Duelist Heavy Fighter, Hunter's Guild (I'm having a go!)

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Deus Siddis
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Re: Duelist Heavy Fighter, Hunter's Guild (I'm having a go!)

Post by Deus Siddis »

chuck_starchaser wrote: I was afraid this is what you meant. A solid bevel is only three lines, versus two for a dumb bevel; not a huge expense. I only use quad-line bevels (manual, 3-line solid bevel, plus, then, standard beveling applied to the center line) for bevels that are very exposed and need to look perfect.
Well, I guess 3-line bevels are a good compromise; not very expensive and they do look much better without a normal map. So noted.

I had thought you meant the unusual planar multi line bevels you describe on the VS wiki.
What you are doing, I gather, is using a standard (dumb) two-line bevel, and relying on normalmap correction to make it look good. IMO, that's putting too much stress on the corrective normalmap, and it's not warranted, in addition to the problem that...
When you say too much stress are you referring to only the resolution limitation of the normal map or something else as well? Just curious.
And how would you apply simple subdivision in one place but not another?
Just select certain faces and W > Subdivide. Admittedly this is a bit of a hack, the more numerous and prominent curvy areas are on a mesh, the more compromises you'd have to make.

Anyways, didn't mean to derail this thread.
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Re: Duelist Heavy Fighter, Hunter's Guild (I'm having a go!)

Post by chuck_starchaser »

Deus Siddis wrote:
chuck_starchaser wrote: I was afraid this is what you meant. A solid bevel is only three lines, versus two for a dumb bevel; not a huge expense. I only use quad-line bevels (manual, 3-line solid bevel, plus, then, standard beveling applied to the center line) for bevels that are very exposed and need to look perfect.
Well, I guess 3-line bevels are a good compromise; not very expensive and they do look much better without a normal map. So noted.

I had thought you meant the unusual planar multi line bevels you describe on the VS wiki.
Well, the three-line bevel technique that I thought I had invented had already been invented, I found out later, and was called "solid bevel". Essentially, if you have two planes at 90 degrees, you just place two cuts on either side of the 90 degree edge. No angling of the strips; just leave them coplanar to the larger polygons they now separate from the bevel line.
Having those strips be coplanar generates vertex normals perpendicular to the planes, which in turn makes the larger polygons look perfectly flat, rather than inflated; thus the curvature is all concentrated on the strip.
There are two problems with three-line "solid bevels", however:
  • They don't look good at any angle; they look best edge-on; because the mid-point normal is still at a different distance from the apparent center of curvature, relative to the edges of the strips.
  • Blender's renderer won't smooth-shade angles sharper than 80 degrees; so 90 degree bevels look totally sharp on renders; so when planes are at angles sharper than about 70 or 80 degrees, I usually go for a 4-line bevel.
So, in the "making bevels look good" I show both techniques, I think, but neglected to mention the rationale for choice.
I also showed a 5-line bevel, for a step change on a plane; but technically that's two bevels; so 5 lines is actually pretty efficient.
When you say too much stress are you referring to only the resolution limitation of the normal map or something else as well? Just curious.
Resolution in terms of texel size, primarily --think of a bevel line that runs at a 5 degree angle on the texture, and all the aliasing artifacts that could produce--; but also in terms of interaction with other normalmap detail. A normal represents a rotation; but you can't exactly add two rotations. Well, you can; but rotation addition is non-commutative. Should the normalmap detail modify the corrective normalmap?, or is it the other way around? Not easy to answer, not easy to compute, no tools that do it correctly, and the final normals are not easy to represent numerically precisely; so you really want to keep your corrective normalmap doing as little as possible, to avoid artifacts when combining it with other normalmap data.
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Re: Duelist Heavy Fighter, Hunter's Guild (I'm having a go!)

Post by starbright »

chuck_starchaser wrote:GOOD JOB WELDING! :D
Thanks :D
Two settings I notice are giving you trouble and you don't even know it, ... Auto Smooth? Don't touch it, leave it off, but UNDER it says Degr: 30... Click and move mouse to the right; max it out to 80....Double Sided, which is on by default. Should be off; as you could have flipped normals and not know it. In fact, you do: on the plates you added over the engines, for instance.
Changed those settings, and flipped the normals, I think I've got all of them.
You need to remove the From Angle setting, in Edge Split, and manually mark edges sharp that should be sharp.


