^ - -^ Origin's original documentation.

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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Post by AzureSky »

Kangaroo wrote: By the way, I have no clue about the dark shade under the chairs nearest to the camera (on the left side). That shade doesn't make any sense to me. Does anyone else think that it's out of place?
Each indoor scene is made up of multiple images overlaid on each other (i.e. background, bar patrons, bartender, fixers). There is a table in a separate image, which I didn't think to include in the set of interiors I uploaded. Here it is for the Oxford bar:
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Post by Kangaroo »

Ah, now it's clear to me. I guess I should make a table for that spot in 3D now.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Or leave it as a separate object that we can remove programmatically. I don't remember seeing the table there in-game. May be wrong.
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Post by ace123 »

Yes, the proportions and overall poor image quality in the university planet was the reason I didn't create animations for it... (The bartender looks kind of off too)

I have a strong feeling that this was the first bar the artists made, and that's why it feels so rough.
http://wcuniverse.cvs.sourceforge.net/w ... vision=1.1

Also, when we made the bases, we just decided to paste the tables directly on the images... since they are always displayed. I had forgotten about that aspect...
http://wcuniverse.cvs.sourceforge.net/w ... vision=1.1


Anyway, I would probably work on modelling a simpler bar (like mining bases) first.

You should also get the alternate perspective base pictures...every base has a background picture for talking to campaign fixers in the data files somewhere. I suspect that having a second perspective to model from would help.
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Post by Zeog »

chuck_starchaser wrote:I don't remember seeing the table there in-game. May be wrong.
If you look at the up-scaled picture of the bar which you posed you can see two chairs in the foreground. There is also a shadow of a table in front of them but no table. Furthermore, the place where the table's legs are are cut into the shadow. This leaves me with the impression that the table has to go there!
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Yes, I know; I was just saying I didn't remember seeing the table itself in-game, but then again, my memory is foggy; maybe it was always there.
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Post by snow_Cat »

^- - ^ No, not foggy.
^ - -^ There is an SDL based Privateer engine that doesn't draw the tables in the bars.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Hmm... But I only played the original Privateer under DOS, back in 95 or whatever it was, and the the VS Priv Remake / WCU. I think my memory is just foggy... :D
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Post by Kangaroo »

Just a minor update: added some bottles and a lamp, included the missing table. Now the resolution is 8:5, but still doesn't match the original.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Looking gorgeous!
Let's have a look at the problem, though: First the original, then I'm reposting your 800 by 500 off my server...


Image

Image

For one thing, your camera needs to move up a bit. You'll notice this by the angle of the bar's counter (too horizontal) and the angle of the bar's overhang (too steep). Also, the chandelier, you're viewing it from a lower position than in the original. And the beams on the ceiling...
On the other hand, I think the floor is too low. Remember, this is modelled after a British pub, and the Brittish are short. :D Just kidding, but I think your floor to ceiling distance is like 10% too high, or more. Even after moving the camera up, you may still need to drop the ceiling a bit.

Then, you probably need to move the camera a wee bit closer to the bar, and turn (yaw) the camera two wee bits to the left: one to compensate for moving it closer to the counter, and one to correct for the fact that it's already turned a bit to the right. You see too much of the back of the bartender's background, and not enough of the second section of wall on the left.

Last but not least, I think you're assuming that the wall behind the bar is parallel to the back wall. But I don't think so: I think the wall behind the bar is at a steep angle; possibly as much as 30 degrees. You see that by the shape of the white square behing the shelves. The shelves make it look like the background is straight, but I think it's the shelves that are not built level. They must have hired a privateer to install them :D

Also, I have a feeling that you need to move a bit back and increase focal distance to compensate.

Yeah, definitely you need to move closer to the bar. If you look at the third section of the back wall, --the section partly covered by the bar--, your perpective shows too much of it. And look at the far section of the bar's counter's angle...
But here again, I think you're assuming that the far end of the counter is parallel to the left wall, but that may not be the case. Possibly the entire bar section --counters, walls, shelves, the whole shabang, needs to rotate 20 or 30 degrees around a vertical axis through its center.

