Demon Model

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Demon Model

Post by Privateer Ferrius »

As per charlieg's suggestion, Imma put the future posts for the Demon model here. The other threads getting radiculously huge.
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Post by Privateer Ferrius »

@mkruer & the rest of the world: Hows the panels I have here look compared to the old ones?

Image
New

Image
Old


Obviously the new one isn't done - I wanted to see what people thought before I took the time completeing it on the rest of the model. It's kinda grungy right now, I'll have to take the healing brush to it, as the grunge should be in demonDMG.jpg, not the diffuse texture. ... but again, wanted to see what people think first.

[edit]: shiney label on the first screencap. Yep, I officially have too much time on my hands now.
Last edited by Privateer Ferrius on Mon Mar 27, 2006 2:42 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by spiritplumber »

Wow. Pimp my Demon!


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jokes aside, that looks really good! right now the demon has some rusty accents which i'd like to keep... one thing we should do is be able to overlay labels/bumper stickers, and randomize thru them so that every ship looks a tiny bit different.
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Post by Privateer Ferrius »

So which of the two panelling textures do you prefer? :D

It would be neat if we could have three or four for each faction and randomize within the faction.
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Post by BradMick »

nice to see someone taking the task of trying to texture this thing. i'll say its good for a start, but definately has a long way to go. reference the ferret i was working on for a little visual assist, or in the standardization wiki with the pioneer stuff. that's the standard i'd aim for with texturing.

and i'm sort of back, sort of not. i'm on hold over down here at ft. rucker waiting for my chance to go through warrant officer candidate school. i'll have some opportunity to post up stuff, but don't expect any models or vids for a while longer. no 3d proggies available :( sucks...i want...to...create. but hey, its all good.

anyway, good start. reference actual aircraft too. nice little panel lines, and access hatches and all that jazz.
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Post by Privateer Ferrius »

The first screencap utilizes a panelling texture I created from a photograph of an airplane :D Then just healing brush/clone stamped away some of the more significant rust and grime.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Hey Brad! How's the military life treating you?
Yeah, your baby is getting textured, finally.
I'm learning how to UV-map, right now; so I may do the unwrapping for your other ships, TBolt, etc.

Ferrius, yeah, that base texture with parallel lines looks a lot better than the checkers, for sure; but I hope you're aiming a lot higher. Think of when you look at a plane up-close; you see gazillions of little details. You're starting from the right idea, though: Neither something too procedural or generic, nor a photograph, but a creation inspired on actual photographic material. That's perfect way to go. Let me see if I can find this pic of the shuttle... hold on.

Here:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/ ... 14_big.jpg

Here's the Ferret texturing Brad's talking about, btw...
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... 3054#53054
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Post by ploppy »

you fellas might like the artwork at this site for inspiration
trav 2300 starships models

Etranger

of course you might have already seen it :lol:
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Ploppy, you're always there with the right stuff at the right time :D

What a great site for inspiration!

Okay, this may not seem related to the Demon, or to the Hornet, for that matter; and it's probably all done with geometry, BUT...

Image

Perfect example: On the top surface, anything higher than 2 or 3 pixels on the pic would be geometry; all the low lying stuff can be done with the normal map.
That's a big ship; but nothing prevents a Demon or a Hornet from having little square holes or protuberances here and there.
The texture is not bad, but with a combo of diffuse and specular, we can do better than that...

By the way, Ferrius, there are many websites with textures of all kinds free to download. Blender's website lists a whole bunch here:
http://blender.org/cms/Resources.181.0.html#572

If you were to stretch this one...
http://www.imageafter.com/dbase/texture ... als231.jpg
and blend it with other layers, it might add some realism...
Or maybe this one...
http://www.imageafter.com/dbase/texture ... loor10.jpg
Or this
http://www.imageafter.com/dbase/texture ... als000.jpg
Here's an actual pic of a plane
http://www.imageafter.com/dbase/texture ... als002.jpg
Another:
http://www.imageafter.com/dbase/texture ... als005.jpg

Ahhh, this is probably the best, along the top edge there's a pretty clean strip...
http://www.imageafter.com/dbase/texture ... als007.jpg

Or for a galvanized look...
http://www.imageafter.com/dbase/texture ... als014.jpg
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Post by mkruer »