I've started the process, quite a few seams are now marked.
Once you're done, you can add the Subsurf attribute.
I like that!!! It really smoothes out some imperfections in the mesh.
--you'll see like cob-webs in some places
Yep, quite a bit of this, sorting it is ongoing. Right now I'm fixing it by pushing and pulling on the edges of my mesh with the grab command.
Secondly, you'll need the minimum number of triangles possible.


I've still got waayyyy too many triangles. But I'm on it.
I noticed a button in mesh tools to turn marked triangles to quads. Is that the best way. Right now I'm joining triangles by highlighting and hitting f. Or redoing the mesh locally when stuff is real bad triangularly.
And the other thing you need to get done is the seams and UV layout, though, at this point, it would be tentative work, and you'd have to reserve space for the greebles and things yet to come; but, on the other hand, you'd probably want to do an ambient occlusion bake, pretty soon, and you need to have a UV unwrap to bake it to.
Haven't started this bit yet, but I thought I'd keep in touch with a progress report.

And here are the latest renders, drum roll....

Image

Image

Image

Image

Image

The latest blend file is here.. http://www.starbrightillustrations.com/ ... ip15.blend

And I'm posting to my blog about the little hiccups I encounter along the way. Here's the latest.. http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog ... h-blender/ :)

Edit---------

oops that blend file should be wip15 not 10, I've changed it now, and I messed up one of the image links, that should now be fixed too.
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Re: Duelist Heavy Fighter, Hunter's Guild (I'm having a go!)

Post by Neskiairti »

good work, its looking alot better.

Before I started using blender i was reading these forums for years.. so I some how -eyes Chuck- had it ingrained in my skull "Tri's are bad mmkay class?"

keep up with it :D will be great to have nice models in VS for once.
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Re: Duelist Heavy Fighter, Hunter's Guild (I'm having a go!)

Post by starbright »

Neskiairti wrote:good work, its looking alot better.

...

"Tri's are bad mmkay class?"

...
Thanks, I'm on a tri hunt and kill mission right now!
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Re: Duelist Heavy Fighter, Hunter's Guild (I'm having a go!)

Post by Fendorin »

Is really nice good work.!
( i still dislike to see the gun outside but is just my taste )
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Re: Duelist Heavy Fighter, Hunter's Guild (I'm having a go!)

Post by starbright »

Fendorin wrote:Is really nice good work.!
Thanks! :D
( i still dislike to see the gun outside but is just my taste )
I think you may have a point, the guns are looking a little bit steam punk right now - like boilers with nozzles. Perhaps if I added some kind of armour jacket, and made the guns smaller?

Hmm
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Re: Duelist Heavy Fighter, Hunter's Guild (I'm having a go!)

Post by Deus Siddis »

Looking at the Franklin's in game stats, I think it's armament is a little bit different. It doesn't have eight ordinary guns, it has:

Light Medium
Light Medium
Light Medium
Light Medium
Special-missile Heavy-missile
Special-missile Heavy-missile
Special
Special

So four medium standard gun mounts, two heavy torpedo tubes and two special hardpoints for mounting things like tractor beams (or perhaps physical grapplers in the future) or "Leeches" whatever those are supposed to be exactly.

It might also be a good idea to come up with some guidelines for how big all of these sorts of weapons are supposed to be, so that a medium gun on the franklin model isn't 15 times bigger or smaller than the same weapon on a different model, done by another artist. What do you say, chuck?

Re: Bevels, those are good points, I did have some concerns about the combination of a heavy corrective normal map with bump detail, I guess those weren't unfounded. After a little testing I think I'll be using a lot more 4 line bevels in the future.
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Re: Duelist Heavy Fighter, Hunter's Guild (I'm having a go!)

Post by chuck_starchaser »

starbright wrote:
chuck_starchaser wrote:You need to remove the From Angle setting, in Edge Split, and manually mark edges sharp that should be sharp.


