Archimedes (new shape for old ship)

[Fendorin]

hello a new shape for archimedes

i use some part of watsons and hawking texture for more unity in texturation

but the texture is not a final texture

if the shape is good i continue?

then tell me your point of view:

[charlieg]

Absolutely awesome even by your own high standards!

[jackS]

Looks really good

One potential alterations does come to mind, but it's not particularly necessary:

if the "head" portion were vertically thicker, then the turrets would have a cleaner firing arc over the top/bottom of the ship

However, it's orders of magnitude better than the old Archimedes model, and I'd be more than happy with it as it is.

[ollobrains]

the new verrsion with some minor tweaking to the gun turrets could work

[Fendorin]

i have question about size of ship :



please could you think is good or the size is so closer???

[Deus Siddis]

Wow, those look amazing together!

I want my own Kahan now.

[jackS]

Looks like the Archimedes should be scaled up just a bit more. Exactly how much is hard to tell from the perspective angle.

Last I checked, the in-game lengths (tip to tail) are:

Archimedes: 4845 meters
Kahan: 1840 meters
Watson: 1458 meters

I actually prefer the inversion of relative sizes of the the Watson and Kahan as per your depicted models.
Likewise, the Archimedes can be closer in size to the Kahan and Watson than it currently is.

Something like:

Archimedes: 2500 meters
Watson: 1900 meters
Kahan: 1500 meters

would be great

[bgaskey]

Wow Great work Deus. Those look great! Hope they are added to SVN soon. i look forward to it.

[loki1950]

The Kahan and the Watson are already in game just the Archimedes to add BTW Fendorin is the artist

Enjoy the Choice

[Deus Siddis]

Wow Great work Deus. Those look great! Hope they are added to SVN soon. i look forward to it.

Uh, I think you mean Fendorin.
I have not contributed any art to VS yet, but Fendorin has contributed alot, including the models on this thread.

[bgaskey]

ya my bad. Wans't paying attention i guess...

[Fendorin]

hello !!!

i finish the most important part of new ARCHIMEDES

you can see it : follow the link:DivShare File - archimedes.zip

need i to make other Faction colorway???

need :
-shield mesh
-ppl map ( ahahahaha i m still stupid how to for make right???)
-bump map ( ahahahaha but how to???)
-normal map ( so new for my ahahahahaha)

is it possible for somebody to explain me
this 3 maps??? with very stupid word and maybe quick exemple(i m french i like picture!!)
like that i could stop to ask you every time
Thank

[bgaskey]

I'll get that ready to add, make a HUD image for it, and send it off to one of the devs for inclusion. Its easy to add other maps in later, if/when they are completed. Beautiful work as always.

[Phlogios]

You need:

Mesh
Shield mesh
Diffuse map
Spec map
Shininess map
Normal map
Damage map

There are certain rules for how materials are made, but this is a rough explanation:

A diffuse texture is the color of a surface.

A spec texture determines what color a certain place on the model _reflects_.
Not the diffuse colour - the specularity!

A shininess texture determines how MUCH a certain place on the model _reflects_. (Black and white)

A normal map is quite difficult to make, it is a purple texture that changes the normal of a surface, so that it looks like the surface is bumped (Used for making details like armor plates)

A damage texture is basically a diffuse texture but with scratches and holes in it. Gets faded-in when the ship is damaged.


Do NOT draw reflections in the diffuse map. By that, I also mean small white dots on black windows: No.

A material cannot have a sum of diffuse and shininess greater than 1. This means, that if you want to make a very reflective surface, like silver, have BLACK diffuse, and white/grey shininess.

Look for tutorials here on the Wiki. You'll learn a lot.

[bgaskey]

You forgot an emmisive, or glowmap, that shows which parts of the ship give off light (windows etc.)

Fendorin: this even came with a HUD image nice
Is the obj file triangulated (only triangles) because otherwise VS seems to get rather unhappy If not, I can export it again, so its no problem.

[klauss]

Little correction about shininess/specmap:

In few simple words:

Shininess is how blurred reflections look. White shininess = well defined reflections. Black shininess = blurred reflections.

