Hellcat (remodelling)

[chuck_starchaser]

The mozzarela is done !!!



Well, I'm not too hot about the way the top mozzarella looks from the top...



... but I can work on that later. At least the pilot's view is right.

I'm gonna catch some sleep, and then I have laundry to do, so tomorrow I'll fix the warps on the main panel. And after the geometry is done, I'll get the materials matched.
And here's the file: http://www.deeplayer.com/dan_w/hellcat/hellcatv47.zip
2785 tris, so far, including the glass bubble, but I don't have much more to add, so say 3k.

[chuck_starchaser]

Trying to get some color-matching happening here...



The problem is Origin's lighting in that cockpit picture is a mix-bag. Just about every item there is lit with different light sources...

[chuck_starchaser]

Very minor update; just fixed some geometry details and made fine adjustments to light positions. The top mozarella slice now is a wee bit darker than the bigger one below.



Before someone says that the buttons around the screen are too small, here's a zoom of the buttons in the original screen:



So, no; it's the dark green stuff around them that makes them look bigger.
Actually, I suspect they are surrounded by blackness (a rectangular cutout) but that there's a faint green glow coming through the cracks. Easy to model with the glow texture.

By the way, is that a brand name tag at the bottom? Anybody knows what it says?

[hurleybird]

looks like cn something-x-something...

[chuck_starchaser]

Getting closer to the right colors....

[chuck_starchaser]

looks like cn something-x-something...

Yeah... it does...

Or it could just be CN, followed by Blue, Green, Red thingies, like a Trinitron logo...

EDIT:
Has the right number of letters to say "ORIGIN"...

[chuck_starchaser]

Allright, this round of color matching is complete to my satisfaction.
I'll do one more round after I add the other greebles and radiosity; and a third one during texturing.



About the round door-frame, never mind; I'm going to trash the glass bubble and the frame, and do them again from scratch.

[charlieg]

Looking good!

[chuck_starchaser]

Thanks. I just noticed though that the shape of the bottom mozarella slice is not exactly like the original. If you look at the screw half-coverd by it on the left side, on the right side it would be completely covered. Still more tweaking to do...
This is aiming a bit high, but I'm hoping eventually, once it's textured and all, these split screen tests will be so accurate you won't even notice the split.
Actually, that's aiming rather low... With radiosity baking and higher resolution textures and bumpmap and phong shading, it should look a lot better than the original. In fact, the original has inconsistent lighting, so it will never look exactly like it.

EDIT: I hate to do this, but I'm going to take a few hours to work on another model; I need to come up with some garbage to get the ball rolling...

[chuck_starchaser]

I think I got the door-frame pretty down pat, finally.



Well, mine is a little more elliptical than the original, but that is physically unavoidable. For it to be more round it would have to be at a closer to vertical angle. But the top surface of the ship ramps down at 20 degrees, so the door frame must also tilt forward 20 degrees from the vertical, otherwise the door wouldn't be able to open even with the hinge as low as to be on the plane of the top surface.

[chuck_starchaser]

Done fixing problems...



Now, I'll either start greebling, or make the glass bubble and opening door; not sure which...
The silver buttons are just a test, out of curiosity how they'd look.

[Zeog]

Starting to look really good, chuck!
I'm glad my explanations could help you a little. After all it seems that you get more used to render your scene

The radar rim
To get that facett-look off the radar-rim: select the object and set it to "smooth" (Links and Material window). Unfortunately the whole object will now be smooth. In order to preserve the round edge enable now auto smooth and play a little with the angle, so that the round edge is "solid" but the rest appears smooth. Remember, in the Blender editing window you won't see a difference with autosmooth enabled nor for different angles. It only turns up in the rendered picture!
The little dip you have there might be a misaligned normal. (To see the normals of your mesh, change into mesh-editing mode (tab) and enable "Draw Normals" in the Mesh Tools 1 Window.) To recalculate the normals hit (ctrl-n) in mesh-edit mode.

WRT your questions:

In the Materials panel, the OB and ME buttons make the material either a "mesh material" or an "object material", if I understan correctly?

Yep, that's how I understand it.

So, now, in the F9 panel, Links and Materials, these are the so-called "material indexes" that are assigned to groups of facets? If so, why are there MEsh *AND* OBject references? I would expect a facet group to be part of a mesh; never part of an object (except through a mesh)... But I could be wrong of course; but even if I were to assume an object can dictate the material of a "SUB-mesh", I much less understand how a material index could be tied to both: A mesh AND an object...