I've started the process, quite a few seams are now marked.
A large percentage of edges that have any of these three modifiers (sharp, seamd and/or creased) should have all three modifiers. That's why I usually go ctrl-E -> Mark Sharp; ctrl-E mark seam; shift-E 2 [enter] by default whenever I sharpen an edge. Easier to revert a few cases later.
For example, ALL edges marked sharp should be creased; no exceptions; and most of them should be seamed. Sometimes you might decide not to seam some sharp edges; say a cubic box, you could make it unwrap as a cross (remove all four seams from one side), but it's better to put all the seams and unwrap all 6 sides separately; otherwise bakes might look rounded at the corners from color bleeding in filtering. On the other hand, for small greebles you might want to ignore this issue and have them unwrap together, to reduce the amount of work during unwrap.
More common is to have seams along edges not marked sharp. You'd preferably do this along material boundaries or in hidden areas, so as to minimize the visibility of texture matching artifacts.
Another exception is edges creased but not marked sharp. One typical case is borders of meshes (for meshes that are not closed). You should periodically, in edge selection mode, and with no edges selected, go to the Select menu and hit Non-Manifold; then go shift-E, 2, [enter], as all unclosed mesh borders need to be creased.
Another is the strategic creasings you need to do to defeat those cob-webs...
--you'll see like cob-webs in some places
Yep, quite a bit of this, sorting it is ongoing. Right now I'm fixing it by pushing and pulling on the edges of my mesh with the grab command.
Ehm... You do NOT want to change your mesh in any way. The way to fix the cobwebs is usually by creasing some edge ending at the cobwebbed corner.
Secondly, you'll need the minimum number of triangles possible.


I've still got waayyyy too many triangles. But I'm on it.
Good!
I noticed a button in mesh tools to turn marked triangles to quads. Is that the best way. Right now I'm joining triangles by highlighting and hitting f.
That's how I do it, with F.
Or redoing the mesh locally when stuff is real bad triangularly.
Good policy.
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Re: Duelist Heavy Fighter, Hunter's Guild (I'm having a go!)

Post by starbright »

Deus Siddis wrote:Looking at the Franklin's in game stats, I think it's armament is a little bit different. It doesn't have eight ordinary guns, it has:

Light Medium
Light Medium
Light Medium
Light Medium
Special-missile Heavy-missile
Special-missile Heavy-missile
Special
Special
Interesting, thanks. Due to my lappy's rubbish graphics card I can't play the game. Is there another source of information like this that anyone knows of?

The thing I used to hate about the original Battletech was that the giant robot illustrations always had the wrong number of guns compared to the stats. That's something I'd like to avoid if I can.

I'm working on the guns right now, along with hunting down and exterminating triangles, I'll keep the front four and redo the armament on the rear heavier wings. I'll also nip off the rear turret. If it isn't listed it shouldn't be on the model, no matter how pretty it is.

I guess the Leeches might look like a rack of limpet mines ready to be seeded in the spaceship's wake?

The heavy missile on the other hand. Is that like a Battletech heavy missile system - a big bin with little holes on the front for swarms of missiles to shoot out of - or a single launch rail?
Is the spaceship capable of reloading, or is this system one shot?
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Re: Duelist Heavy Fighter, Hunter's Guild (I'm having a go!)

Post by chuck_starchaser »

Deus Siddis wrote:It might also be a good idea to come up with some guidelines for how big all of these sorts of weapons are supposed to be, so that a medium gun on the franklin model isn't 15 times bigger or smaller than the same weapon on a different model, done by another artist. What do you say, chuck?
I say 'Yeah'; we should start a brainstorm on it and revive the Attack on Trinity proposal to go with it.
Re: Bevels, those are good points, I did have some concerns about the combination of a heavy corrective normal map with bump detail, I guess those weren't unfounded. After a little testing I think I'll be using a lot more 4 line bevels in the future.
To be honest, I haven't bothered making controlled experiments to determine how bad the interaction problem is; call it laziness; but I'm also a big fan of playing safe, and not a huge fan of empiricism in graphics, given that the perception of quality in graphics is a grand combination of a gazillion issues, each of which is probably barely noticeable; I think playing it safe is the better policy.
Many bevels will look good with 3 lines. 4-line bevels are best for sharp angles in very visible areas.

