New guy needs newb guidance

tiadoppler · Post by **tiadoppler** » Wed May 14, 2008 5:36 am

Hi
I love VS and want to help out with development - especially increasing the number of available ship models. I just started modeling yesterday (see my test model below) and I would like to get some experience before I try to do any real model for VS. Please leave some feedback on what I should do to improve in Blender, or if I should scrap this test ship and start a new one with better form (This ship was very crudely done, with a single cube extruded over and over, with a mirror modifier). Thanks!

http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/galle ... temId=7518

Info about the ship

Role: Heavy assault on slow-moving or stationary targets

Design: The design of the ship is focused around fitting as big of a gun as possible onto as small of a ship as possible, and figuring out some method for it to survive to get into range of an enemy base or capital ship. A thick armor plate is mounted at the fore, with three gun-ports for heavy weapons and missiles. The rear section of the ship is virtually unarmored by comparison, and houses all primary systems. The heavily armored cockpit and single autotracking light weapon (not modeled yet) is all that protrudes from the front of the shield. The primary weaponry consist of a single spinal mounted HEAVY or CAPSHIP-LIGHT (or heavier?) weapon, two MEDIUM (or HEAVY?) weapons, and some number of LIGHT-MISSILEs.

Strengths: Heavy frontal armor protects against vast amounts of damage from that vector. Abnormally heavy weapons mounts for a ship of this size let the ship deal out a lot of damage. LIGHT AUTOTRACKING mount and decent LIGHT-MISSILE loadout provides some defense against enemy fighters. When fighting against a single slow moving opponent, this ship can easily 'hide' behind its shield by constantly rotating to keep the ship pointed directly toward the enemy.

Weaknesses: Pathetic side/rear defenses, combined with high mass (slow acceleration and maneuvering) make this ship almost completely defenseless against smaller, faster ships. Carrying cargo easily raises the mass of the ship to such an extent that acceleration is negligible and travel is impractical. When fighting multiple opponents, this ship cannot protect itself effectively, and cannot engage both opponents simultaneously.

Post by **ace123** » Wed May 14, 2008 7:11 am

I like the model as a concept.

However, it needs a higher Polygon Count. How many polygons does that have?
That would make a good LOD model, but the polygons shouldn't be noticable when close up.

RE: linking images
I think you just do

When linking to gallery images, you sometimes need to add the GET parameter to the end "&ext=.jpg" to get the forums/wiki to recognize that it's a jpg image.

You may have gotten caught by the Spam script

tiadoppler · Post by **tiadoppler** » Wed May 14, 2008 8:55 pm

How do I get the polygon count in Blender?

bgaskey · Post by **bgaskey** » Wed May 14, 2008 9:30 pm

Sorry can't answer that question (use wings myself) but Blender is a great and well-documented tool. Don't get discouraged, your first model is a lot less ugly than mine. I mean a LOT. My brother looked at it over my shoulder and couldn't even tell what I was doing. I told him and he was like "so its for that stupid space game"

THats the level of respect VS gets around my house

So the moral of the story is be persistent, and don't listen to my brother.

With some smoothing, I can see that model in VS some day pretty soon.

Post by **klauss** » Wed May 14, 2008 9:41 pm

IIRC, there are a few numbers on the top-right corner (or near corner) of the screen that always show your polycount (or your selection's)

tiadoppler · Post by **tiadoppler** » Wed May 14, 2008 10:17 pm

Ah thanks okay:
859 vertices, 1114 faces in this most recent model
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/galle ... temId=7520

bgaskey · Post by **bgaskey** » Wed May 14, 2008 10:45 pm

Looks much smoother and generally nicer. You can still do more smoothing, as I think the poly count can go up to at least 3000 or so. (correct me if I'm wrong though)

Post by **Deus Siddis** » Thu May 15, 2008 2:54 am

5,000 triangles should be the minimum for fighter sized craft. imo. A bomber sized craft like the Goddard I'd make 10,000 tris. The privateer folks are going nuts with their polycounts and would probably consider these values conservative.

