Making new graphics...

[AzarWolf]

So is there a list of stuff to do, or can we just start making stuff, and things that look good/fit in just get included?

I came up with some ideas for a line of various ships ranging from a light fighter to a huge cap.ship and freighter all using the same architectural style... I'm not all that sure how they'd match up with any other architectural styles though...

Once I make the models in a day or two I'll post them.

What is an appropriate poly count for say a light fighter?
What about a cap.ship?

[Ares]

http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/Artstyle_guides
General design/style themes for most species.

[Phlogios]

Don't worry about the poly count

Just aim for something below 75,000 polygons for small ships, probably more for larger ships. The texture sizes are more important to limit. 512x512 is the maximum for small ships, 1024x1024 is the maximum for large capships.

And yes, there is a to-do list in the wiki, along with art/style guidelines.

[charlieg]

Ideally large ships should be built of of components that can be textured separately for extra high close-up detail.

[Phlogios]

I'm not so sure about that :/

It depends very much on what is faster and easier on the GPU.

[AzarWolf]

That part of the wiki seems very... empty.

How about I just make the models and someone else decides where they should go...
(I'll set it up as multiple objects so that it may be easily viewed. Textures and consequently UV mapping will come later.)

[chuck_starchaser]

Ideally large ships should be built of of components that can be textured separately for extra high close-up detail.

The advantage of multiple mesh instances is memory utilization: If 1k textures are used in 16 places, that's... 16 x4 x5 = 320 megs worth of detail at 20 megs price.
Another trick is using sub-units. Each sub-unit can have its own LOD, so if you are close to one of the instances you see the highly detailed version, whereas the other instances farther away may be showing lesser LOD's.
One thing to worry about, though, is ambient occlusion (ambient self-shadowing), which is statically baked as part of the texturing process. If all the submeshes or subunits will receive shadow from the same direction, and in the same amount, then we're talking. Otherwise the AO will look borked.

1024x1024 is the maximum for large capships.

I would say 512 for fighters, 1k for corvettes and destroyers, 2k for carrier-sized ships, and stations.

How about I just make the models and someone else decides where they should go...

This has been tried many times, and it never works. You can't model casually; you need to have a clear idea of what you're going to do. This forum is sometimes inundated by would-be modelers contributing random ships that end up in the trash bin. It takes about a month or two to model and texture a ship, so you don't want to start from a half assed idea that "maybe will work".

[AzarWolf]

Somebody REALLY needs to get around to updating that wiki page...
I'd do it if I had been around longer.

[chuck_starchaser]

Azar, I don't know whether you're an expert modeler or just getting started. Unless it is the former, I would advise you to start small: Stay away from trying to model a full ship. There are tons of existing models needing work. There was a thread a while ago asking for volunteers to produce specular textures for models that have none. If texturing is not your thing, there's a lot of work to do in the modeling department adding greebles and optimizing existing meshes. Also, redoing UV maps for ALL ships: A lot of models use overlapping of similar areas to use a common section of the texture. This needs to be fixed. There should be NO overlaps, except for parts that are black or mirror-like, or lights of the same color. And UV islands need to be oriented so that the direction pointing to the front of the ship, in any island, points UP (North) in the texture map. Tons of work to do. There are enough ships already; need a few well done ones, for a change, with specular textures, radiosity bakings, ambient occlusion, normal maps and the whole shabang.

[AzarWolf]

Azar, I don't know whether you're an expert modeler or just getting started. Unless it is the former, I would advise you to start small: Stay away from trying to model a full ship. There are tons of existing models needing work. There was a thread a while ago asking for volunteers to produce specular textures for models that have none. If texturing is not your thing, there's a lot of work to do in the modeling department adding greebles and optimizing existing meshes. Also, redoing UV maps for ALL ships: A lot of models use overlapping of similar areas to use a common section of the texture. This needs to be fixed. There should be NO overlaps, except for parts that are black or mirror-like, or lights of the same color. And UV islands need to be oriented so that the direction pointing to the front of the ship, in any island, points UP (North) in the texture map. Tons of work to do. There are enough ships already; need a few well done ones, for a change, with specular textures, radiosity bakings, ambient occlusion, normal maps and the whole shabang.

Seeing as I'm quite unfamiliar with the procedure for Vega strike's model setup -Forged Alliance has a very strict way to setup models while transcendence just asks for a simple render of 20-40 angles. Thus being allowed to improve current models would be a great way to get used to VS's procedure for setting up models- a procedure I'm sure is very foreign to what I'm used to

Would these models be listed in the todo list? I'd think that the klkk star-fortress is one of those overlap problems you're referring to...

