Models - Chris Kuhn

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Re: Models - Chris Kuhn

Post by klauss »

riftroamer wrote:That being said say two artists produce models following the same (forgive me for staying with the terminology of my post) the slot design or scale but chose different coliring of their textures. Is there a way to automatically blend a texture with a base color (similar to vertex shading in blender)? I think for procedural geneeation thw color sceme of the hull shoild match its upgrades. ..
The way to do that would be to have two diffuse textures, a base color texture, and a customizable overlay (or the other way around). The fragment shader can blend in any way that seems interesting, in fact that's what damage textures are for, and randomizing or customizing each separately you have lots of possible variations.
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Re: Models - Chris Kuhn

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote: Now, if you absolutely know a hull will have engine pods, you can bake the PRT with a "proxy pod", a pod you use only to block light, but one that you don't include in the mesh. That'd work. But then you cannot use the hull without the pod.
Coming back to this... I'm not sure it's completely true you can't use the two together, as long as you bake the hull with a small gap between it and the proxy pod.

That way, when there is no pod, the area around the connection point looks fairly dark, but this darkness seems like it could by grit, grease, a charred area where the pod was blown off or a slot in the hull where a pod can insert. And when a pod is attached, it still looks close to the way it should because the gap was so small that the hull receives most of the occlusion that it should.

And it's no different from what you have to do with turrets, which have exactly the same issue, only worse (due to them being animated as well as modular).
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Re: Models - Chris Kuhn

Post by klauss »

We're not talking about just ambient occlusion. The "ghost pod" will cast shadows. They'll be fuzzy, and not immediately recognizable as such, but they'll look wrong.
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Re: Models - Chris Kuhn

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote: We're not talking about just ambient occlusion. The "ghost pod" will cast shadows. They'll be fuzzy, and not immediately recognizable as such, but they'll look wrong.
Then when you fly into a space station hangar or get close to another object, it will look equally wrong. You always make sacrifices when you introduce baked effects into a dynamic environment.

But if PRT shadows are much more sensitive than AOs, you could just use the ghost pods exclusively for the AO bakes. Use nothing for the PRT bake.
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Re: Models - Chris Kuhn

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Deus Siddis wrote:
klauss wrote: We're not talking about just ambient occlusion. The "ghost pod" will cast shadows. They'll be fuzzy, and not immediately recognizable as such, but they'll look wrong.
Then when you fly into a space station hangar or get close to another object, it will look equally wrong. You always make sacrifices when you introduce baked effects into a dynamic environment.
That's where you're wrong. The PRT is an image-based lighting technique, that uses the surroundings and a transfer function (the PRT) to compute lighting. When you go into a station, the environment is the station, and you are thus lit by reflected light from it.
Deus Siddis wrote:But if PRT shadows are much more sensitive than AOs, you could just use the ghost pods exclusively for the AO bakes. Use nothing for the PRT bake.
PRT is a replacement for AO. It does what AO does, but better.

However, we could have two versions of the PRT. One with and one without the pod. Not sure how that scales, though.
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Re: Models - Chris Kuhn

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote: That's where you're wrong. The PRT is an image-based lighting technique, that uses the surroundings and a transfer function (the PRT) to compute lighting. When you go into a station, the environment is the station, and you are thus lit by reflected light from it.
So then why isn't the attached engine pod considered part of the nearby environment? Performance reasons (when there are multiple pods)?
klauss wrote: However, we could have two versions of the PRT. One with and one without the pod. Not sure how that scales, though.
It would most likely scale terribly, since you'd have maybe a half dozen choices of pods for each mount point and perhaps a dozen mount points for hull sections, engine pods, weapon pods, radar arrays, etc.
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Re: Models - Chris Kuhn

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Deus Siddis wrote:
klauss wrote: That's where you're wrong. The PRT is an image-based lighting technique, that uses the surroundings and a transfer function (the PRT) to compute lighting. When you go into a station, the environment is the station, and you are thus lit by reflected light from it.
So then why isn't the attached engine pod considered part of the nearby environment? Performance reasons (when there are multiple pods)?
Technical considerations. The pod is in the near-field, the environment is supposed to be in the far-field, where distance is high enough that its direction doesn't vary much across the model's surface. In essence, the pod is too close to be considered "environment".
Deus Siddis wrote:
klauss wrote: However, we could have two versions of the PRT. One with and one without the pod. Not sure how that scales, though.
It would most likely scale terribly, since you'd have maybe a half dozen choices of pods for each mount point and perhaps a dozen mount points for hull sections, engine pods, weapon pods, radar arrays, etc.
The phrase aimed more at how to make it scale, somehow. I don't think there's a way to make it scale, but who knows.
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Re: Models - Chris Kuhn

Post by Deus Siddis »

That is quite unfortunate then. Each ship will have to be fully assembled offline before the PRT bake and must remain in that arrangement permanently, so no in game graphically represented upgrades or modular damage modeling. Or else no PRT.