It is ridiculous to let the the cpu and ram work so hard as they do in current VS, while the gpu sits there playing cards. So let's throw it some tris people, nobody uses vacuum tubes anymore, this is the future. Let's make models as smooth and interesting as we always wanted to!

Post by **klauss** » Thu May 15, 2008 3:31 am

Without LODs those polycounts aren't for VS. Privateer has generally less ships in the scene. With lods, you don't care about polycounts since the ones far away will use simpler models. A modern card can easily handle about 1M triangles per frame at 30fps or so... and I'm talking GF6, not GF8 which will probably be a lot faster. But, have in mind that some rendering techniques need multiple passes, and you'll have more than one model onscreen, so you shouldn't go overboard - ie: 100k polies is reserved for top lod on a station.

In short, IF (and I stress the IF) we were targetting GF6 and up,

Top LOD:

Stations / capships: 10k - 40k, maybe the occasional exception.
Bombers: 5-10k
Fighters: 1-5k

First LOD:

Stations / capships: 5k
Bombers: 1k
Fighters: <1k

Second LOD:

Stations / capships: 1k (optional)
Bombers: <1k
Fighers: none

I realize that's wishful thinking... we never get LODs from artists, and I'm asking for 3 levels... but... I'll be wishful today.

Post by **Deus Siddis** » Thu May 15, 2008 4:39 am

klauss wrote:Without LODs those polycounts aren't for VS.

Sure, a 1k lod shouldn't be much trouble.

Privateer has generally less ships in the scene. With lods, you don't care about polycounts since the ones far away will use simpler models.

True, but VS scenes are also much, much huger. There are very few ships close enough to even be rendered the vast majority of the time.

A modern card can easily handle about 1M triangles per frame at 30fps or so... and I'm talking GF6, not GF8 which will probably be a lot faster.

Hey well I can only wish I had a GF6, instead I have a 64mb quadro4 700 xgl, which is a very old card. But I get 8 fps frame rates in rush hour enyo when there is nothing being rendered on my screen-- the game bogs down my damned old system from non-graphical load. So what does it matter if my gpu is doing some work, if older machines like mine are already getting bogged down in other areas.

But, have in mind that some rendering techniques need multiple passes, and you'll have more than one model onscreen, so you shouldn't go overboard - ie: 100k polies is reserved for top lod on a station.

Rendering techniques can be disabled though. I have to shut down half of the cool graphical features when playing Nexuiz, and yet that project still insists on using 1k character models that look like puke. For us folks with older hardware, we're used to having to make some choices with settings, but we can't choose 5k models if they don't exist in VS's content directory.

But the most important thing to consider is how long it takes to upgrade the model set in a free project such as this. By the time there is a fleet of 5-10k interceptor/fighter/assault/bomber models, GF8s are only going to be used for recycled hardware art and the blades of kidney daggers for office war competitions.

tiadoppler · Post by **tiadoppler** » Fri May 16, 2008 4:37 am

Up to 2k faces now. I'll be sure to do a couple LODs when I finish the model (I'm aiming for 5k faces, so I'll do one at 1k faces, and another at 100-200)

http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/galle ... temId=7554

This ship is probably built by the Highborn - it looks slightly similar to the Gawain, at least to me.

I'm starting to think about the color scheme for the texture: should it be dark gray and black (like the Gawain)? I sorta think that it should be white with some blue, like the ship profile of the Admonisher (link below), but I want to follow canon as closely as possible.
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/galle ... temId=5989

tiadoppler · Post by **tiadoppler** » Wed May 28, 2008 10:48 pm

New pic is up - nearly 4k faces now!
Who likes the shield on the front and thinks it should stay? Who doesn't like it and thinks it should go? I've been trying to make the shield look more like the rest of the ship (in polygon count, style, shape, etc.) but it just doesn't seem to fit. I'm voting for no shield, but I'll keep the shield on if other people want it.

http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/galle ... temId=7559

bgaskey · Post by **bgaskey** » Thu May 29, 2008 2:04 am

Looks pretty nice. I think it might look nicer aesthetically without the shield, but on the other hand it makes it more unique...
I abstain.