@starbright: Don't miss my last previous post; I posted about a minute after Deus Siddis did, in the previous page.
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Re: Duelist Heavy Fighter, Hunter's Guild (I'm having a go!)

Post by starbright »

chuck_starchaser wrote: Ehm... You do NOT want to change your mesh in any way. The way to fix the cobwebs is usually by creasing some edge ending at the cobwebbed corner.
OK, oops! :lol:
I'll stop poking around and start creasing.
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Re: Duelist Heavy Fighter, Hunter's Guild (I'm having a go!)

Post by chuck_starchaser »

Yeah, the technique to rain in the cobwebs is hard to explain for me, because I don't fully picture in my head how catmul clark subdivision works, so I'm just getting better at it over time, as I gain more experience. But in simplified form, you can think of creased edges as having the ability to "pull" or "push" the cobwebs. If you have a rectangular depression, for example, you may have to crease external edges ending at the corners of the rectangle to "pull" the cobwebs towards the corners. But some situations can be very tricky, and their solutions unintuitive.
For example, if the rectangular depression is on a curved surface, creasing outer edges may cause your curved surface to shade weirdly.
In this case, one possible solution is to add an extra cut around the rectangular depression, "framing" it, so that you only need to crease short lines. But when you do this, you might get the areas of the mesh around the new, framing cut, to cobweb inwards and enter the depressed area. I've managed to solve situations like that, but it can be very hard and take a lot of experimentation.
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Re: Duelist Heavy Fighter, Hunter's Guild (I'm having a go!)

Post by Deus Siddis »

chuck_starchaser wrote:
Deus Siddis wrote:It might also be a good idea to come up with some guidelines for how big all of these sorts of weapons are supposed to be, so that a medium gun on the franklin model isn't 15 times bigger or smaller than the same weapon on a different model, done by another artist. What do you say, chuck?
I say 'Yeah'; we should start a brainstorm on it and revive the Attack on Trinity proposal to go with it.
Posted:

http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... 66#p117566
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Re: Duelist Heavy Fighter, Hunter's Guild (I'm having a go!)

Post by starbright »

I've been working mostly on the mesh, apart from updating the armaments to more closely represent the stats. The renders don't look that different to the last ones, but the mesh should be a whole lot better.

Image

Image

Image

Image

Image

Image

http://www.starbrightillustrations.com/ ... ip21.blend

There is till a to do list (feel free to suggest more stuff for it)
More detail/greebles
More work on the rear wing weapons
Cockpit and pilot
More sharp edges

And that's just fro the mesh, but I think I might try a UV unwrap just to see how that works (never done one before) and to see what can and can't be updated after the UV unwrap.
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Re: Duelist Heavy Fighter, Hunter's Guild (I'm having a go!)

Post by Neskiairti »

for weapons, Id suggest housing blocks. Think in terms of armor and heat disipation.

So stick a cube out, hollow it, then box the sides in with radiators, either ribs or a smooth shiny surface

as to heavy missiles.. a light missile id put in a missile pack, heavy would be a single large 'bay' of sorts with extending missile mounting. (i imagine it would draw in, reload, then push out again after firing)
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Re: Duelist Heavy Fighter, Hunter's Guild (I'm having a go!)

Post by chuck_starchaser »

Looking good!
The work on the mesh is not done yet, though. Lots of little shading artifacts to work out; some
on the wings, some in the supports for the retro thrusters, but most noticeably around the cockpit.
If it doesn't shade well in Blender, it won't shade well in-game; don't think you'll be able to mask
problems with the texturing; no such thing; all the issues have to be worked out at this very
stage in the design. It's a lot of painstaking work; but that's the way it is. When you turn the mesh
and you can notice triangles as the light reflects from different angles, you have to know that
there's work to be done yet.
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Re: Duelist Heavy Fighter, Hunter's Guild (I'm having a go!)