Well, although I have never hit that question before (I mostly use the cases: one mesh and material "set" for every object, or all objects being the same including materials) I just did the test. The material indices are part of the mesh (test this by deep or shallow copying your object, respectively, and changing the facets).
Those facet groups can be equipped with a material for each group. If you make this material setting a MEsh material, all objects using this mesh will look like this. But you can override these materials by using OBject materials for a object that uses a shared mesh but you may only use the very same facets owned by this mesh.

I'm generally in the dark about *WHEN* things happen in Blender. If I were designing the interface, I'd probably have Apply - OK - Cancel buttons in every panel... In Blender it seems most changes are committed in real time... Except for the Assign button in Links and Materials; I love that. But, when I go New, either in Links and Materials, or in the Materials panel, does it apply to the settings of the other?

There is no OK- or Cancel-button, that's right. Every button that you toggle, every number you adjust stays in this very state until you change it and it immeadiately takes effect. It's not as in a usual Windows-application in which you loose all changes once you leave the window. Just imagine all dialogs in Blender being open and active, but you just can't see them at once.
You might not see the change in real time due to the effect being only visible in the rendered version. As for playing around with lights in shaded mode: there is the "solid" mode in which lighting is done with the default OpenGL lights in the blender edit-window (toggle this mode with z) and there is the "shaded" mode (ctrl-z, or icon in 3D-window) wich does change when moving the light. You might not see a change due to light saturation of a too intensly light scene (try using the startup setup (crtl-x) with that ordinary simple light from top-view, worked for me as I moved the light around -- this machine has Blender v2.34 though)

(Hint: to change the default OpenGL light that is used in the "solid" shade mode by Blender: Drag down the top menu (do this by positioning the mouse cursor at the separation line between 3D-window and the top menu, the cursor will change shape, drag down). There you will find a "System & OpenGL" and many more interesting "Options" buttons. There you can change it, if you really want to.)

[chuck_starchaser]

Your explanations have helped me a lot; in fact I'm not sure where I'd be now without them... I'd already read many tutorials and still couldn't figure out a lot of things; and I'd asked questions at Elysium, and answers were forthcoming, there, but rather short.

WRT the radar rim, I've already set the facets on the periphery (but not the front-facing ones) as smooth, but it only helps the view from the side, of course. I think I'm going to bite the bullet and make it 64-sided. But this would add 32 wedges, at two quads each, that's 64 quads, at 2 tris each that's 128 triangles... so not before I try another trick I've been thinking of, namely using the bump map to round the corners. Simply drawing a circle on the bump map passing through all the corners, I'm thinking, might be the cheaper ticket.

I've been thinking of a possible procedure for automatic bump map smoothing:

1) Take the model as is, and generate a radiosity baking.
2) Save the model as a differently named file "my_model_ultrasmooth" and go crazy smoothing the geometry all the way to 100k polys. Add beveling too, wherever you fancy there should be.
3) Make a radiosity baking of the ultra-smooth model, using the same radiosity baking setup.
4) Subtract one radiosity baking from the other in Gimp; save the file as "diff".
5) Blur the above with a large blur radius. Call this "blurr_diff"
6) Subtract 'blurr_diff' from 'diff' and add 128,128,128; to get a mid grey with only local variability.
7) Blend the result into the bumpmap.

Or something along the lines...

[chuck_starchaser]

I figured, what the heck, the radar is what one is looking at a lot of the time; might as well spend the extra polys and make it look round.



I was zooming into the original screen and found that what I had assumed was the shadow of the door-frame on top of the dashboard, was actually a cover, like a mantlepiece, of a different material. Back to work...

[chuck_starchaser]

Zeog, any chance you could take a look at this file and tell me what I'm doing wrong? I've tried everything I could think of, with the glass bubble material... lighting doesn't seem to get through...

http://www.deeplayer.com/dan_w/hellcat/hellcatv52.zip

Here's what I get...



... only the ambient light...

I haven't touched my lighting. The rim of the frame, at the top of the picture proves it. It is outside of the glass, and it lights properly, and I can see it through the glass no problem; but the the light from the lamp doesn't get through the glass, for some reason.

But then again, it's not too important; I can still work with the file; just it would have been nice to get screenshots with the glass on.

[BradMick]

i know that whenever i want transparent glass to work right in lightwave i have to switch on caustics and make sure that transparency and translucency and all that jazz are checked on in my render options. dunno if that helps, but its what i know i've gotta do before rendering glass properly.