What about UV maps, would each module get its own separate UV map or would multiple modules share the same texture space?
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Re: Models - Chris Kuhn

Post by klauss »

Deus Siddis wrote:That is quite unfortunate then. Each ship will have to be fully assembled offline before the PRT bake and must remain in that arrangement permanently, so no in game graphically represented upgrades or modular damage modeling. Or else no PRT.
Well, it's not so black and white. If a solution isn't found, it could simply be that the PRT will not account for them, and it won't look totally realistic.

But I do have ideas.
Deus Siddis wrote:What about UV maps, would each module get its own separate UV map or would multiple modules share the same texture space?
Each module would be a separate mesh. It would get its own everything.

I'm betting on the fact that they're reusable, so overall performance won't be hurt, since the engine will be drawing many of the same meshes, which is considerably cheaper than many of different meshes.

LODs might work against that. I guess we'll have to try and see what happens.

At worst, the engine will have to "bake the mesh", to make a wholesome mesh out of its parts. That's also entirely possible without the artist noticing.
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Re: Models - Chris Kuhn

Post by Deus Siddis »

Intriguing stuff... Tempts me to try putting something together in blender.
klauss wrote: LODs might work against that. I guess we'll have to try and see what happens.
Why would modular ships and LODs not play well together?
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Re: Models - Chris Kuhn

Post by klauss »

Modularity makes meshes reusable, which means a single batch might draw many using instancing, or at least many batches would be chepaer because they'd need less state changes (drawing many of the same mesh with same textures makes it cheaper).

However LODs will counter that, because farther instances will in fact use a different mesh (and possibly different texture and shader set).

It's difficult to predict whether the expected speedup of reusing meshes will be achieved given that LODs will reduce the likelihood of actual mesh reuse.
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Re: Models - Chris Kuhn

Post by pheonixstorm »

Could the shadows not be computed by the engine? For older graphics and slower systems they would have to use precomputed shadows anyway, but for more modern systems we should be able to generate shadows in the scene either in the engine or via shader.
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Re: Models - Chris Kuhn

Post by klauss »

I don't think it can be done in realtime, not even in modern or future GPUs. Read the paper I linked, it's a lot more than just shadows.
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Re: Models - Chris Kuhn

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote:Modularity makes meshes reusable, which means a single batch might draw many using instancing,
Doesn't this still mean a net gain for batch count though, because if a ship uses four unique meshes that repeat a number of times, that is still four times more than a ship with a single piece mesh?
However LODs will counter that, because farther instances will in fact use a different mesh (and possibly different texture and shader set).

It's difficult to predict whether the expected speedup of reusing meshes will be achieved given that LODs will reduce the likelihood of actual mesh reuse.
What if you force all modules of a ship to use the same level of detail, based on the ship's distance from the camera instead of letting each module set its own LOD based on its individual distance?
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Re: Models - Chris Kuhn

Post by klauss »

LODs are a net win when the vertex pipeline is saturated. With unified architectures, it's probably less of a concern, but I know you simply can't make that tradeoff for onboard GPUs for instance.

In any case, that will be simply tweaked by the "graphic detail" setting in vssetup, so no concern there. I'm sure we can make this work.
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Re: Models - Chris Kuhn

Post by pheonixstorm »

klauss wrote:I don't think it can be done in realtime, not even in modern or future GPUs. Read the paper I linked, it's a lot more than just shadows.
Even using PRT and shadow maps we should still be able to use real time shadows for some things. They are expensive but not impossible. Its something for the high end cards, or even cards made in the last 3-5 years. The book Game Graphics Programming (2008) talked about them being used in games, though their use being limited due to the expense of the computations. I am beginning to think its more about the limits of the VS engine rather than the limits of the hardware.
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Re: Models - Chris Kuhn

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pheonixstorm wrote:
klauss wrote:I don't think it can be done in realtime, not even in modern or future GPUs. Read the paper I linked, it's a lot more than just shadows.
Even using PRT and shadow maps we should still be able to use real time shadows for some things. They are expensive but not impossible. Its something for the high end cards, or even cards made in the last 3-5 years. The book Game Graphics Programming (2008) talked about them being used in games, though their use being limited due to the expense of the computations. I am beginning to think its more about the limits of the VS engine rather than the limits of the hardware.
To what "realtime shadows" are you referring to?