Post by starbright »

chuck_starchaser wrote:... you have to know that there's work to be done yet.
You weren't joking!
I've been working on the mesh for a few days now; pulling bits apart, stitching them back together, flipping normals, creasing, rethinking, adding detail. It truly is a lot of painstaking work. Sometimes I think I'm improving the model, other times I'm not so sure. It's never less than fun though. It's a challenge, and it's very rewarding.

Anyway the wings are less crumpled now and hopefully I've ironed out some of the issues around the cockpit. I've also added a bit more detail, couldn't resist.

I'm still noticing some little black triangles here and there, especially at the trailing edges of the rear wings, are they a big deal? Should I go to UV unwrap now or continue refining the mesh? Any advice and input gratefully received.

Here are some renders so you can see what I'm talking about.

Image

Image

Image

Image

Image

Image

Wondering what's under the hood? Here's the blend file. http://www.starbrightillustrations.com/ ... ip30.blend
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Re: Duelist Heavy Fighter, Hunter's Guild (I'm having a go!)

Post by klauss »

I'm not sure if it's just the colors, but it looks... toy-ish.
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Re: Duelist Heavy Fighter, Hunter's Guild (I'm having a go!)

Post by starbright »

klauss wrote:I'm not sure if it's just the colors, but it looks... toy-ish.
Hmm... I know what you mean.
Perhaps it should be more grey, and less blue.

Maybe more greebles and texture will help, right now there are too many featureless bits.

I'll experiment with less colour, and with more detail.
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Re: Duelist Heavy Fighter, Hunter's Guild (I'm having a go!)

Post by Neskiairti »

try doing some texture detail as well. a simple series of black lines could mark off seams in the surface, armor plates and the like..
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Re: Duelist Heavy Fighter, Hunter's Guild (I'm having a go!)

Post by starbright »

Neskiairti wrote:try doing some texture detail as well. a simple series of black lines could mark off seams in the surface, armor plates and the like..
This is s a good idea. I plan to criss-cross the Franklin with both deep and shallow grooves (between plates, around greebles, etc.). But is this better done to the mesh, or later painted on with a texture, like the scratches and dirt?
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Re: Duelist Heavy Fighter, Hunter's Guild (I'm having a go!)

Post by chuck_starchaser »

I wasn't going to say anything about the colors until time came to think about texturing; but yeah, it looks
like the colorful style of WC1/WC2.
Definitely, for working on a mesh in Blender, the best color to use is the default color, white in specular and light gray in diffuse; --which is a BAD color in terms of texturing, physics and optics, but Blender's editor lights are so dark (and you cannot change them) that any other colors are too dark to see what you're doing.
Neskiairti wrote:try doing some texture detail as well. a simple series of black lines could mark off seams in the surface, armor plates and the like..
How can he "try texture detail"? The ship is not UV unwrapped yet.
Forget about wasting time with such things. Right now the point is to finish the mesh, clean up shading artifacts,
and unwrap it; then try baking an AO, and fix mesh and unwrap problems until the ao comes out perfect. Then
the next step is baking a binormal, to perfect the rotational orientation of the UV islands.
Texturing is the furthest thing to worry about.
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Re: Duelist Heavy Fighter, Hunter's Guild (I'm having a go!)

Post by Neskiairti »

I'm referring to the end product detail. to do that I know you would need to unwrap the ship.
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Re: Duelist Heavy Fighter, Hunter's Guild (I'm having a go!)

Post by starbright »

chuck_starchaser wrote: Right now the point is to finish the mesh, clean up shading artifacts,
and unwrap it; then try baking an AO, and fix mesh and unwrap problems until the ao comes out perfect.
Ive managed to bake an AO.. at least I think I did (just the "rat's nest" automatic version so far). The mesh isn't perfect yet, but it's easier to spot problems without the distracting colours, and with the nice AO shadows making stuff easier to see.

As usual I'm working on the mesh anyway, so if you see anything you think might be usefully tweaked, please don't hesitate to let me know.

Image

Image
oops I seem to have put a hole in the belly! how didn't I spot that?

Image

Image

Image

Image

Image

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blen ... lin2.blend ... and the blend file.

... what's a binormal by the way?
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