Llama

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chuck_starchaser
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Re: Llama

Post by chuck_starchaser »

Don't get excited; these are not the material colors...

Image

Image

...just the bump-map; --a progress report.
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Re: Llama

Post by snow_Cat »

^ -u-^ Looking good. I suppose that for ships of a higher design quality the radiator pattern might resemble a fractal antenna, and larger ships something like a phased array.

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Re: Llama

Post by chuck_starchaser »

My idea for higher tech factions is MetaBlack. I posted a link in the Mule thread.

EDIT:
Here we go... MetaBlackTM.
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Re: Llama

Post by chuck_starchaser »

Diffuse progress:

Image

Image

Image

Not final colors; the important thing is to get the color keying; the real colors
will find themselves once I throw it in-game. Then the real adjustments start.
Black parts are shiny metal, btw (black in diffuse; white in specular). Dark
green is intended to look like Teflon in the final model.
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Re: Llama

Post by chuck_starchaser »

Finished the texture set as far as the characterization of materials.
Fendorin, do you still want to do some work on it? It's now ready for some
real art.

Diffuse:

Image

Specular:

Image

Shininess:

Image

Not sure what's next...
Oh yeah; cooking dinner.

EDIT:
Opinions still very welcome, btw. I'm totally unsure about the materials
I've applied. Purple and brown don't usually go together. My original
hull paint was yellow; I could put it back to that. I was thinking of
psychology: the, what's the name now?, VHLW?, are a poor faction; so
they'd probably make their ships look neat out of self-conscious feelings.
So I actually looked for a flashy color; but I'm not sure if the brown
paint makes sense. Any ideas welcome. Maybe it needs more greebles,
like hatches.
For those who are not familiar with diffuse and specular colors, all the
parts that are black in diffuse but almost white in specular are shiny
metal.
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Re: Llama

Post by Deus Siddis »

Fendorin, do you still have that old faction color chart?

If not, the 'mostly metal' look is always a good option, IMO.
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Re: Llama

Post by Dawe »

It's a real piece of art chuck!
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Re: Llama

Post by Fendorin »

Is looking very good
about the back oriented thruster is means is game they will be not working or they will be re-oriented ?
i like the idea just the main part have a thruster with flame into game

I guess into the game Faction color must be for military,
As the Lama is handle by LIHW and a multi faction ship mettalic effect must be better.
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Re: Llama

Post by chuck_starchaser »

@Deus: An all-metal look was my first idea, in fact; and I wouldn't mind returning to it. Reason I switched to paints was more for shader-testing purposes than artistic considerations. If a metal look emerges as concensus, I might keep the current look for shader work and change the textures later.

@Dawe: Thanks!
Fendorin wrote:about the back oriented thruster is means is game they will be not working or they will be re-oriented ?
Frankly, I don't know. All I know is that it was time, I think, to show at least some possibility of craft steering. Klauss wrote code, long time ago, that controls flames based on forward acceleration. Perhaps that code can be expanded to include maneuvering considerations, and lateral and vertical accelerations. I don't know how hard it would be. Don't even know where the code is. But I think the art should begin to reflect the need to steer ships, and put the onus on programmers to support it.
i like the idea just the main part have a thruster with flame into game
I agree. I think that, for the time being, the best solution will be to have a single flame after the main, central thruster; and just a bit of static glow inside the side-thrusters.
I guess into the game Faction color must be for military,
I thought the llama was a civilian ship :-/
(Ah, maybe you mean what I think; --namely that it shouldn't have a logo.)
As the Lama is handle by LIHW and a multi faction ship mettalic effect must be better.
Indeed.
I know nothing about VS canon, but... Wouldn't faction logos be mostly on military craft and not civilian? I mean, I can buy a ship from any faction, and sell it to a buyer from any faction. Logos usually have a purpose. Civilian cars often have only manufacturer logos, such as GM crosses or Chrysler pentagons. If a TV station or carpet cleaning company buys a fleet of cars or vans, they may put their logo on them. But what purpose does a faction logo serve, unless it's a military vessel? More importantly, who would be devoting time to painting faction logos?, and who pays for that time?
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Re: Llama

