HAMMER aka TOAD - LIHW Heavy Fighter

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chuck_starchaser
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Bump-modulated AO:

Image

Don't worry; it will be more subtle than that.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Materials roughly set up:

First the "albedo", which is the sum of diffuse and metallic specularity color. It's baked from Blender's material index's "Diffuse" color.

Image

Next is the "specularities". NOT a specular color at all.
  • Red intensity encodes how specular versus diffuse the material is.
  • Green encodes the blending factor of dielectric versus diffuse surface content.
  • Blue encodes the material's dielectric constant.
It comes from Blender's material index's "Specular" color.

Image

Finally is the "miscellaneous" texture.
  • Red encodes shininess (surface gloss).
  • Green is the detail control channel (0.5 for no detail; 1 for full bump detail added; 0 for full speckle and stain detail added).
  • Blue channel is not used; set at 0.5 for the hell of it.
Baked from Blender's material index's "Mirror" color.

Image

See the Texturing with Blender (for CineMut Opaque shader and La Grande noodle) tutorial.

First I'm going to test the ship using only these baked materials; no texture; as combining the textures is going to be a headache; so I want to get the materials exactly right first.
(Fendorin, I wish you had used transparency for the background. You used black, which would be okay, except that you also used black for painting with, so separating what supposed to actually be black from the background is a nightmare.)
  • bake PRT's ......................................................... ***DONE***
  • make a bumpmap .............................................. ***DONE***
  • finalize the material definitions in Blender ......... ***DONE***
  • bake the materials again ................................... ***DONE***
  • bake radiosity for the lights
  • put the textures through the LaGrande noodles
  • export .obj's
  • convert to bfxm's
  • throw it in-game
  • figure out why it doesn't work
  • fix it
Fendorin
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Post by Fendorin »

i made a mistake sorry you have a new

Image
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Post by pyramid »

Ha, ha, Fendorin as LIHW pilot.

Good one :lol: :lol: :lol:
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Thanks, Fendorin! This is really going to make it easier.

Baking radiosity...

Image
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Post by Fendorin »

and after with Cinemut you have just one map combine all your baking???
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

In the case of the radiosity baking, it needs to be first bump-modulated, then multiplied by the diffuse texture, and the result is added to the glow map.
What I use to combine the textures is "noodles" (Blender node networks). These networks I'm still working on them, refining them. The whole package of networks will be called LaGrande.
They function sort of like Gimp or photoshop layers, but they allow you any kind of math computations, and do all the arithmetic in higher precision than Gimp or Photoshop; so you don't lose quality at each step.
In Blender, you just go to the bottom left corner of any window, click the icon, and change the type of the window to Node Editor. That's where noodles are built.

EDIT:
Damn! The radio baking failed. Always problems with the number of material indexes...
It puts all my meshes together: Metals, dielectrics AND lights into one; and runs out of indexes...

Ah, I think I know what to do:
I'll just make the whole mesh a single, gray material before I start the baking.
Wish me luck.
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Post by Fendorin »

And do you know the setting for render GOLD and SILVER (like jewels very shiny)???

i try but every time the texture look like humide/wet it's like a plastic duke in bath i can't find the mass and metal effect!

thank
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Clean silver and chrome are black in diffuse, about 0.9, 0.9, 0.9 in specular.
Clean aluminium is very dark gray in diffuse an bright gray in specular with a tiny bit of a blue hue, like 0.88, 0.88, 0.9 specular.
Note: You won't get them to look right in Blender renders unless you set up an environment map.
http://wcjunction.com/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... 9876b77399
Gold is about 0.12, 0.1, 0.03 diffuse and 0.72, 0.6, 0.18 (yellow) in specular.
For metals in general, make sure that diffuse and specular are the same color (chroma); just different intensities (luma). Do NOT desaturate the color for specular, for metals: If you try to make gold yellow in diffuse but white or gray in specular, it will look like yellow plastic.
But the "wet" look is probably due to excessive shininess; but with the current shaders you have no way to lower the shininess, except by lowering over-all specularity.
I'll be sure to put some gold items on the Hammer.


Radio bakes done:

Image

Image

Image
  • bake PRT's ......................................................... ***DONE***
  • make a bumpmap .............................................. ***DONE***
  • finalize the material definitions in Blender ......... ***DONE***
  • bake the materials again ................................... ***DONE***
  • bake radiosity for the lights ............................... ***DONE***
  • put the textures through the LaGrande noodles
  • export .obj's
  • convert to bfxm's
  • throw it in-game
  • figure out why it doesn't work
  • fix it
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Post by Fendorin »

thank for your reply
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

My pleasure.

I just finished making a noodle I wanted to do for a long time: a bump modulator that modulates each
rgb channel separately. I thought Blender was going to crash on so many nodes, but it doesn't,
somehow. It works!
Well, it still needs some fine-tuning...

The pic below is about one quarter of the entire noodle:

Image

Needs a bit of adjustment because, as you can see in the pic below, the bright side of the rivets is always at
45 degrees. Which means the light ramp detection gain is too high, and is saturating in both x and y or z.

Image
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Fixed!
It was missing connections (typos?) rather than any need for tweaking.

Image

For the curious:
http://wcjunction.com/temp_images/toad/ ... _rgb.blend
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Normalmap *basically* done. Much better could be done by someone who's willing to work at it.

Image

I made a Blender noodle to try and thin out the bump map features. Problem is, if the textures are 512 (and the normalmap is 1024), rivets, for example, can't be placed arbitrarily anywhere at the working texture size of 2048, because they would be terribly distorted in the texture (if you want to give them a different material) after reducing from 2048 to 512. So, basically, rivets and small holes and grooves and wires have to be drawn at 512, then scaled up. But on scaling up from 512 to 2048, 1 pixel wide grooves become 4 pixels wide.
So, the bump_scaler4x.blend noodle scales up 4x and thins out features in the process.