Specularity is how much is reflected. Black means no reflections. Gray means dimmed reflections, White means mirror-like reflections (stay away from this, it always looks weird). Colored specularity means colored reflections.

Now, in more physical terms:

A shininess map is how rough the surface is: the whiter the shininess map, the shinier (ie: less rough). The darker, the rougher and less shiny. Imagine stone. That's black. Imagine a mirror/crystal. That's white.

A specmap is closely tied to shininess but not the same. The specmap is how much light (and of which color) gets reflected. Metal usually has a specmap of the same color as the diffuse, unlike it's coated with something that reflects off by itself (like venier), which would make the specmap gray or white. Usually you just see what looks good in the specmap, since deriving actual rules for it is rather difficult.

[Phlogios]

Little correction about shininess/specmap:

Thanks! I wasn't really sure

[chuck_starchaser]

A specmap is closely tied to shininess but not the same. The specmap is how much light (and of which color) gets reflected. Metal usually has a specmap of the same color as the diffuse, unlike it's coated with something that reflects off by itself (like venier), which would make the specmap gray or white. Usually you just see what looks good in the specmap, since deriving actual rules for it is rather difficult.

NOT closely tied, at all.

Glossy paints and plastics, for example, as well as glass, and most dielectric materials and coatings, can have very high shininess, but very low specularities. Look at a glossy white fridge, for instance: Reflections are sharp ; not blurred; (i.e. high shininess); and yet hard to see (low specularity). Same with glass...



At the opposite extreme, most metal surfaces are best represented by making them (black in diffuse and...) medium to high brightness in specular, but with low or very low, or ultra-low shininess. Stainless steel, for instance: Black in diffuse, about 60% gray in specular, shininess of like 20 or 10, or even 5, like the Tarsus engine housings here:



(NOTE: The above are NOT renders; they are in-game (PU) screen-shots.)

And it's not necessarily true that one must stay away from white specular. Rough aluminium, for instance, would be best represented as black in diffuse, white in specular, and black again in shininess (shininess of "zero" (the shader limits it to 1 (of 255) at the bottom end)).

For gray car paint, almost the exact opposite: 50% gray in diffuse, say, or whatever shade of gray you want the paint to be, up to 80% or 85% gray for "white" paint (white paint is never perfectly white); but about only 10% to 15% gray (pretty dark gray) in specular --regardless of the shade of the paint--; and yet with shininess you could go as high as 255 ("white" shininess) to represent high gloss.


Shininess and specularity are UN-related; because specularity is a characteristic of the material itself, whereas shininess is a function of how smooth or "polished" the surface finish is; and the two things are *completely* unrelated.


So, Fendorin, the first thing you need to do is decide what your materials are. What's metal, what's plastic, what's ceramic, what's glass, etceteras.
You can then, in Gimp, select regions by color and paste them in a new layer, then change the color for specular, and yet another layer for shininess. Then you export the layers to separate xcf's.
For metals, you need to decide which metals they are.
For paints, what kind of paints.
Low gloss paints have specular colors of the same hue and saturation as diffuse, but darker, and dark shininess. Glossy paints have gray-scale (desaturated) specular color, and high shininess. Metals are all mostly black in diffuse, and of varying brightness in specular, but low shininess.
Chromes would be white in specular, black in diffuse, high shininess.
Gold is black in diffuse, yellow in specular, high shininess.
Matte ceramics (and matte materials in general, such as paper or fabrics or rust) are whatever color they are, in siffuse; but black in specular (shininess doesn't matter).
Plastics are like high gloss paints (gray-scale, desaturated specular color), but lower gloss.