Post by Deus Siddis »

chuck_starchaser wrote:@Deus: An all-metal look was my first idea, in fact; and I wouldn't mind returning to it. Reason I switched to paints was more for shader-testing purposes than artistic considerations. If a metal look emerges as concensus, I might keep the current look for shader work and change the textures later.
You could also do the metal look for the player/civilian ship 'skin' and then the other texture sets for various factions could be painted in by texture artists afterward. That's the way things have gone in the past.
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Re: Llama

Post by chuck_starchaser »

True; but it will be easier for people to paint on top of paint, rather than on metal.
Not a peeling problem :D; rather that if they paint on metal they have to tweak the
specular texture as well, and the shininess. Better to offer them a few already painted
areas that they can just color the diffuse texture alone to their liking. Also because
you don't want to have diffuse AND spec textures with faction specializations; too much
disk space and bandwidth.
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Re: Llama

Post by Phlogios »

How about this:
Every civilian, privately owned ship, such as the Llama, has a paint area in the texture, with a weird color key like lime green (doesn't matter which), and then this paint area gets a color generated in-game for each ship. All civilian Llamas would use the same texture, but their paint would be different. Just ask the shader to replace the lime green information with the generated color. Would something like that work?
It would give us great diversity, and provide the player the choice of his own color. "I want a Cerulean Blue Llama."
"Enjoy the Choice" - A very wise man from Ottawa.
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Re: Llama

Post by Phlogios »

Then we could have paint textures and metal textures separated,
every Llama in the universe would use the same metal texture, but different factions would use their own paint texture, which is used in conjunction with the metal texture.
Silly idea or plausible?
"Enjoy the Choice" - A very wise man from Ottawa.
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Re: Llama

Post by Dawe »

I really like that idea, it would add a lot of diversity as it tends to get somewhat repetative seing the exact same ship over and over again.
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Re: Llama

Post by chuck_starchaser »

Okay; this is two ideas rather than one:

1) Reserving a particular diffuse color as a color key that means "this color is for run-time replacement by another"; and then the shader receives a variable from the engine that's a color to use to substitute for the color key.

This is quite doable. I think the color key could be (1.0,0.0,1.0) purple; which I doubt anyone would want to use. There's one problem, though, that comes up repeatedly: Color keying is incompatible with any kind of filtering, off-line or real-time.
For example, suppose you're in the last stages of texturing, applying little scratches and dirt streaks that fade back gradually. If you apply these to a color key, then any amount of blending of dirt or whatever will cause the purple key to become a "purplish" NON-key color. So all the rusts and dirt and scratches and whatnot will have to be on a separate texture. Well, this is precisely my plan for CineMut, where there will be an Age input variable that will fade all that wariness in, in proportion to how old a ship is. But introducing color keying into the standard VS shaders and the 5-texture scheme would preclude any modulations of the key color-painted areas of the ship. Furthermore, it would prevent it from being contacted by any other colors. It would not be able to share UV islands with other, non-color-key materials; because of mipmap blurring filters and trilinear filtering, which, by blending the key color with other materials will give non-key color inputs to the shader around the edges.
So, I think this is a great idea in principle; but maybe one that I should add to the CM feature request.

2)Reserving a spot for a logo that the engine can vary as ships are spawned, without messing with the rest of the ship.

A great idea too. I think that this one has been tossed about since times immemorial. In fact I think I've seen such things as "decal texture" being reserved in bfxm for variable decals. I don't know where things are at right now; I'll have to ask Klauss.
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Re: Llama

Post by Turbo »

Both ideas are great IF they can be done in a cost-effective manner.

Failing that, those of us with excessive vanity can paint our own ships (such as my avatar).
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Re: Llama

Post by chuck_starchaser »