FYI- I am NOT good at all for textures...

[chuck_starchaser]

Would these models be listed in the todo list? I'd think that the klkk star-fortress is one of those overlap problems you're referring to...

The person handling the state of the art is Pyramid, and he's on vacation. I hope somebody else is around who can point you to a list.

FYI- I am NOT good at all for textures...

I have good news for you, then: In the near future all you'll have to do, as a modeler,
is to assign materials to the different parts of the ship, from a materials library, bake material texturess from
your 3D app, plus ambient occlusion and a few other things,
http://wcpedia.com/dw/doku.php/wc_info/ ... th_blender
and then put all those textures through a series of Blender node networks called LaGrande:
http://wcpedia.com/dw/doku.php/wc_info/ ... ing_noodle
You get textures of this quality,
http://wcjunction.com/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... 1606#11606
or... much better than that, actually; and all without even touching a brush.
Good enough to throw in-game right away; then texture artists can take your bakes and add greebles and things.

[AzarWolf]

FYI- I am NOT good at all for textures...

I have good news for you, then: In the near future all you'll have to do, as a modeler,
is to assign materials to the different parts of the ship, from a materials library, bake material texturess from
your 3D app, plus ambient occlusion and a few other things,
http://wcpedia.com/dw/doku.php/wc_info/ ... th_blender
and then put all those textures through a series of Blender node networks called LaGrande:
http://wcpedia.com/dw/doku.php/wc_info/ ... ing_noodle
You get textures of this quality,
http://wcjunction.com/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... 1606#11606
or... much better than that, actually; and all without even touching a brush.
Good enough to throw in-game right away; then texture artists can take your bakes and add greebles and things.

>.> I am clueless how to use blender... sorry about that.
In SCFA I'd just need to UV map- the specular file was entirely separate and handled by the pixel shaders in-game.
For transcendence, I just have to bake only the bitmaps on and then use the materials editor in max to manually (and visually) edit gloss, shininess, transparency, etc.
But if I'm interpreting this right- (since I know from editing transcendence, using ONLY the materials editor and a bunch of separate objects, I could reproduce that ship (not the environment though- that's very obviously textured)
Well, I'll get around to experimenting with this!
I made a quicky little test ship mesh (probably around 15k poly) and I'll experiment with that. I can include lights in-model right? or are those added via script like SCFA did?

[chuck_starchaser]

Lights are made with blobs of color in the glow texture.
We have basically five textures for use with the current shaders:

• Diffuse.
• Specular (for reflective color)
• Glow (for added light)
• Damage (diffuse texture is faded to damage texture as ship damage increases)
• Normalmap (you probably know, already; tangent space)

The upcoming CineMut shaders will use a different texture packing,
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... 695#101695
which includes dielectric constant of the material, among other things:

[AzarWolf]

Lights are made with blobs of color in the glow texture.
We have basically five textures for use with the current shaders:

• Diffuse.
• Specular (for reflective color)
• Glow (for added light)
• Damage (diffuse texture is faded to damage texture as ship damage increases)
• Normalmap (you probably know, already; tangent space)

The upcoming CineMut shaders will use a different texture packing,
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... 695#101695
which includes dielectric constant of the material, among other things:

Hmm... So we should wait for the CineMut shaders then? Someone told me stuff was pretty much at a standstill until the CineMut shaders are done.
SCFA had Specular + Glow, albedo, and normal textures. Diffuse seems to be albedo here. It doesn't seem to be too different.

[chuck_starchaser]

Things should NOT be at a stand-still. I'll have a side-node-network for converting existing texture sets to LaGrande input sets, so work for existing shaders won't be wasted. And it will be a while yet for CineMut; we'll need cubempaps, and that needs engine work (and now Klauss (the main developer in graphics) suffered a videocard death).
And once the shader is ready, I still have to finalize the LaGrande stuff, before people can use CineMut; otherwise it will be very difficult to produce the texture packings using Gimp and the like.

[AzarWolf]

Things should NOT be at a stand-still. I'll have a side-node-network for converting existing texture sets to LaGrande input sets, so work for existing shaders won't be wasted. And it will be a while yet for CineMut; we'll need cubempaps, and that needs engine work. And once the shader is ready, I still have to finalize the LaGrande stuff, before people can use CineMut.

OK good. Since if things were at a stand still...
So, I'll be off experimenting with using 3dsmax for VS. and hopefully getting around to fixing some of that stuff soon.
wish me luck!

[chuck_starchaser]

Good luck!