By the way, before someone asks, the reason there's so many color changes, streaks, bands, stains, besides the grooves and rivets, that's the corrective normalmap. It is baked from a high poly count version of the ship to the normal mesh, to make it shade smoother.
That's what xNormal does, mainly.
I got a noodle that computes normals from a bumpmap AND adds them to the baked normalmap: bump_normal_combiner.blend.
It adds them by angles, by the way; which is better than anything you could do with Gimp, that I know of. Better yet would be to treat the two normals to be blended as matrices of rotation, and do a matrix multiplication, but I don't know how to do that.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

How to get the look of anodized aluminium:

Anodizing aluminium is a controlled oxidation of the aluminium surface, produced by submerging the aluminium in an acid bath and circulating a DC current (electrons flowing from the bath and into the aluminium). Aluminium oxide, like most oxides of most metals, is a dielectric. So, you can sort of class anodized aluminium among plastics and paints, rather than as a metallic material. The top region of the anodized layer is porous and will absorb dies of various colors. The most commonly used color die is black, as it makes heatsinks more efficient as radiators.
Thus, black anodized has pretty similar characteristics to rubber: Black in diffuse, plus a dielectric constant; apparently 8.
http://www.pfonline.com/articles/clinic ... alum1.html

With standard shaders, therefore, you'd represent black anodized aluminium as black in diffuse and some shade of gray in specular; typically a dark shade, to represent its dielectric specularity; and very low shininess.

With CineMut you can be more specific:

Diffuse = Black
Specularity = 0
Dielectric blend = 0.9 (I'd venture)
Dielectric K = 0.82 (the magical number to get 8, from this graph)
Shininess = 0.1 (pretty low)
Detail = 0.5 (none)

EDIT:
And so, you might ask, how do I represent rubber with CineMut?
Hard rubber has a dielectric constant of 2.8, which falls right at 0.5 in CineMut's 0-1 input range; and rubber typically has a porous surface, so I'd venture,
Diffuse = Black
Specularity = 0
Dielectric blend = 0.8 perhaps
Dielectric K = 0.5
Shininess = 0.1 (pretty low)
Detail = 0 (speckled detail maxed out)

This is all just tentative; we shall see what they look like in-game.
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Post by Fendorin »

well when you finish the Hammer post it a picture on this forum
i m realy want to see your noodle tools in action ( i didn't understand all the topic about Cinemut and some explain is still under shadow for my bad english)

then the picture is more easier for understand

thank
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Yes, I'm working as fast as I can. The new bike model is almost done; I just finished the last bake I needed, --started it yesterday evening, so it took like 20 hours. Once I got the new test bike, I can finish up some fixes and features I started working on for CineMut; possibly tonight, but maybe tomorrow. Anyways, very soon I'll get back to finishing the Hammer. I'd say by next week-end it should be in-game-able.
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Post by Fendorin »

then i will wait....
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Sorry this is taking so long, but I've been testing alphas and betas of xNormal; then when I thought all my bakes were right, I found an artifact on the bottom side, between the radiator fins; so I fixed it, and now I'm redoing the bakes.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

90% done...

Not me, I mean, xNormal.
Last friday afternoon I ordered a 1024 ray uniform ambient occlusion with 4x anti-aliasing, for the Hammer. That's 16 sub-texels x 1024 rays, or 16k rays per texel. 4M texels x 16k rays = 64 billion ray collisions. So, it's Monday evening, 90% done; by tomorrow morning I should have the best AO the world has ever seen :D
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Uniform AO done! :D

Image

Those two dark lines along the convex folds above, on the side of the fuselage, must be an xNormal bug; I sent email
to Santiago Orgaz about it. But I think I can live with it, for now; and other than that, it looks immaculate to my eyes :)

Image

Image

No more bakes!
The rest is all noodling work.

EDIT:
I might add, I haven't had to use blurs on a selection of the background like I used to have to do; no tweaking,
no fixes, no nothing. This is un-retouched xNormal baking; thanks to all the new features Santiago put in.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

EDIT:
I just got an email from Santiago. The good news: He found the bug that was causing those dark lines on the sides of the Hammer's fuselage, in the ambient occlusion. The bad news is that I'd better wait for his fix and rebake. Otherwise those dark lines would attract shadows onto themselves. That's the ao used for PRT shadow computations; it has to be perfect.
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Re: HAMMER aka TOAD - LIHW Heavy Fighter

Post by tiny paintings »

Looking spectacular, chuck :)
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Re: HAMMER aka TOAD - LIHW Heavy Fighter

Post by loki1950 »

Long time since we seen your name on a new post :D

Enjoy the Choice :)
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Re: HAMMER aka TOAD - LIHW Heavy Fighter

Post by MC707 »

Is this model done?
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Re: HAMMER aka TOAD - LIHW Heavy Fighter

Post by chuck_starchaser »

Hey, tiny paintings!!! :D :D :D :D How are you doing, old friend and teacher?
Glad you like what I've done with the Hammer; I haven't changed it much at
all really; just subdivisions where needed, weldings here and there.
Unfortunately the texturing is on hold, as I was going to texture it for the new
shaders, CineMut; but development on the shaders is at a stand-still because
Klauss still doesn't have a videocard, though he says he ordered one; and he's
very busy with the sound system. But without his help I can't finalize CineMut,
so the art pipeline is backed up.
I've also been put in charge of your other ship, the luxury yatch; but haven't
started on it yet.
Check out the PU board when you have time.
http://wcjunction.com/phpBB2/index.php

[quote="MC707"]Is this model done?[/quote]The modeling is done. The unwrapping also.
The texturing is on hold, however.
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