Glass is a different animal. For glass you need to separate the parts from the mesh, save a separate obj, and edit their bfxm, so the header reads,

Code: Select all

<Mesh scale="1.000000" reverse="0" forcetexture="0" sharevert="0" polygonoffset="0.000000" blend="ONE INVSRCALPHA"  texture="blank.png" texture4="glass_norm.png">
<Material power="255.000000" cullface="1" reflect="1" lighting="1" usenormals="1">
	<Ambient Red="0.000000" Green="0.000000" Blue="0.000000" Alpha="1.000000"/>
	<Diffuse Red="0.000000" Green="0.000000" Blue="0.000000" Alpha="0.100000"/>
	<Emissive Red="0.000000" Green="0.000000" Blue="0.000000" Alpha="1.000000"/>
	<Specular Red="1.000000" Green="1.000000" Blue="1.000000" Alpha="1.000000"/>
</Material>

Notice the blending type (ONE INVSRCALPHA), and 0.1 in diffuse alpha.

BTW, if you want to have self-shadowing, you'll have to open the mesh in Blender and bake an Ambient Occlusion. If you wan static lights to bathe objects, like the green light on the helmet above, you'll need to use Blender's Radiosity Bake tool.

[klauss]

Ok, thanks chuck for putting it into that much detail. I went for a quick description. I said "closely tied" as in "related", which it is, for single-layer materials. But, as you said, there are multilayer materials. And they're pretty common, and then you have pretty much any combination of specular and shininess... and didn't want to go into as much detail as you did. Actually, I wouldn't have known as much.

[chuck_starchaser]

My pleasure. I just saw this as a golden opportunity to try once again to convince Vegastrike's artists to go the route of depicting realistic materials, and using ambient occlusion and static light bakes. Hopefully I'll succeed some day.

But again, I have to say I strongly disagree about shininess and specularity being related, even for single-layer materials. Take rough aluminium (like cast aluminium) and polished stainless or nickle (like a baking pan), for instance: Stainless has about 60% specularity regardless of polish. If highly polished, it can have pretty high shininess (low blur in the reflections), and yet its specularity stays the same at 60%. Aluminium is almost white in specular (over 90% reflective, and a tiny bit bluish), regardless of polish; but in most uses of aluminium (except shiny foil), it has pretty low shininess.

I stand by my argument: shininess and specularity are UN-related, IN-dependent variables; --regardless of how many layers you have.

Maybe what confuses you is oxides. Aluminium becomes less specular when it oxidizes (yes, aluminium oxidizes, but its oxide is clear --well, semi-transparent gray--, so you don't "see" it), and it is statistically less common to find oxides on polished surfaces. But this is only statistical and circumstantial: Just the fact that the act of polishing tends to scrape off oxides and other "dirts".

[Deus Siddis]

My pleasure. I just saw this as a golden opportunity to try once again to convince Vegastrike's artists to go the route of depicting realistic materials,

It could help drive the point forward if you posted all the maps (even those that are mostly black) for the tarsus, so folks can see exactly how you got it to render so nicely in the new VS engine.

and using ambient occlusion and static light bakes. Hopefully I'll succeed some day.

I for one love AO baking, if for no other reason because I hate painting that kind of stuff (don't have a stylus and pad, maybe that's part of it). And who cares if there is not much ambient light in space, the effect looks too good for me to care.

Not sure if light bakes make great sense on alot of vessels though, since if you have any tactical sense at all, you won't want to go out of your way to illuminate yourself for your adversary's benefit. Unless glowing objects are part of one of your vessel's important technologies, especially if you are a race of strange aliens like the Aera or Rlaan (if they never use any organically moving structures).

[chuck_starchaser]

My pleasure. I just saw this as a golden opportunity to try once again to convince Vegastrike's artists to go the route of depicting realistic materials,

It could help drive the point forward if you posted all the maps (even those that are mostly black) for the tarsus, so folks can see exactly how you got it to render so nicely in the new VS engine.

Here you go:
http://deeplayer.com/pu/tarsus/tarsus.7z
That's the whole tarsus folder from under /units. The png's are actually dds; but they will open in Gimp if you have the dds plugin. Note that this tarsus is NOT textured, officially. All I did was bake the materials from blender, and then used ambient occlusion modulations and stuff; but there's nothing painted on it, no normalmap, nothing. And the UV unwrap is utter garbage; I just used automatic unwrap. This was just a temporary hack to get the new tarsus in-game; Nate is working on a real unwrap, and once he's done we'll do a real texturing.
Also note that the specular texture has shininess in the alpha channel, but the alpha channel is not being used in-game. Shininess is still, unfortunately, coming from an ad-hoc computation from specular color.

and using ambient occlusion and static light bakes. Hopefully I'll succeed some day.