First off I am no Michal Angelo, so here is a quick and dirty example of what I was talking about. For reference I used Chucks frontbakeinvmsk.jpg as the baseline, I would highly recommend creating a flat mate baseline. Anyway what I did was I approached the texture as if it was a real ship such as a 747. If you look at an unpainted 747 it looks like a gigantic aluminum can that has been riveted together to form the body. Each panel of the body has a purpose, and no 4 corners can all meet at the same place. If you look at my example I did the same thing. What I am getting at is that when making a texture for a fighter, you need to approach it as if you were constructing the ship from pieces of metal. You want to keep the pieces are large as possible and not have weak points.

Once you have all the component parts, then you can fill in the areas with a very subtle texture. Just enough to give a slight hue to between the edges and the center of the object. Then on the other side (of the edge) use a slightly shifted color and do the same thing. If done correctly if you removed the line/edge, you should notice that the two fill textures are different, but with the line/edge it should not be noticeable. (See Example 2)
The top image and the low image are using the same gradients the one on the right hand side is a slightly darker one. If you look at the top image both gradients appear to be the same however if you look at the lower one there appears to be a white line down the center. This is cased by the slight difference in color.

The problem that I have with the original texture and the new one, is on the original, I could buy that texture if the ship was say the size of a carrier, but its not. On your second image it looks like you tired to do what I was doing in my example, at least for the top boon section of the ship, but the rest just looks like it was the original texture but stretched.

Here is something that you might want to try. I believe that GIMP supports a vector graphics layer. Make a flat mate image of all the parts of the ship then comeback on a vector layer and carve up the parts of the ship into separate panels then apple the method I mentioned about to give each panel a slightly (and I mean slightly) different hue. Now when you map the texture to the ship, you will still have the hard section lines on the ship, and the hues will make it look like its made of panels.

EDIT:
One the Hue section this would be the time to add in a random pattern of color gradation. This will give the illusion that the surface is not perfectly flat.
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Post by klauss »

Yes... what mkruer said... that random panelization applies more to the specmap than the diffuse map. Why?
Well... for the diffuse map, which should reflect the actual pieces which make up the hull... what mkruer said: panels as big as possible, each with a specific function or reason to be as they are.
For specmaps, though, it's a different matter. Specularity of a surface depends on its polish, and polishing the panels gets done in patches, which ends up creating a seemingly random (or unordered) and patchy layout of polishing characteristics (and so specularity gets the "patchy" look).

Usually, what I do when I make specmaps, is take the diffuse panel structure, use it as "dominant" layer, and merge it with a "slave" layer of random panel patches... not necessarily square (in this case, streched and thin would fit nice, I think). The dominant layer provides the general tone of the specmap, while the slave layer texturizes each big panel, preserving the big panel layour (the divisions). Then, I manually randomize the overall tone of each big panel (each one is different), selecting it and applying a brightness/contrast filter.

I'll see if I can post an example later.
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Post by Privateer Ferrius »

I'm using the CF-18 as my reference for the panelling. I'm going to add in the details when all the panels themselves are done. Gotta have a foundation before you build a house...

On an complete aside, I've flown that plane (the CF-18 ) before at the national aviation museum :D I'd flown some older planes and Cessnas before, but nothing that required an oxygen mask. That was a trip.

@Chuck: Thanks for the galvanized metal texture! I was thinking I'd have to get another roll of film and go down to the chopper shop or something to get myself a proper texture to blend in for that effect.

Here's it thusfar. By the way, the panels are done mostly (about 75%) in the lighting texture:

Image

The inside of the weapons hardpoints looks lighter because they haven't gotten panelled yet.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

What resolution are your textures? Those 512 by 512 I put into the initial package were just for a quick test. With 1k by 1k textures you should be able to represent things as small as... let me see, 10 meters over 1000 is 10 millimeters, or 1 cm... Like 3/8 of an inch; so one should be able to distinquish something as small as a dime, so the rivets, if you have any, should be noticeable. The dark streaks are too long and too dark; like smoke or grime or windmarks should be subtle and trail from specific objects that protrude from the body, or from wherever aerodynamic discontinuities there may be, not cross all along the body.
Also, it would be a good idea to keep the paintjob aside, for now; we can't see the details on the metal base with the flames on there.
From what I remember, inside those square holes at the front, one could distinguish what looked like 2 or 3 metal spheres, in the original.
Last edited by chuck_starchaser on Mon Mar 27, 2006 11:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Privateer Ferrius »

The source is larger, but I downsampled them to the texture size that came in the zip.

