New Hornet model

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Post by spiritplumber »

semi off topic.... here's my take on the wc4 kilrathi transport (which is IIRC only seen in a cutscene).

http://www.spiritplumber.tzo.com/k_transport4.png
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Looks good Spirit. Here's some modeler advice, though; you can go higher with the poly count. The larger the ship, the more polys there should be, to give a sense of hugeness. Even if the ship is boxy and with sharp corners, you can still have like frames or separate arches near hangar doors, poles with lights, a few large, rectangular recesses with little 5-sided boxes you can float against the surface, just use your imagination; the tinier the details, the stronger a sense of hugeness they create. And they provide support for the eventual bump-map: Like you can draw pipes and cables in the bump-map, but they will look a lot more believable if they stop at a box. Same with doors: You can fake an open door as easily as painting a black rectangle, but if there's a frame, and other facilities lining up with it, it makes it a lot more believable. Lights on poles would be specially good, in the sense that you can precompute their illumination and burn it into the glow map, and they look great, and add complexity that helps hide artifacts in the overall illumination.
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Post by DualJoe »

Ha ha, I'm back, ..., well I'm online at least. I've purchased a laptop and now have internet at my quarters. This also means that I can work on the model on my shiny new toshiba.

Sadly it also means that I now have to learn how to use windows XP. I honestly can't see why people call it a userfriendly OS. Sofar I'm having nothing but problems and the performance hit is unbelievable. If only I could get my wifi to run under Linux.

I don't have as much time as I did to finish the texture, but I'll see what I can do. A couple of hours every week should be possible.

I've still got a couple of things to sort out and then I'll do my best to reserve some time for this.

BTW
In case some of you missed it. The current CVS-version of Blender supports tangent-space normalmaps among a ton of other things.
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Post by spiritplumber »

Shiny!

I moved the multiplayer client to SVN and put the ship pack on SVN also... right now we could REALLY use wc1-era models.


welcome backies!
My Moral Code:
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- Rules were made for people, not the other way around.
- Don't deceive. Real life is complicated enough.
- If all else fails, smash stuff.
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Post by klauss »

DualJoe wrote:Sofar I'm having nothing but problems and the performance hit is unbelievable.
I hear you.
I'm still stuck with Win2K since I won't install XP on any machine by principle.

One trick that handles 50% of your problems, though: disable the themes. They eat twice your RAM.
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Post by spiritplumber »

Very true dat.
My Moral Code:
- The only sin is to treat people as if they were things.
- Rules were made for people, not the other way around.
- Don't deceive. Real life is complicated enough.
- If all else fails, smash stuff.
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Post by DualJoe »

:evil: I now have a viral infection in my eyes, which means I'm blind for the moment.

The first thing I'll do when I have my eyesight back is to upload the current files I have. In case I run into some more setbacks.

Where should I upload the xcf-files? Mind you they are pretty big, because of the 4k resolution I'm using. I may be able to clean out some layers, but I don't think I'll be able to get them smaller than 70mb.

I'm doubting that it will be possible to store all the source files for every single model in one repository. Even with compressed textures a lot of commercial games require a couple of gigabytes storagespace.

Anyway I'll get back to you as soon as I'm able to see again.
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Post by micheal_andreas_stahl »

DualJoe wrote::evil: I now have a viral infection in my eyes, which means I'm blind for the moment.

The first thing I'll do when I have my eyesight back is to upload the current files I have. In case I run into some more setbacks.
A real infection in YOUR eyes, or one on thcomputer that is annoying you???
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Post by micheal_andreas_stahl »

DualJoe wrote::evil: I now have a viral infection in my eyes, which means I'm blind for the moment.

The first thing I'll do when I have my eyesight back is to upload the current files I have. In case I run into some more setbacks.
A real infection in YOUR eyes, or one on thcomputer that is annoying you???

Oh Spiritplumer, i can't get into your page.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Oh, Dual; damn!; I hope you're getting better. For uploading you can use my server; we're only using 5 gigs altogether, out of the 50 gig maximum. What kind of viral infection is it? What's the prognosis?
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Post by klauss »

You can do as chuck said, and upload to deeplayer, or email me the files and I'll keep them safe ;)

BTW: Watch your eye ;)
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Post by Vector_Matt »

spiritplumber wrote:semi off topic.... here's my take on the wc4 kilrathi transport (which is IIRC only seen in a cutscene).

http://www.spiritplumber.tzo.com/k_transport4.png
From that screenshot, the ship appears massivly, humongously, incredibly, giantly, insanely big. Is it realy supposed to be that big?
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Post by spiritplumber »