Getting perspectives right takes a lot of trial and error. Sometimes I like to take a break from it for a while and work on the lighting, and then get back to the perspective work. You have a light behind and to the left of the camera, which is right, but it's too high. In the original scene it comes from near the floor. You see the shadows of tables high up on the wall. Probably projected by tables that are near the front windows; and the light source must be some object reflecting sunlight through the window and into the bar. Just guessing, of course.
But there are other lights... One of them above the camera, near the ceiling, which projects a shadow from the dropped cupboards above the counter, to the wall behind the bartender.

EDIT: I think the bar stools need to shrink a little.
EDIT2: The columns at the back could use a bit of thickening, and the picture frames and dartboard might as well be geometry; they won't take too many polys.
EDIT3: I also have a feeling that the camera is tilted by like one or two degrees to the right. Go to object mode, select it, press numpad Del to center on it, the go to parallel (non-perspective mode), and see if the lines of the camera are perfectly horizontal or not.
EDIT4: Just noticed, you can also tell the need for the ceiling to drop by looking at the shape of the wall sections at the back. They are flatter, more rectangular, in the original.
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Post by Kangaroo »

Got your point on the ceiling and columns (and all your references to object positions and sizes), but I don't agree with synchronizing the perspectives. First of all, the player will never see such a wide picture as shown there, because when I tested my first layout, I noticed that a standard 35 degree lens can't stretch the image as shown in the original (unless the new 3d observer will be wearing some fish-eye glasses). Second, if you take a closer look on the original, you can see that the perspective on the original is not perfect either.

See these two images I made:
Image
Image

I don't think that the angle offsets for the overhang and the bar table could be that drastic, if compared to the ceiling beam angles at the other side of the image. That leads to think that other objects of the image might be misangled too.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Got your blend file and spent a few hours working with it. Thing is, I didn't realize till now that you had the texture in layer 2, so I was just working by eyeball. It does not match the texture, but in any case, I think it's getting a lot closer.

Your assesment about the correctness of the perspective was based, as I said, on the assumption that the bar area is arranged orthogonally on the floor. It isn't. It's like this:

Image

Here's the updated blend file:
http://deeplayer.com/dan_w/tmp/Oxford02.blend

So, I rotated the bar, scaled the main room down in Z, up in X and Y.
Also fixed the lighting a little better, and adjusted the camera.

Image

Image

Anyways, I don't want to take over Oxford; just to convey what I meant by the bar needing to rotate, and about the floor to ceiling distance; though I did move the tables and chairs around a bit.

EDIT: Updated pic and blend file. Matching the pic was a snap with the setup you have. I only did a first round of approximation, though; it can use a lot of finetuning. There's really two types of chairs in the original: Some are more square backed, some are more squat and have like a raised part in the middle of the back. Plus the column at the corner is too thin, the rest are too wide, the bottles need tweaking; the salt/pepper-shakers too. And it needs pictures and dartboard, and then what behind the bar? Washrooms? A pool table? Or is this a kitchen bar? Donno.

EDIT2:
Ehm... you might want to go through all the objects pressing Ctrl-A, as I did a lot of scalings and rotations in Object mode.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

This is it, Kangaroo. Now you have no excuse... :D
http://deeplayer.com/dan_w/WCUships/WCs ... ntop1k.jpg
http://deeplayer.com/dan_w/WCUships/WCs ... side1k.jpg
You can almost see the rivets...
Sorry, Snow Cat; these were in the "Previous" link in Photobucket, off the page of your chart, on the other thread, and I couldn't resist.

EDIT:
Actually, hold on, Kangaroo; let me get the station started, 'cuz I think I understand some things about it that I couldn't explain in words...

EDIT2:
Here, this is what I wanted to say:

Image

Image

Sort of like what I'm seeing in those 6 balls around the station.

