-grab which has it as well.
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Post by BradMick »

little update, started unwrapping here, half way done. going to have to go study now though, so it'll probably be the end of the week before its release, i dunno that i'll have time to texture it either..i'll try to, but no gaurentees. at least you'll have a fully unwrapped model though..thats half the battle. i'll see what i can do.
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Post by BradMick »

well, this isn't exactly a demon, but something i'm working on just the same. its not finished as of yet, some things yet to knock out on the wings, the back end, and...well, thats it actually. Anyway...here it is, my Ferret model as it stands.

Oh yeah, 3 512x512 textures on it. Color, Spec, and Bump. Also, the UV layout for anyone who wants an idea on how to lay one out.

Image

Image

Image[/list]
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Post by blue_paladin42 »

Freakin sweet. Never seen that coloration, but it doesn't look half bad that way. Makes it look like confed has a separate version from INSYS.
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Post by klauss »

Beautiful textures.

I think... with perhaps a few tweaks (I dunno, but they look a little awkward, but can't put my finger on it - perhaps it's the panels so not aligned to the geometry?), anyway, with some tweaks, that could be a superb example of how to texture in an old-WC way.

Still... I think you know... the geometry needs more detail around the edges (wings, mostly, but almost every surface has the problem). I know you're against it... but I'd bevel :P (anyway, I'm not a modeller - that may be why I'd bevel)
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Post by spiritplumber »

Seriously sweet!

Love the grey-green livery... we should unify liveries for Confed
fighters (Kat stuff looks acceptably similar as it is). Didn't
someone recently make an Arrow with the same livery?

are you going to let us use that mesh Brad? ^-^
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

I think it should go by time; in the earlier eras, Confed were greener; later they get the blues. Maybe there's a way for the date to control hue... :D
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Post by rockstar »

Uh yeah damn... that's a ferret. I like this baby, BradMick!

For "identification" colors I would suggest Confed green, Militia blue and Kilrathi red and for Pirates maybe kinda purple. No idea how to color Retros... Honestly I have no idea what the colors are which were actually used for identifiing a ship in Pivateer. It's just a suggestion...
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Post by mkruer »

@ Brad

What’s the current poly count on the model, it looks to be in the 1500s, I though the poly count was good up until 4000-5000. And on the texture, I tough we were going to use 1024x1024x24 minimum. Also not to offend anyone but I think the texture is ok. I think that the lines on the texture are over emphasized. With sheet metal you are suppose to have the seams as small as possible. The current look looks as if you could fit your hand through the crack.
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Post by BradMick »

this isn't for WCU. It's actually for a little nexus mod, I posted it up for the hell of it.

that's why the textures are 512x512 and the ship itself is only 986 tris. The texture style, with the panel lines is actually in line with the Privateer ships, which happens to be my favorite visual look.

No beveled edges on this one. If I were doing on proper, you'd better believe it'd be peakin at around abouts 4500 or so tris, with a full 1024x1024 texture. its funny actually, i basically did the Pioneer texture style for this thing. i probably need to tone down the bump map as well.

and yup, its coloration is meant to be more in line with confleet as opposed to insys.


note: felt i should not i said its not for WCU because i don't like wcu (which..well folks know where i stand) but because with all the models that already need to be replaced in WCU, adding one more (in this case because its low res on purpose) would be kind of bad/dumb because in the end it'd still need to be replaced. also, that said, the demon and this will have to wait until sunday more than likely as i'll be down swearing into the Army this weekend. I'm one of the Army's newest Warrant Officer Candidates...15 weeks after my official Army Career start (9 weeks of basic, 6 weeks of WOC school) i'll be flying helicopters....heheh, i'm freaking excited!


and another note:

you have to take into account that this thing isn't just sheet metal kruer. theres like...6cm of armor plating coating this puppy. so seams and the like would be fairly pronounced. also, i keeps in line with the original textures and stuff, which is important IMO.
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Post by blue_paladin42 »

Would it be possible to use that model as a basis for a better model for WCU? I know where you stand, but its a DAMN fine model, and while I agree that putting smething in game that would be replaced soon is a bad idea, if it were touched up and made even sexier....
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Post by mkruer »