About the same as a wc3 transport, so.... maybe 20 times a fighter?
My Moral Code:
- The only sin is to treat people as if they were things.
- Rules were made for people, not the other way around.
- Don't deceive. Real life is complicated enough.
- If all else fails, smash stuff.
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Post by DualJoe »

Well my eyes have gotten worse so I'm uploading the latest textures I can find.
Don't know if these also have the paths for creating the bumpmaps, but it's the best I can do with my limited vision at the moment.

http://www.deeplayer.com/DualJoe/Hornet ... ubletex.7z [43M]

As far as I can recall the modell has not changed since Klauss did those AO-tests so it's just the textures.
I made a 7zip, that way I'm sure that windows and linux users can extract them.
Hopefully I'll be back in touch when the antibiotics and the other drugs I'm taking are finally working, till then have fun with the textures.

BTW
Check out the blender-site for some nice vids of the conference. Some of them sounded very interesting. Especially the one about opengl.
Also the cvs-blender now also supports tangent-space-normalmapping, so no more need for seperate bump and normalmaps.
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Post by DualJoe »

Since I've got one good eye and I'm stuck at home till the other one heals, I might as well finish this thing.

I've finished the texture. Not that its perfect or as detailed as it could be, but I'm fed up with it and want to do something else now. Next I'll do the guns and landing-gear. That should be pretty straightforward. After that I'll have a go at baking a set of textures for the current engine, that way we can enjoy it even before the ogre-integration is done.
Someone else will have to put it ingame though, because I haven't the foggiest on how to do that.

I don't know what the consensus is on how to handel paint, logos and decals so I've put on a base paint job and gave it a bit of weathering via a mask.
This mask can also be used for other paintjobs and such.

Klauss I can't figure out how to make the glass transparent ingame or with your rendermonkey-shader. Maybe just as well, because I haven't done anything with the cockpit jet.
Should I make LOD-versions or not?
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Post by klauss »

DualJoe wrote:I've finished the texture. Not that its perfect or as detailed as it could be, but I'm fed up with it and want to do something else now.
It's great last time I checked, so I bet noone will complain ;)
DualJoe wrote:After that I'll have a go at baking a set of textures for the current engine, that way we can enjoy it even before the ogre-integration is done.
Very good idea.
DualJoe wrote:Someone else will have to put it ingame though, because I haven't the foggiest on how to do that.
Worry not. I'll probably do it.
DualJoe wrote:I don't know what the consensus is on how to handel paint, logos and decals so I've put on a base paint job and gave it a bit of weathering via a mask.
That sounds fine.
If need be, and if you have the layers somewhere, logos could be added to factionalized versions. They worked great for VS, even though they eat a bit of RAM and loading times. We'll work out some more efficient technique later, probably, but having a few variants (neutral, base + confed, say) should do.
DualJoe wrote:Klauss I can't figure out how to make the glass transparent ingame or with your rendermonkey-shader.
With rendermonkey, you'd have to change the shader. Not fun. Well... for most (it is for me ;) ). It's an easy change, but change it is.
Ingame, if you don't have a cockpit, I'd say "don't", for now. When you have a cockpit, you'll have to cut the cockpit out of the model and add it as a separate submesh with a different (transparent) material, or do alpha-testing (1-bit alpha on the texture). Personally, I'd prefer the cutting option, since it's much more flexible (though a tiny bit less efficient).
DualJoe wrote:Should I make LOD-versions or not?
If you're up to it, that'd be great.
Can't remember the polycount, but a LOD at around 1.5K is necessary for any model that goes far above that number. Of course, if it's a lot of work, we might try using the current hornet for that task (may need retexturing, of course, probably using your texture).
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Post by DualJoe »

Allright I'll texture the cockpit. Currently the Hornet is around 6.8k tris without the subunits. The guns are around 800 tris in total.
:shock: the landinggears and rockets however are well over 8k tris! I'll have a look into that aswell.

The old hornet is around 1.7k tris. It will need some adjustments though for texturebaking to work.

Btw did you get the link for nvidia's performance kit?
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Post by klauss »

DualJoe wrote:the landinggears and rockets however are well over 8k tris!
Don't worry there - they're rendered in contexts where you don't have to be so conservative. Anyway... not wasting tris is always good.
DualJoe wrote:The old hornet is around 1.7k tris. It will need some adjustments though for texturebaking to work.
Probably :roll:
DualJoe wrote:Btw did you get the link for nvidia's performance kit?

Yep. I already have it. I had it, in fact.

BTW: Only very briefly mentioned, I can't find the original paper. But, here's some mention (per-pixel displacement mapping, using distance functions).
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Post by DualJoe »

It seems you need one more texture namely the height-map. I think we can get away with using the bumpmap I made for that.
Well here you go diff, spec, normal and heightmap all in one package for your convenience. I also included dds-versions.