Oh well I guess I vote without too, but keep a version with the shield lying around if you do decide to remove it.

tiadoppler · Post by **tiadoppler** » Thu May 29, 2008 5:32 am

I think that I will shelve the shield idea until a later model. This ship will be a much more standard BOMBER class ship, and I'll do a more unconventional one later. As of now, I just want to finish this model so I can learn to texture. My goal is: two more days to finish the model itself. Tomorrow I will add all the cool-looking stuff I want, especially in the places that look sort of boring atm.
The biggest thing that will be done tomorrow is the finishing of the missile launcher model - the launcher is close to done, and will be 'loaded' with missile models (pbly custom). Unfortunately, I have no clue how to animate the missiles so that they fire/run out of ammo in the game, so you'll just be stuck with a static model

.
The day after tomorrow will be clean-up: making sure that there are no missing faces, no faces included that cannot be seen in game, no polygons that are too weirdly shaped(for ease of texturing) and nothing that just looks ugly. I'll be pretty busy over the weekend, but I'll be back and texturing with a vengeance on Monday.

Another question: is there any way to tag a weapon mount so that it cannot be upgraded with autotracking? This ship (at least as originally planned) centers around a single, very powerful weapon which should not be autotracking for two reasons: it look ugly when a projectile shoots sideways out of a gun model, and it would be overpowered.

Post by **ace123** » Thu May 29, 2008 7:42 am

I'm not sure about weapon mounts... you may be able to put that in the .template of this ship (the .template AFAIK specifies the maximums that the ship can hold), but I have a feeling that templates are deprecated. Still, it's worth trying.

Post by **Deus Siddis** » Thu May 29, 2008 6:38 pm

It is looking alot better, though you should really test and see how it looks when smooth-shaded. The unusual arrangment of the triangles that make up its mesh might create alot of shading artifacts.

You'll also want to set aside some time for UV unwrapping it before you can move on to texturing it. Finally, you'll want to bake tangent space normal mapping and ambient occlusion mapping for it in blender using some sub-surfing or a higher res model built by your own two hands (err, well using a keyboard and mouse

).

Post by **loki1950** » Thu May 29, 2008 10:48 pm

@tiadoppler since this thread has become Artwork and Content do i have your permission to move it there

Enjoy the Choice

tiadoppler · Post by **tiadoppler** » Fri May 30, 2008 3:47 pm

Yes please move it to Artwork/Content. Thanks!

I've just started learning about texturing, and will have to do some research on what I need to do/tools to download etc. Thanks for the heads up though.

tiadoppler · Post by **tiadoppler** » Wed Jun 25, 2008 1:53 am

I'm not dead!!!
expect update soon - have been way busy.

Post by **loki1950** » Wed Jun 25, 2008 2:25 am

Glad to hear real life does have a tenancy to overwhelm one on occasions

and one of the many challenges of open source development.

Enjoy the Choice

tiadoppler · Post by **tiadoppler** » Sun Jun 29, 2008 1:10 am

UPDATE! (I finally have time to do some work on the models)
Three models:
Bomber that's been on this forum
Two versions of small shuttles for civilian/police work (one civvie model, one for the milspec version which is more of a police-car spaceship)

I'm just starting to do texturing, but I have two more ideas for models: a missile-heavy Interceptor, and a large Fighter with lots of atmospheric flight capability.

I'd show my concept sketches, but my scanner broke down.

http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/galle ... temId=7695

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New guy needs newb guidance

New guy needs newb guidance

Sheild or no shield?