I for one love AO baking, if for no other reason because I hate painting that kind of stuff (don't have a stylus and pad, maybe that's part of it). And who cares if there is not much ambient light in space, the effect looks too good for me to care.

Painting self-shadowing would never be as precise as a computed ambient occlusion, anyways. Besides, you need three powers of ambient occlusion for the ship to look right. I use square root of ao to modulate diffuse, the square of ao to modulate specular, and the plain ao multiplied by the diffuse texture to get the actual ambient contribution, which I then add to the glow map at a very low level, like 12.5% blend.

Not sure if light bakes make great sense on alot of vessels though, since if you have any tactical sense at all, you won't want to go out of your way to illuminate yourself for your adversary's benefit. Unless glowing objects are part of one of your vessel's important technologies, especially if you are a race of strange aliens like the Aera or Rlaan (if they never use any organically moving structures).

Well, the amount of realism and sense in a game is up to the developers to decide, of course. But even if you opt for NOT making your ships look like christmas trees, there's still some light bakings to do, such as illumination from the exhausts, and interior lights, if you have glass windows. Or like the baking of green light from the instruments I put on the Demon's pilot's helmet. In any case, space stations need a lot of lights, if nothing else for the sake of safety.

[chuck_starchaser]

In any case, might as well forget about all those squares and square roots of the ambient occlusion, as the next generation of shaders will compute them on the fly; so we won't have to modulate any textures by it; we'll simply throw the ambient occlusion into the alpha channel of the glow texture.
I'll start working on the new shaders as soon as Klauss finishes up the "Methods" variable for xmesh, which he said would be done this week, so that probably means today...

[Deus Siddis]

Here you go:
http://deeplayer.com/pu/tarsus/tarsus.7z
That's the whole tarsus folder from under /units. The png's are actually dds; but they will open in Gimp if you have the dds plugin. Note that this tarsus is NOT textured, officially. All I did was bake the materials from blender, and then used ambient occlusion modulations and stuff; but there's nothing painted on it, no normalmap, nothing. And the UV unwrap is utter garbage; I just used automatic unwrap. This was just a temporary hack to get the new tarsus in-game; Nate is working on a real unwrap, and once he's done we'll do a real texturing.
Also note that the specular texture has shininess in the alpha channel, but the alpha channel is not being used in-game. Shininess is still, unfortunately, coming from an ad-hoc computation from specular color.

Interesting. I'm a little confused about the diffuse though- there seems to be alot of detail in it but not much in specular, even though the tarsus looks like it should be composed mostly of metals. The tarsus' diffuse actually looks like the demon's specular that you posted a while back in the VS shader HowTo, even though they appear to be made out of the same sorts of materials.

Besides, you need three powers of ambient occlusion for the ship to look right. I use square root of ao to modulate diffuse, the square of ao to modulate specular, and the plain ao multiplied by the diffuse texture to get the actual ambient contribution, which I then add to the glow map at a very low level, like 12.5% blend.

In any case, might as well forget about all those squares and square roots of the ambient occlusion, as the next generation of shaders will compute them on the fly; so we won't have to modulate any textures by it; we'll simply throw the ambient occlusion into the alpha channel of the glow texture.
I'll start working on the new shaders as soon as Klauss finishes up the "Methods" variable for xmesh, which he said would be done this week, so that probably means today...

Just so we are all on the same page and get a consistent look, in blender, should we bake using add, subtract or both for the engine supported ambient occlusion you and klauss are working on?

[chuck_starchaser]

The stainless material of the engine housings is those brighter rectangles in the specular texture. They aren't black in diffuse, only dark; but they will be black in diffuse in the final textures. The rest of the materials are bogus materials, really. There just aren't materials that mix diffuse an specular in equal parts, but the tarsus body does.

I always have my ao setting in add mode; I'm not sure if it matters for Bake Rendering -> Ambient Occlusion, or whether that's only applicable to renders that mix ao and lighting.