Turbo wrote:Both ideas are great IF they can be done in a cost-effective manner.
Exactly.
And there's a lot more to cost-effectiveness than just technical stuff. There's also the work going into it; problem solving... The idea of using color keying has come up and gone so many times I've lost count. A few months ago Klauss suggested color keying for ALL materials; then he withdrew his proposal, but then I was bitten by the idea and tried my darndest to make it work. In the end it didn't. But it took a couple of months of wasted time to realize how problematic it was. Keying in a single color is really not less problematic than keying in all materials. The problem is the same: filtering, mipmapping and antialiasing, all of which modify the color, destroying its key value, and producing boundary artifacts as a consequence. The only way to solve it would be by completely isolating the part of the mesh so keyed; but that imposes a rather difficult constraint in the UV unwrapping process.
And the decals... Well, I remember discussing them with Klauss and Hellcat many years ago; and I've forgotten what the problems were; but problems there were ... It was a looong discussion. I think the fact that the infrastructure for them has been there for so long and forever unused speaks volumes; but I'll ask Klauss to remind me, --after cubemaps are working.
Failing that, those of us with excessive vanity can paint our own ships (such as my avatar).
Exactly. And it's a good exercise, with the potential of producing texturers, which we badly need. Right now the modelers and the texturers are forced to be the same people.
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Re: Llama

Post by snow_Cat »

Textures? Is "public domain (free for any use)" good for a starting point?
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Re: Llama

Post by chuck_starchaser »

Certainly. I have like a gig of textures I've downloaded from such sites; though I've never used them, in the end, since the scale of the materials and tilings is usually incongruent with ship models. A "metal texture" for example, might map like a millimeter or less per texel; whereas a texel on a ship model would typically represent a square inch (in a fighter), to about a square meter (in a large ship or station). But if we ever get 3D ship and station interiors implemented in the engine, then material texture libraries will come very handy.

Update, I'm working on a second LOD now, down to 2400 facets.
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Re: Llama

Post by nphillips »

snow_Cat wrote:Textures? Is "public domain (free for any use)" good for a starting point?
Absolutely! Anything flagged Public Domain is a-ok. Also, look for Creative Commons licensed stuff (probably NonCommercial-Attribution-ShareAlike (NC-BY-SA), specifically)

I know of a few decent sites; I'll dig up the URLs and post them to an appropriate thread.
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Re: Llama

Post by chuck_starchaser »

Update:
I decided to throw away the top mesh, promote the 1st LOD to top mesh, and promote the second LOD to first LOD. Reason is, the top mesh was just too heavy. About 70 k triangles. I know I'm a big fan of cranking up the poly count, but 70 k tris for a ship this size is a bit ridiculous, and the 1st LOD looked just fine; just a little poligonated in a couple of places; and I fixed those.
So now, my ex-LOD1, now top mesh is exactly... let me see:
736 triangles, plus,
8316 quads, which x2=16632, +736= 17368 triangles.

So, now, my one and only LOD is...
236 triangles, plus,
1860 quads, which x2=3720, +236= 3956 triangles.

17368/3956 = 4.39

By the way, the high poly mesh, used for normalmap and AO bakings, has
approximately 280,000 triangles. I just tried to select all triangles to get a
count, and it seems to have crashed Blender. Looks really smooth, as it
should. If the corrective normalmap bake works, it should make my 17k
triangle mesh look almost as smooth as the 280,000 triangle one. That's
why we bake normalmaps; --or why I do, anyways...

(Blender recovered, but the selection didn't happen.)
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Re: Llama

Post by Turbo »

chuck_starchaser wrote:
Failing that, those of us with excessive vanity can paint our own ships (such as my avatar).
Exactly. And it's a good exercise, with the potential of producing texturers, which we badly need. Right now the modelers and the texturers are forced to be the same people.
True. In producing the paint job for my ship, I created new 1024x1024 diffuse and specular maps. These were built from simple vector graphics, using the orginal diffuse map as a reference image. I had to make a new spec map because I changed a lot of paint to metal. Then I took in-game screen shots to build the HUD image which is also my avatar. In doing all this, I discovered problems with the wrapping of the model that are not obvious with the original textures. But I don't know how to fix them.
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Re: Llama

Post by chuck_starchaser »

Well, to fix them you need to use Unit Converter to get the mesh
converted to .obj+.mtl.
Then you import them into Blender, split the screen, make your right subwindow
a 2D UV-map editor, highlight the mesh in the 3D window, and the unwrap appears
on the right window. Then you edit, export wavefront obj, and use Unit Converter
to update the bfxm.
It's a bit of work.

I'm in a shader writing and testing roll, right now; but in-between I've come up
with a second LOD for the Llama, with only 400 polygons. Also Gorbalad, of PU
fame, baked a high quality ambient occlusion for the Llama, using xNormal;
and will have normalmaps for me tonight.
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