It's wrong, though. Very wrong; --the cover armor should be a bit rounded along the length axis, corners should be rounded, there's two more sheets of armor underneath... and even if not visible, the armor sheets should have a thickness...-- so I won't even bother saving the blend file. I'd start again from scratch, myself, anyways. But you get what I'm trying to say, right? There's a lot of details that one can see there, if one wants to see...

EDIT3:
And you might as well go to town on it. Even as high as 100k polys is justified for a space station. The diameter of it is 1.2 kilometers...
http://www.wcnews.com/ships2/wc2starbase.shtml
Which is almost twice the length of a Bengal carrier.
And there should be meter-sized details on it, for visual scale reference.
But Blender won't play well with things smaller than 0.01, and the recess of windows should be less than their height, so I'd make 0.02 Blender units = 1 meter, such that the diameter would be 24 Blender units.
But, actually, you'll need details smaller than half a meter... like antenna sticks, hand rails and cables probably should be 10 cm diameter max...
Okay, I'd make 0.1 = 1 meter, and so the full diameter would be 120 units.

EDIT4:
The goal is, --or I should say, "my goal would be", but I'm hoping to make this a standard for all future WCU work--, to make it such that, from the right distance, or at a given "blur factor", it looks exactly like the reference illustration... As if the illustration was a photograph of the model. BUT, such that, as you get closer or zoom in or focus the camera, the amount of detail you see increases. In other words, the extra greebles should be so small and subtle that if you were to take that photo a bit out of focus, you wouldn't see them, but instead you'd get the reference image. IOW, I'd first make a model the resembles the image !00%, and then proceed to add details, but only tiny details; --details so tiny or faint that one could reason they "wouldn't have shown on the picture, anyhow". Or you can have larger than "tiny" greebles, but only in areas that are hidden in the picture. That way, there's no canon conflict.

And it doesn't have to be many details. Rather than a homogeneous distribution of greebles, I prefer small clusters, myself. And only greebles you can't do with the texture are really warranted: --i.e.: non-superficial; --e.g., cables that cross space, masts and beams, radar dishes; but not rivets, say. And only windows near the outer rim, like on the balls, need be geometrically recessed. Windows on structures inside the pan, you could never fly too close to them, so they might as well just be in the texture. Also, greebles that are smaller than a pixel are well justified: Textures for a station would be 2k by 2k, including all sides unwrapped, so assume we'll get about 1 meter by 1 meter texels. So a hex nut half a meter in size *must* be represented using geometry.

And as for the "value" of a greeble, I'd say the most important question is, does it help tell the size of the thing? So, things that look familiar, like windos, doors, scaffolds, terraces, hand-rails, etc. would be first priority. Functionality comes a close second: Dockings surrounded by docking facilities, like spotlights, a little control tower... maybe fold-out grapples that can grab a ship in an emergency, etceteras. Would be interesting to come up with a purpose for the outer balls, say, and then greeble them with consistency to that purpose.

EDIT 5:
Hey! Maybe the balls are guns that can turn like eye-balls. It would be very easy to make them into "turrets", just specifying a 30 degree azimuth cone for them, in units.csv; so they don't turn too much, and that's it. That would mean that the "armor sheets" are actually what holds the moving part of the turret, and what's really attached to the rest of the station.
(Actually, if you look closely, it seems that they are: The main station disc looks like it's made of a bottom half that is like a hollow "frying pan", and the lip of it seems to attach to the bottom edge of the second "armor sheet" on the balls.)
and it would mean that these "armor sheets" contain the motors and mechanics that move an inner ring, only visible at the bottom; and which inner ring turns the "eyeball" in azimuth.

If you like the idea, you only have to include one ball in the mesh file, as we'd eventually separate it into another mesh, call it a turret type unit, and add 6 of them to the station as subunits, in units.csv.
Well, not really; you'd have to copy it 6 times anyways, for the radiosity baking; but you don't want to unwrap the ball onto the same UV map; it would have its own texture; just want to have them there to cast shadows onto the main station during the ambient light bakings.

