Space Elevator

[CoffeeBot]

Alright, I finally figured out blender, and this is what I've got so far.





I'm not 100% satisfied with it, but, I can't put a finger on exactly what it is (although I do know I want to "dirty" it a little)

I really want to see what it looks like in-game, but my windows box doesn't have room to install VS, so if there's a soul willing to create the necessary files, I'll love them forever (or, if there's a linux version of mesher/whatever?) I've got the obj/mtl file here:
Edit: defunct link

[CoffeeBot]

Oh yeah: The greebles on a few of the panels are courtesy of stranglet's Hullgen 1.5.

Also, is there a way, in blender, to re-map only a small segment of the model? Apparently, a chunk of it didn't get selected (go figure -- "select all" doesn't.) so it didn't get mapped, and I really do NOT want to remap that thing for a fourth time.

[chuck_starchaser]

What do you need done, CoffeeBot?

[klauss]

Assuming that "select all" will not select it again, you can select all and then invert the selection. It should select everything you didn't select. However, I don't have the keybindings in my head to be more specific.

If you remap having selected those faces only, everything else will remain as it was before. That's a beauty. Also, you can try selecting one of the unselected faces somehow (like with border select), and then CTRL + '+' (Select more) it will start to read your mind and select more and more, until you have what you want.

[CoffeeBot]

What do you need done, CoffeeBot?

Well, the next step (not counting adjustments to the texture) is to see how it looks in-game.

Also, aside from the uvmap, what else needs to be added? Bumpmaps, baked radiosity?

[tiny paintings]

You should definately dish out some normal maps if you have time to spare - the perfect way to add grebles! Or just paint normal maps if you're not up for the detail-modelling.

Baked radiosity... why not? It's probably not going to do any wonders but it won't hurt either.

What kind of lighting is applied in that view? It's looks like it's only ambient => it doesn't look round, really. WIP shots would look a lot better with some lighting, and you'll get more compliments!

WRT the texture:
The noise looks funny. It's rainbow-colored. Ek.

WRT mesher:
Yes, it compiles under linux too. Should be in your_cvs_vegastrike_dir/objconv/mesher/.

[CoffeeBot]

@tiny: Yeah, the noise needs to be toned down a little -- I did want it to have a slightly marred look, similar to metal that's been exposed to high temps. I just need to lower the saturation, I think.

As for the lighting, using the render function in blender only showed a blank grey color. I couldn't get the UV mapped texture to show up.

WRT normal maps...uh, what? I'm not completely sure what those are. Do we have any decent tuts on 'em? Or, if not here, elsewhere?

[tiny paintings]

@tiny: Yeah, the noise needs to be toned down a little -- I did want it to have a slightly marred look, similar to metal that's been exposed to high temps. I just need to lower the saturation, I think.

As for the lighting, using the render function in blender only showed a blank grey color. I couldn't get the UV mapped texture to show up.

WRT normal maps...uh, what? I'm not completely sure what those are. Do we have any decent tuts on 'em? Or, if not here, elsewhere?

You don't even need to render them, just set the viewport shading mode to Solid or Shaded (and add a lamp) and you'll at least have some lighting.

Textures are applied by giving your mesh a material. F5 and add a texture, and change "map from" (or whatever it's called, can't remember) to UV. Hit F6 and... well, you'll work it out from there.

Normal mapping are the same as bump maps, really. Regular grey-and-white bumpmaps are converted to normal maps before they're used. There are basically two ways of making normal maps:
1) paint it the ol' fashioned way. nice for adding pipes and insets. hard to do more advanced stuff, and without good/custom tools getting the desired result can be hard.
2) model both a low poly and a high poly model. then use a program to bake a normal map from the highpoly model. you'll get all the shading info from the high poly mesh but the contours of the low poly mesh. With this method you get a nice way of making round parts appear a lot more round than the 8 polygon cylinder it really is.

I googled up a few examples of method number 2:
http://amber.rc.arizona.edu/lw/normalmaps.html
http://www.3dkingdoms.com/tutorial.htm
http://www.dbd.com.au/3dsmax7-normalmaps.htm

Tell me that is not neat!!
It's not supported in VS yet, but will be once the ogre transition is completed.

[CoffeeBot]

grrr... something's wonky. When I use Draw Mode: Shaded, the lighting appears, but in Textured, you get what I posted above.

Rendering the actual image, too, only provides shaded mode, and no uv map.

I tooled around with what you suggested, tiny, and it all "seemed okay" but didn't change anything. Is there a random option hidden somewhere that activates a uniform ambient light and negates lights in the scene?

I'm also beginning to wonder if there's something wrong with this model -- too much "this should work by default" stuff doesn't.

[klauss]

I think it's the mode. If you're in UV-Face selection mode, it will show the texture like that (I guess to let you see what you're doing better). I think you have to switch to edit mode to see a real rendering, with light and all. Plus, you have to setup the material (UV-Face selection shows the loaded texture, but that has nothing to do with the texture applied by the material).

[CoffeeBot]

Theeeere we go. I don't know what I did, but klauss inspired the fix. Here's some good images.





Next is to add some greebles, bumpmap, and a little wear and tear. And make it less shiny.

@tiny: do you think the mottled effect is any better? it really seems to tone down when you get proper lighting on it.

[CubOfJudahsLion]

For automatic greebles and the like, try the discombobulator (check out the star destroyer below) or the red dwarfer, or a combination of the two. You'll probably want some subdivision, and then to split your mesh for processing parts of it separately.