[Zeog]

The Blender renderer cannot do caustics, just basic refraction (use Yafray if you want that, but that's not what you asked for ).
In order to see semi-transparent shadows and light through glas you need to enable "Receive Transparent Shadows" (the TraShad-button in the materials' shader window) of every material that you want to receive light which is passing through glass.
Make sure that raytracing is enabled in the rendering dialog.
Doing so I got some beautiful renders of your model's cockpit!

[chuck_starchaser]

(The boards are dead these days... Where's everybody?)
Thanks, Zeog; that did the trick, the "receive transparent shadows" worked.
Here's a rendering with the cockpit closed...



And here's a shot with the cockpit open...



I still can't see the stars ahead, though.

So, the new glasswork:





Then you say "Open Sesame!", and...

















Just have to finish the matching doorframe for the bottom of the door, on the body surface, a bit of upholstering and greebling, and it's done.
The current file:
http://www.deeplayer.com/dan_w/hellcat/HellcatV55.zip

[dandandaman]

(The boards are dead these days... Where's everybody?)

Dying of overwork and overstress? Well, I am ... and I know Jack is The christmas rush is on for most people I guess

But don't worry, I'm still reading this stuff...just not commenting much And btw, as I haven't said so before, this is great work you're doing It's been great to see you go from blender beginner to blender well, almost-pro

Dan.a

[chuck_starchaser]

Hey, dandan! Thanks, and I'm sorry to hear about the stress, but glad you're surviving it Yeah, damn Christmas crap... worst time of the year, if you ask me. One thing about being totally immersed in modelling is it helps you forget...

[klauss]

Christmas...

<OT>
I saw a "christmas essence" parfume the other day (I'm not sure it's parfume the word I'm supposed to use... it's an "ambient deodorant"?).
Now, tell me... wouldn't gunpowder smell be "christmas essence"? That's what I thought when I saw it... hey! does it smeel like gunpowder?
</OT>

Anyway, looks great chuck... but whre's the polycount going? Without numbers, it looks like it would be quite high. Cockpit only, obviously, don't count the ship below the cockpit.

[chuck_starchaser]

Explanation: Chrismas in the Southern hemisphere, summertime, everybody outside like a Carnival, firecrackers. That's why klauss is thinking of gunpowder essence

Klauss, Chrismas up here is Hell. Telling you; no street celebration. It's "the time to be with the family"... In other words, you HAVE to put up with your relatives for like a week or 10 days, as there's nothing else to do... Super-cold outside, piles of snow, businesses are closed everywhere, hardly any restaurants open; there's nowhere to go, and nothing to do, no way to justify your need to escape from the "family" crap. You go out in the street and there's not a soul to be found, hardly a car anywhere. Chrismas is the closest thing to the day after WW3. Absolute Hell on Earth.

I'll count the polys, after work. Last time it was less than 3k, but I'm sure it's about 4 k now, BUT, I have an idea we can make the glass into a subunit and make it dissappear as you launch into space... It's transparent, so you won't notice much...

[klauss]

So, in the end we not only have "Tango, Facturas y Dulce de Leche", but also "Fun christmas".

Anyway, 4K isn't bad. If you can keep it around those numbers, great.
If you want to add tiny gadgets, I'd be up for some benchmarks while pushing the tricount around 10K... tiny gadgets + stencil shadows = extreme coolness - Keep the 4K version, of course.

[chuck_starchaser]

Indeed.

I'll try to keep it at 4k; in fact; I haven't done any optimizations yet; there are whole big surfaces full of polys that aren't visible I've yet to clean up.
For a 10-15 k benchmark I could just put a model together that has everything in one bfxm, with cockpit, wheels and all. Another feature I've been dreaming to add is air-brakes that double as deployable re-entry shields. A bit bogus scientifically, but better than nothing I'd say. It would be like surfaces that fold out from on top, behind the cockpit, and from the bottom, behind the front wheel, and would have ceramic tiles on the front, and a "meta-black TM" honeycomb in the back.

[MamiyaOtaru]

Super-cold outside, piles of snow, businesses are closed everywhere, hardly any restaurants open; there's nowhere to go, and nothing to do, no way to justify your need to escape from the "family" crap.

If it wasn't bad enough like that at home, I'm going with the family to England over Christmas. At least I hear New Years in Scotland is kinda cool (we'll be in the lake district, so might make it over the border) [/OT]

Really impressed with the cockpit so far, with the obsessive detail matching etc. Great stuff. If it's close enough you can use the same old .cpt and sprite files as with the 2d cockpit. Until we can stick gauges on 3d surfaces that is.