EDIT6:
Actually, this picture,

Image

shows some details missing in the other, like it looks like the eyeball has a circle of "things" around the "iris"... huge nuts or attachments of some sort? Donno. The stats say 4 flak cannons, btw; but going to 6 isn't too much of a stretch, is it? There's definitely an inconsistency between the in-game pic, having 4 balls; and the manual pic having 6. I leave it up to you: If you want to give it just 4 balls, and make it look like the in-game model, instead, go for it. Might help the modelling, as you could then use X and Y mirroring, and only model one quarter of the station.
Or make one of each: One with six, for the big Star Base,
http://www.wcnews.com/ships2/wc2starbase.shtml
and one with four for the lowly "Space Station"...
http://www.wcnews.com/ships2/wc2candar.shtml
And then, when you're done, there's the Supply Depot...
http://www.wcnews.com/ships2/wc2supplydepot.shtml

EDIT 7:
Here you go:

Image

And I could almost swear, at the top and bottom ends of the station, that I see eye-ball turrets, also...
And don't forget launch bays for station defense escorts. More like launch tubes, or catapults... I'd say about 20, --like 5 on each side of the squarish structures underneath the "frying pan".
And missile launchers...
By the way, the purpose of the "frying pan" we could assume is to protect the living areas from ships coming for docking but straying slightly off course, which would lead me to believe that the dockings are in those squarish structures under the pan.
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Post by snow_Cat »

^- - ^ Note the two lowered platforms off of the main plate.

^ - -^ I have not uploaded the interior because my files are in disarray and I do not want to make an unintentional omission.
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Post by snow_Cat »

^ - -^ *blink*
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Post by Sunfire »

chuck_starchaser wrote: Question: Is the hangar bay shown after landing, or before departure, or when? IOW, my question is, is it hinted whether the Ferret seen on the hangar bay is about to take off, or whether it has just landed and is being put away? Because it seems to me it would be a bit contradictory if the ship was shown there before departure, and immediately after you're shooting off a launch tube...
I think Snowcat answered these but im playing wc1 ATM and i hope you dont mind my 2 cents. The hangar bay is shown both pre-launch tube and post landing sequence. the former, youre already in the ship and the "maytag repair man" straps you in. in the latter, the same guy wheels up the ladder so you can get out while commenting on your ships damage level.
chuck_starchaser wrote: Interesting; the Fraltha is supposedly 600 meters long or so, but the station is listed as being 1100 meters "long"... I'd say that's probably its radius, or heighth; --at least...
In the manual its listed as a Radius for both the Star Base space station and the K'tithrak Mang space station (1,200M the former and 1,100 the latter)
snow_Cat wrote: 3. the ship is caught by the crane and lowered to the deck triggering a frenzy of activity.

^ - -^ the crane animation is a whopping four frames (.8 seconds), and in all honesty it looks like you smack into the thing and fall to the deck.
If i may humbly disagree... it seems to me the crane is in the foreground and up high (notice the little fuel or armament cart that would seem to be behind the crane and infront of your ship) and you simply land on deck.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Welcome to WCU, Sunfire; and thanks for the info.
Sunfire wrote:
chuck_starchaser wrote: Question: Is the hangar bay shown after landing, or before departure, or when? IOW, my question is, is it hinted whether the Ferret seen on the hangar bay is about to take off, or whether it has just landed and is being put away? Because it seems to me it would be a bit contradictory if the ship was shown there before departure, and immediately after you're shooting off a launch tube...
I think Snowcat answered these but im playing wc1 ATM and i hope you dont mind my 2 cents. The hangar bay is shown both pre-launch tube and post landing sequence. the former, youre already in the ship and the "maytag repair man" straps you in. in the latter, the same guy wheels up the ladder so you can get out while commenting on your ships damage level.
I should definitely play the game, and see these things with my own eyes, but I really don't have the time right now. What's still not clear to me from the textual descriptions is how you get from hangar bay to the launch tube. Does the floor under the ship go down or up like an elevator and then you're in the tube? Or is it left to the imagination? Or is something else hinted at?
chuck_starchaser wrote: Interesting; the Fraltha is supposedly 600 meters long or so, but the station is listed as being 1100 meters "long"... I'd say that's probably its radius, or heighth; --at least...
In the manual its listed as a Radius for both the Star Base space station and the K'tithrak Mang space station (1,200M the former and 1,100 the latter)
Aha! Thanks! So the starbase is 2.4 kilometers in diameter. I'm so glad you posted this; I was going to start working on the starbase, probably next week; and I would have had my scale wrong by a factor of two (windows and whatnot too large).