On LOD's: do they also have subunits, or should it be the model with guns and such attached?
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Post by DualJoe »

I'm almost done with the LOD. Took more time than expected, because I didn't use edgeloops throughout the model.
The next model I'll do will have only quads and correct edge-loops.
Especially since Blender-cvs now has some new tools like collapsing of edgeloops and better merge options.

The LOD is currently 1322 tris without the engine and guns.. Unfortunately I wasn't able to keep the unwrap intact, so I'll have to make a new one.

Before I continue I'll need to know a couple of things.
Will the same texture (different mip-maplevel) will be used for the LOD as for the high-poly one or does it have it's own texture?
Also do LOD's have subunits (for the guns)? If not than I'll have to make a new texture anyway and it'll make unwrapping a whole lot easier if doesn't have to match the highpoly-one.
What size will the LOD be onscreen? Currently I can't really estimate how far I can reduce details.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Dual, while you wait for klauss' answers, I'll give you mine, which are 99% probably right. The LOD uses the same texture. Whether a mipmap of it, chances are yes, but that's the hardware's problem. And I believe you should assume LOD's have subunits. Otherwise each LOD would need a separate entry in the .csv. Now, maybe the subunits will be culled at some distance, but that's up to klauss to decide in the code.

I haven't done an LOD yet, but I would imagine the way to go is take the original mesh and start collapsing vertices that don't do much. Vertices along seam lines I'd leave there, tho.

LOD choice at runtime is based on how many pixels the thing spans on the screen, and the player's choice of graphical detail. You'd typically want your first LOD to go to a quarter the poly count at least; maybe a tenth.
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Post by DualJoe »

Alright, I'll do the unwrap superimposed on my texture.
The LOD really does need a different normalmap though in a different scale. Details like rivets, scratches and such are pointless on the LOD.
Better use the normalmap to compensate for the missing features from the high-poly-version.

BTW
I made the LOD in the way you just mentioned. The problem was with the welds of the wing and the cockpit. Those tris don't collapse well.
First I had to rework the welds, wings and cockpit to form edgeloops and after that I could start collapsing those.
If you still can I'd suggest taking a good look at the edgeloops of the Bengal.
Collapsing edgeloops (new feature in Blender-CVS) works pretty well for me.
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Post by klauss »

chuck_starchaser wrote:The LOD uses the same texture.
NO.
They don't have to be the same.
In fact, a very nice technique I've been practising is texture-lodding: even if I don't have a LOD "mesh", I create downsampled textures. The idea is that, at the distance, smaller textures are used and many, many, many types of ships can be displayed like that without saturating the VRAM. Up close, hi-res versions are used. This is NOT mipmapping, mipmapping uses more VRAM at any instant, this uses less VRAM at any instance, though more system RAM.

But, obviously, a more obvious usage of the feature is to have your own geometry with a totally different unwrapping.
chuck_starchaser wrote:And I believe you should assume LOD's have subunits.

Yes, they do.
They can be culled, and are, but independently.
That's how asteroid fields work, actually - with a subunit hierarchy.

LOD-wise, you only take your mesh and simplify it. Just that.
chuck_starchaser wrote:LOD choice at runtime is based on how many pixels the thing spans on the screen, and the player's choice of graphical detail. You'd typically want your first LOD to go to a quarter the poly count at least; maybe a tenth.
You can specify the number of pixels of diameter your LOD is able to represent accurately. That way, a basis for user-selectable level of detail is specified. That is, some detail setting is "optimal", as in "what the modeller specified", and any other setting only scales up or down that reference point.
In short - conserve polies all you can without loosing the main features, and then render it at different sizes to get a grip of the maximum "quite-acceptable" pixel diameter. You input that into xmesh, though it's a bit odd since it's not properly scaled (ie - 100 doesn't mean 100 pixels, but if 100 means 10 pixels, 200 means 20).
It is my intention to normalize that on 0.5.x, and make it actually be pixels - it's really odd otherwise.
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Post by DualJoe »

For comparison and C&C, low-poly is on the right with 1220tris.
Image

These are opengl-renders from the blender viewport so no fancy normalmaps etc. (They will work just as well though) The pink parts are parts that I plan to change for the LOD-texture, because they need more resolution than they got in the original unwrap.
What do you think, should I make the LOD-version of the engines or will one bake in the texture suffice?

Now I have to figure out how to bake normals and texture of just the two pink parts.
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Post by klauss »

The engines are rather complex.
This brings conflicting issues: a) they would need more geometry, but b) they are the greatest poly-savers if baked.

Given that the idea of a LOD is to save polies... perhaps baking would be the best option. But I'll leave it up to you - you might have to back the baking with some really simplified geometry.
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