To all artists, past, present and future

[chuck_starchaser]

We are approaching a release, and most models don't have shininess in specular alpha, and no ambient occlusion
in glow's alpha channel, and most don't even have a friggin normalmap.

Let's get to work; shall we? I can't do them all for you.

It's Retexturathon time.

I've removed all the old hacks from shaders to try to "guess" shininess. The new rule is: If you don't have
shininess in spec alpha, you're screwed; SOL; your ship or station will look weird, like wrapped in plastic.
So, your reputation is at stake!

If you don't know what shininess is, or how to produce it, or how to put it in the alpha channel, ask and
ye shall be enlightened. If you want to see an example of shininess at work, svn up data, then fly around
and find a Diplomatic Center; land on it first and save the game; then fly off and around and have a good
look. You'll need to svn up vegastrike and recompile the engine also (unfortunately you can't if you are
on Windows; only linux users can compile the latest code, for now), to use the latest shaders and see
the glorious DDS cubemaps.
To compile, you need to get all the dependencies first, as per the wiki; then,

Code: Select all

./bootstrap-sh
./configure --enable-release --disable-debug --enable-cubemap --with-boost=system
make

[Deus Siddis]

Where does one find the shininess value for say, nickel-iron? Is there a table or chart someplace for this stuff and real life materials?

[charlieg]

If you don't know what shininess is, or how to produce it, or how to put it in the alpha channel, ask and ye shall be enlightened.

...or somebody could create a wiki page with information and instructions...

[Deus Siddis]

He already did, actually:

http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/ ... oToShaders

I was just curious if there was more material-specific values out there anywhere. Because I can't get VS to load my textures for whatever reason-- so I can't just play it by ear at the moment. I guess I'll just go with full gloss for transparent materials, half for metals, unless polished or heavily corroded, and none for everything else. And then the same for gloss - semi-gloss - matte paints, respectively.

[chuck_starchaser]

I will, as soon as I get back to a more normal routine --e.g. modeling, texturing... Right now I'm wearing a developer hat and can't remember how to start Gimp. I think the way to go right now is code a python program and get it done. Writing a tutorial, with pictures and all that, would probably take as much time.
I committed updates to the shaders, last night; and tonight I'll try to move them to their new homes, in a folder tree under /techniques. I want to finish that work and test it, so I can then port everything over to PU (engine, techniques, shaders, cubemaps) and test there. Once that's done I'll probably ask shenle for a fresh win binary, and release a new PU.
Then I want to do that again for VT.
That's my immediate priorities, in a nutshell. A tutorial would perhaps have helped 2 or 3 months ago; but right now it's too late for it to achieve anything before release.
But I'll get that done, for sure. Have to.

@Deus: LOL; I'd forgot that one. It's been messed up by someone: In the starting, Overview of Requirement section it says,
"A shininess texture determines how MUCH a certain place on the model _reflects_. (Black and white)"
That is a complete lie; it should say,
"A shininess map (which we locate in the alpha channel of the specular texture) determines how coarse or glossy the surface is; --that is, how sharp or blurry reflections look on it. This is UNRELATED to the material's specularity. For example, glossy paint has low specularity (Fresnel specularity) but the reflections are sharp, making the material look glossy. A sheet of stainless steel, for an opposite example, is highly specular, but reflections on it are blurry, because the surface is rough (non-glossy). A value of 1.0 in spec alpha makes the surface maximally glossy; a value of 0.0 in spec alpha makes the surface maximally rough."
I can't edit the wiki anymore; somebody who can please fix that; it is totally misleading the way it is now.

EDIT:
Deus, have you tried mesher again, lately? Because I fixed a bug with it that's probably the one that stalled your work.
Not sure if you're on linux or windows. If the former, just svn up and make. If not, you could ask shenle for a mesher
binary.
About materials, most metals would be in the lower half of the range of shininess, except polished chromes on the ships of 1950's fans trying to get a Harley feel. Stainless steel needs a pretty low value; perhaps slightly higher than cast aluminium, but not much. Most glossy paints would be on the upper half of the shininess range. Somewhere in the middle you'd have an egg-shell finish, like paints that say high gloss on the label but are for brush or roller application and are cheap.

[klauss]

I can't edit the wiki anymore; somebody who can please fix that; it is totally misleading the way it is now.