I really struggle with the brightness/contrast on the plates. Too light looks washed out, and it's easy to get too dark.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

No, you should be working at 2k by 2k, and scaling down to 1k by 1k for production textures; not 512 by 512.

I can sympathize about contrast, etc.; thing is, you just can't make a very metallic look with just the diffuse texture; you need something in the specular.
Remember what klauss was saying about the patchwork?
Maybe take that metal texture I gave you and stick it in the specular (PPL) map.
Last edited by chuck_starchaser on Mon Mar 27, 2006 11:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Privateer Ferrius »

As I noted above Chuck, the plating is 75% in the specular texture.

[edit]: The bit about the three circles in the front is helpful. I couldnt figure out what the hell should be in there, but SOMETHING had to be :P Heh.

[edit2]: Will larger textures work with the existing mesh or will the mesh have to be done again?

[edit3]: Umm chuck, the production texture IS 1024x1024.

The source is much bigger.
Image
Don't do try that at home ;)
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Privateer Ferrius wrote:As I noted above Chuck, the plating is 75% in the specular texture.
Ah, good.
[edit2]: Will larger textures work with the existing mesh or will the mesh have to be done again?
The mesh UV coords are in range 0 to 1, and scale with texture size. IOW, the mesh is totally texture-size agnostic; you can put any power-of-two sized texture in.
[edit3]: Umm chuck, the production texture IS 1024x1024.
Ah, good.
The source is much bigger.
Excellent.

Haven't heard from klauss yet. Did you try with the vegastrike executable? (I imagine you're talking about the version on cvs..., NOT the prehistoric 0.4.3...)
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Found an executable that works!!! :D

http://www.deeplayer.com/dan_w/tmp/vegastrikeR.zip

Specularity, glows, the whole shabang.
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Post by spiritplumber »

argh, now i gotta integrate them again >_<

give me until the weekend, i have some work to do first...
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

It's worse than you think, Spirit; that working executable is one I compiled back in october. Nothing I compiled or downloaded ever since seems to honor glow masks or specularity... But klauss says he just compiled last night and it works. So, I donno, but, for testing purposes, you can use my quick and dirty demon:
Bfxm:
http://www.deeplayer.com/dan_w/WCUships ... demon.bfxm
Textures:
http://www.deeplayer.com/dan_w/WCUships ... testex.zip

and for reference, you can use this old, *working* executable:
http://www.deeplayer.com/dan_w/tmp/vegastrikeR.zip
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Post by Privateer Ferrius »

Hmm ... my source texture is a power of two, maybe I should see if VS would have an aneurism if I put that one in :mrgreen:

And sorry guys, but not much progress today. I feel sick as a dog.

[edit]: No dice with that exe chuck. Gives an error: "The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000006) Click OK to terminate."
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Privateer Ferrius wrote:Hmm ... my source texture is a power of two, maybe I should see if VS would have an aneurism if I put that one in
In my experience (with 6600GT card, 128 megs video ram, and having a triple texture (diffuse, specular, emissive) ), at 1k by 1k it's slightly slower than at 512 by 512; at 2k by 2k: aneurism. At 4k by 4k more like 'estado de coma'.
And sorry guys, but not much progress today. I feel sick as a dog.
I'm just starting to feel better, myself; that's one pretty weird bug making the rounds...
[edit]: No dice with that exe chuck. Gives an error: "The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000006) Click OK to terminate."
Damn!
Klauss, where are ya?
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Post by Privateer Ferrius »

So at that obscene amount of size, and following that trend, my video card should explode in a dramatic fashion. Neat! :mrgreen:

VS prolly isn't running because I can't get Setup.exe to work and gimme a config. Same error tryina run Setup.exe.
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Post by Privateer Ferrius »

Chuck, do you mind telling me how you got the weird and wonderful rust subtractor done on the texture, so I can implement it without having to redo the source PSD? ^_^;
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