There are a myriad of techniques, and there are just as many shadow types. There's the diffuse shadowing usually called "ambient occlusion", there's soft and hard projection shadows, there's volumetric shadows... the subject is huge.

In all direct shadowing cases, where an object casts a direct-lighting shadow onto another object, VS has little use of it. It's an uncommon occurrence, except for planets and stations shadowing nearby smaller units. The case of planets is handled on the CPU already.

Far more common and unsettling is the absence of self-shadowing: a unit casting shadows onto itself. Most techniques are terrible at this, and here's where PRTs come in handy, because PRTs can model self shadowing. Very diffusely, but enough to make a difference.

Hard self-shadowing can only be done with shadow maps, stencil shadows are a thing of the past, their performance is abysmal nowadays. VS has no shadow mapping. That's our limitation. But if I were to implement it, I would only do it for self-shadowing, or, at most, self + nearest occluder (ie: station). But I predict the motivation for it to be greatly decreased if we start using PRTs. Their shadows are already quite something.
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Re: Models - Chris Kuhn

Post by etheral walker »

a quick one this one, regarding this guy awesome work:
http://www.blendswap.com/user/KuhnIndustries
he says: I could probably be convinced to do it for free :)

Maybe asking him, with your ideas, can give a good surprise?
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Re: Models - Chris Kuhn

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote: What about some creative way to make the most out of less?
Stations can be modular, for instance. Modules can be hand-placed, but it'd be easy to make variation. Or, they can be randomly placed. Possibilities there are infinite.
Ships are tougher, but maybe something can be worked out for them?
Giving modular ships a shot...


Consequence:

Image
Image

Pacifier:

Image
Image

Admonisher:

Image
Image

Six sub-models used. A couple fuselage sections, an engine pod, a radiator, a 16x medium missile pod and a 2x heavy missile pod:

Image

Thoughts?
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Re: Models - Chris Kuhn

Post by klauss »

That in your particular examples, AO will be a nightmare. I guess I really need to solve the AO/PRT baking problem somehow... I need to brainstorm, and for that I need time away from RL :(
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Re: Models - Chris Kuhn

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote:That in your particular examples, AO will be a nightmare.
Well there is always SSAO.
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Re: Models - Chris Kuhn

Post by klauss »

I was thinking exactly the same. I don't like SSAO, but it's an option.
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Re: Models - Chris Kuhn

Post by Primordial »

I think modular stuff is good for mockup purposes if nothing else. There's some interesting shapes you can knock out pretty fast in comparison to ground-up design.
It looks like It'd be restricted mostly to Andolian style vessels, and there's a certain amount of playing about you'd have to do with each base chosen, but I think there's room for expansion/use.
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Re: Models - Chris Kuhn

Post by Deus Siddis »

Primordial wrote: I think modular stuff is good for mockup purposes if nothing else. There's some interesting shapes you can knock out pretty fast in comparison to ground-up design.
Our deficiency is not in concepts but completed content.

This is the situation:
  • Every model in the game looks strikingly outdated. Nothing in game looks younger than a decade.
  • Making a modern looking model takes at least 10x more work than one from a decade ago.
  • There is no skilled, content creator manpower still working on VS.
Which leaves us with the options:
  • Do nothing. Easiest solution but certainly contributes to the continued slow death of VS.
  • Dramatically reduce the number of ships. Like 8 unique ship designs for each major species- Aera, Human and Rlaan.
  • Make all ships modular and create a larger pool of ships out of a small number of recurring parts.
There is also the compromise option of using the second option for the smaller aerospace craft that most players fly and the third option for the large dedicated spacecraft and space stations.
It looks like It'd be restricted mostly to Andolian style vessels, and there's a certain amount of playing about you'd have to do with each base chosen, but I think there's room for expansion/use.
The technique would have to work for all factions to be worth the effort. Whatever current aesthetic a faction has would need to be adapted to modularity. The part designs might also be made more intricate and tighter fitting than the above examples, to make the ships look a bit more fluid and unique. But not by too much or else you will either have too small a number of possible, good looking ships designs or so many parts that the advantages evaporate.
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Re: Models - Chris Kuhn

Post by charlieg »

Here's another set of ship building modules:
http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/17601

This idea is not new btw. I guess reality [of lack of artist power] has sunk in more by now though.
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