BTW, Snow_Cat, what's happening with the image extraction project? No particular hurry, just worried you might have abandoned it. We really need all the images we can get.
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Post by snow_Cat »

^- - ^ What happened is that I've accidentally deleted all my files.

^- - ^ (in Windows Explorer) I selected the 'base' folder from the directory tree then used control+A to select all and control,shift+click to unselect the finished (300+) files followed by a 'delete' command.

^ > < ^ I was unaware that the [contemptible] software saw my selection as
(the parent folder) ctrl:plus ( (A:All files) ctrl:minus ctrl,shift+click:my files) )

^ - - ^ Counter intuitive given that the 'highlight' is not drawn when the tree is not selected, rendering identically to when the folder is only open, and that normally you can never select items from multiple panes.

^- - ^ So... that was a waste of three weeks of time.

^- - ^ I've added dump and scan routines to my version of WCNav so it should not take nearly so long form me to extract the data again though currently I'm looking for a job- seeing as I quit little over a year a go and need human contact... badly.

Additionally:
I recorded the animation using DosBox and ZMBV. There is an animation difference between the original DOS 1.0 and the later 1.1, 1.2 versions, though you do not collide with the crane in later versions the ammunition cart still takes off like a bat out of hell and the men go running.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

OUCH! That hurts.
Whatever pics you posted I got them, tho; but I'm sure it's other files you needed.
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Post by Sunfire »

chuck_starchaser wrote:Welcome to WCU, Sunfire; and thanks for the info.
You're welcome and thanks, glad to have finally made it over here... :D
chuck_starchaser wrote:What's still not clear to me from the textual descriptions is how you get from hangar bay to the launch tube. Does the floor under the ship go down or up like an elevator and then you're in the tube? Or is it left to the imagination? Or is something else hinted at?
absolutly nothing is hinted at... you go running down a hallway with the klaxon blaring and bathed in red light. then, side profile with aforementioned maytag man, then launch tube

well... let me be more specific...

Scene 1 you run from the brefing room down hall way.. first 2 seconds, side profile head shot of two ppl running down a hallway... next two, feet shot (possibly for the reason of showing the benefits of properly tied shoes...) then head shots again. sometimes the person in the foreground is wearing a helmet, sometimes its the one in the background, and sometimes, well... evidently not everyone gets a helmet... (pesky budget cuts i guess)

scene 2, side profile of front of ship moving diagonally upward into camera view, then horizontally forward where the pilot and MRM are seen, MRM fiddles with something in your crotch, (er... wait thats my imagination... whoops!) then canopy closes. also, camera pans horizontally forward in the same direction of the ships travel throughout scene

scene 3 launch!
Snow_Cat wrote: Additionally:
I recorded the animation using DosBox and ZMBV. There is an animation difference between the original DOS 1.0 and the later 1.1, 1.2 versions, though you do not collide with the crane in later versions the ammunition cart still takes off like a bat out of hell and the men go running.
LOL! indeed... and i wondered why that crane was there in the first place...
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

LOL, thanks; I think I'm getting the picture now. What's this "crane" thing? There's a hook that lifts the ship somewhere?
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