Done. Somewhat.
We have to formalize the highend texture packing though, and document that. Like the precise gamma used in the shininess texture (which isn't linear), the normal map encoding, and things like that.

[safemode]

done

hrm.. if me and klauss both did that edit at the same time... i'll defer to you to put it back right... you two are on the shader/texture end of things way more than me

[chuck_starchaser]

Indeed; that's the other reason I was neglecting to explain for not writing a tutorial now; I'm not 100% sure yet that the linearity is right.
I'm very tempted to have a variable inter-mip scaling ratio for blur angle in vs_cubemap_gen, like start with a scaling factor of 3.0 from the top LOD to the second, and taper it down to like 2.0 between mip 7 and mip 8. Log-linear doesn't seem to do the trick for my eyes: too little change at the top; too much at the bottom.

[Deus Siddis]

For example, glossy paint has low specularity (Fresnel specularity) but the reflections are sharp, making the material look glossy. A sheet of stainless steel, for an opposite example, is highly specular, but reflections on it are blurry, because the surface is rough (non-glossy). A value of 1.0 in spec alpha makes the surface maximally glossy; a value of 0.0 in spec alpha makes the surface maximally rough."
I can't edit the wiki anymore; somebody who can please fix that; it is totally misleading the way it is now.

. . . .

About materials, most metals would be in the lower half of the range of shininess, except polished chromes on the ships of 1950's fans trying to get a Harley feel. Stainless steel needs a pretty low value; perhaps slightly higher than cast aluminium, but not much. Most glossy paints would be on the upper half of the shininess range. Somewhere in the middle you'd have an egg-shell finish, like paints that say high gloss on the label but are for brush or roller application and are cheap.

Good information. Would there be a very noticeable specular and shininess difference between most specific metals and alloys, like say stainless steel and nickel-iron or titanium and tungsten? Or would getting that specific just be ridiculous?

Deus, have you tried mesher again, lately? Because I fixed a bug with it that's probably the one that stalled your work.
Not sure if you're on linux or windows. If the former, just svn up and make. If not, you could ask shenle for a mesher
binary.

I'm on windows; I talked to shenle but he wasn't able to put together a mesher binary due to the code mess.

[chuck_starchaser]

About materials, most metals would be in the lower half of the range of shininess, except polished chromes on the ships of 1950's fans trying to get a Harley feel. Stainless steel needs a pretty low value; perhaps slightly higher than cast aluminium, but not much. Most glossy paints would be on the upper half of the shininess range. Somewhere in the middle you'd have an egg-shell finish, like paints that say high gloss on the label but are for brush or roller application and are cheap.

Good information. Would there be a very noticeable specular and shininess difference between most specific metals and alloys, like say stainless steel and nickel-iron or titanium and tungsten? Or would getting that specific just be ridiculous?

IMO, it would not be ridiculous at all. I would LOVE to have precise data on the specularity and color of every alloy in common use, and exact numbers to use for shininess. Unfortunately I have been unable to find such info. The info should exist somewhere, because there exists a standard for measurement of optical characteristics of materials called BRDF, but I've googled for days sometimes and haven't found hard data.
Another thing that would be useful would be the precise color of scaling rusts, and the exact refractive index and typical thicknesses of passivating rusts. There are instruments for obtaining optical data for material samples, but they run into the thousands of bucks, and these days I'm a poor man.

Deus, have you tried mesher again, lately? Because I fixed a bug with it that's probably the one that stalled your work.
Not sure if you're on linux or windows. If the former, just svn up and make. If not, you could ask shenle for a mesher
binary.

I'm on windows; I talked to shenle but he wasn't able to put together a mesher binary due to the code mess.

Damn!

[klauss]

Deus, have you tried mesher again, lately? Because I fixed a bug with it that's probably the one that stalled your work.
Not sure if you're on linux or windows. If the former, just svn up and make. If not, you could ask shenle for a mesher
binary.

I'm on windows; I talked to shenle but he wasn't able to put together a mesher binary due to the code mess.

Damn!

I'll try to build on shenle's work by updating the SVN in my oldish windows machine and trying to build there.
I can't share the binary, because that thing is full of little strands of rna, but I can probably spot and/or correct the issues shenle's been facing.

[Shark]

For those of you doing planet textures, this site has some pretty awesome tutorials. I know some of you are using POV-Ray to generate the textures, but I haven't seen any scripts so far that produce as good a results as the Photoshop examples in these tutorials.