BradMick wrote:note: felt i should not i said its not for WCU because i don't like wcu (which..well folks know where i stand) but because with all the models that already need to be replaced in WCU, adding one more (in this case because its low res on purpose) would be kind of bad/dumb because in the end it'd still need to be replaced. also, that said, the demon and this will have to wait until sunday more than likely as i'll be down swearing into the Army this weekend. I'm one of the Army's newest Warrant Officer Candidates...15 weeks after my official Army Career start (9 weeks of basic, 6 weeks of WOC school) i'll be flying helicopters....heheh, i'm freaking excited!
In the future will you please refrain from showing a model that you have no intentions of releasing to the public and or WCU or any other WC mod related to the vegastrike engine. I want to cut down on the confusing, because I know that most people do not read, only look at pretty pictures, it give the impression that the model was being developed for WCU project.
BradMick wrote:and another note:

you have to take into account that this thing isn't just sheet metal kruer. theres like...6cm of armor plating coating this puppy. so seams and the like would be fairly pronounced. also, i keeps in line with the original textures and stuff, which is important IMO.
This is a stylistic issue.

I think, or would though that the reason for the outlandish seam definition had more to do with the fact they were trying to emphasize the ship was made of plates or metal on a really pixilated image. So they need to exaggerate those seams out of necessity.

I am basing this assumption on the fact that WC2 ships tend to look out of place detail wise when you compare against the other models in other games, just like WC4 carrier models are out of place. I am not saying to replace the texture with an entirely different, but I think it would look more realistic if the seams were a quarter the size. Right now the textures look… cartoonish. Even your ships is Pioneer don’t have that outlandish seam definition and as such it ads more realism.

I think it would be a fun test to take one model and the same texture but reduce the seam size to see which one looks better.

The thickness of the metal has nothing to do with the tightness of the seams. Look at a battle ship or aircraft carrier. They have 16 inch thick plate steal hulls, and unless you are standing very close, it’s hard to make out one panel form another. The same is true for all ships in general.
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Post by BradMick »

well, you can't get smaller than a 1 pixel width line.

oh well, can't please everybody i guess.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Actually you can, if you work on the texture at 2x or 4x resolution, at master level, and only scale it down when generating the final texture, lines that are 1 pixel in size in the master will appear as subtle, well antialiased colorations of the final pixels, which will suggest fine lines to the eye.
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Post by BradMick »

hmm...i've played around with that, everytime i've ever done that its always been washed out and none to clear.

i wound up toning down the bump, its less pronounced now while still getting nice light play. mighty handy.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

The secret with scaling down textures from hi-rez master is to blur them first. I know this from audio principles: If you have an audio wave in analog tape and you are going to sample it digitally at 22 KHz, say, you have to low pass filter it with an 11 KHz cut-off. It's called the "Nyquist" law, which says that to avoid "aliasing" problems, the bandwidth should be half the sample rate or less. The same principle applies to graphics: If you have a 1 pixel thick, oblique line in a high rez master, say at 4k x 4k, and then scale the image down to 1k x 1k, what remains of the line will still be "aliased" (jaggy). But if, before scaling down, you apply 2 or 3 passes of gaussian blur with a radius of 8, say, the line will be antialiased when you scale down. I use 3 passes with different radiuses, say 7, 8 and 9, to avoid repeating loss of precision artifacts. If scaling down by a 2:1 ratio, I'd use radiuses of 3, 4 and 5.
The flip side is that you need to make your master high contrast, detail-wise, to compensate for the local loss of contrast introduced by the blur passes. IOW, if a thin line should be "somewhat darker" than the surrounding color, just make it pitch black, and so on. So the master should look as if 'sharpened', sort of.

EDIT:
One more thing, about the blur passes: Blur tends to accentuate the moire effects across gradients, due to the averaging of pixels, which involves a division at the end. So what I do is introduce a noise bias, by, in Gimp, going to Filters -> Noise -> Scatter RGB. I do one pass with values 1,1,1 for the RGB components (invisible); *then* I blur. IOW, I "pre-dither". I do the same for other types of operations that incur loss of precision, such as the two operand layers in a multiply op.
Doing this I can have subtle gradients without banding, and good color precision even after over a dozen layer ops. Check this for example:
http://www.deeplayer.com/dan_w/goodies/ ... e_noon.png
Even the dark, night look shows almost no banding:
http://www.deeplayer.com/dan_w/goodies/ ... _night.png
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Post by BradMick »

gotcha. coo, i'll have to play around with it then now that i know what to tweak.

well, should get this done here soon, going to try for today. all my army stuff is done, sworn in...ship out 28 december. very excited.

i think just the UV map is what i'll knock out and then release the demon.
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