Ah, and welcome to blenderness

[CoffeeBot]

First off, thanks for the links and all the help, everyone I'm beginning to feel comfortable, and productive!

Now, I managed to get the car loaded into VS in lieu of the llama, but the texture is completely misaligned, and it's very shiny. What to do? Screens:

[tiny paintings]

There's a bug, supposedly in mesher, that flips your uvs. You have to vertically flip your texture in gimp.

[XV-745]

Wee! Even with the textures flipped, seeing a shot of it ingame has got me excited. So, how are you planning to do the elevator cable? Will it be modeled from the planet surface to the station, or will it "fade out of view" due to it's small size and the lack of lighting? It would be pretty cool if the cable was modeled as a true obstacle (the ramming of which would probably involve some pretty significant faction reputation adjustments, eh?)

(I hope I didn't miss a conversation that already covered the cable...)

Keep up the good work!

[chuck_starchaser]

Wee! Even with the textures flipped, seeing a shot of it ingame has got me excited.

Same here.

So, how are you planning to do the elevator cable? Will it be modeled from the planet surface to the station, or will it "fade out of view" due to it's small size and the lack of lighting? It would be pretty cool if the cable was modeled as a true obstacle (the ramming of which would probably involve some pretty significant faction reputation adjustments, eh?)
(I hope I didn't miss a conversation that already covered the cable...)

It was long time ago. Nanotubes are really strong. The cables would be sheer, like pantyhose. Nanotubes are also pretty elastic. If a satellite got caught in space elevator cables it would probably drag them dozens of kilometers in space while slowing down and eventually falling from its orbit. I think if the cables were modelled at all they'd be done like strips a bit longer than the car, low alpha value, hardly visible, and fading away above and below. No texturing. With their sheer sheerness, texturing wouldn't make much of a difference, so probably a plain color.

@CoffeeBot: The reason for the shininess is that you don't have a specular map. If you don't provide a specular map, the VS engine assumes you want a mirror.
Just for starters, take your normal texture and invert its color values. Darker areas will be more specular; brighter areas will be less specular. The dark areas you don't want to see become specular, paint them black in the spec map.

[Wisq]

Ah, cool. That explains why the Tesla I bought looks like a house of mirrors. I thought it just lacked a texture altogether.

[CoffeeBot]

Spleh.

Chuck, the vertical flip of the texture worked great, as evidenced here and here. They're full-sized pics.

However, when I added the spec map (all I did was inverted the colors on the texture, saved in another file) VS would crash every time it came to load the docking bay and ship. And, by crash, I mean I had to fully drop out of X, and in 2 instances (out of four) I had to hard reboot. Unfortunately, I don't have an error log for them :/

Is it more than just adding a filename in the xmesh, then flopping back to bxfm? the "insert your ship" wiki didn't imply that, but hey, who knows? According to this post in the wiki it's not. So what'd I botch?

Edit:
WRT the nanotubes the elevator travels on:

They'd be very sheer, like pantyhose. The color of nanotube fabric, I'm not sure; I think they come in a variety of colors depending on the molecule type --there are various numbers of carbon atoms per turn, and "twist" numbers that make different molecules, which are all still called nanotubes, but should have all kinds of colors, so I'd pick one at random.

I photoshopped a screenshot to illustrate what I had envisioned them as. I think they might be even fuzzier than that, depending on what we can do with the models.
Edit 2: Thinking more on it, maybe the nanotube ribbons wouldn't even be visible on the lower LOD models, due to their size, and the distance involved. And since we're talking about having some kind of massive defense system for these, a ship wouldn't even get close enough to see them. I don't know. we'll figure something out.

[chuck_starchaser]

Hmmm... So you added the spec map to the file with xmesh like in the example,

Code: Select all

<Mesh texture="normaltexture.png" texture1="specular_map.png" >

and it crashes? You named your spec map the same? It's a PNG? It's in the same folder as normaltexture.png? Should work; it did for me.

The ribbons look good, if a bit bright as you say. I'm thinking about them in terms of lighting model, like in terms of tiny painting's environmental self-shadowing: Near the sides of the car, like between engines, they would darken slightly your view of the hull slightly, as you'd see more the shadow of them on the surface than you'd see the ribbon itself. Why? Because each nanotube in the fabric being so thin, it would reflect light so dispersely it would be an ultra-matte material. Hardly visible; but its shadow would be mor visible; so mabe the texture of the hull itself should have a very filtered shadow strip connecting engines vertically, and then the ribbon itself on top would be hardly visible, specially considering that the car itself might be projecting shadow onto the ribbon. But as you move towards the spherical areas of the hull at both ends the shadows fade out, and reflected light of the ribbons would become a bit more noticeable against the darker background of space, to then fade out again but more slowly, for convenience.

EDIT:
Something odd about those crashes. What videocard do you have? Right driver installed. I have an NVidia 6600GT based card, and the NVidia installer had to recompile my kernel to install the driver in FC4. (Did the same before, when I had FC3.)

[CoffeeBot]

@chuck: I'm sure I did something wrong with the spec map, but superfically everything looked okay. I just wasn't in the mood to troubleshoot.

I've got an ATI (blech) Mobility 9600, and the kernel/driver sets are up to date. Well, with one another, not necesarily any releases since mid September.

What's wierd, though, (and I just remembered this) is that the first time it crashed, I created the spec map, edited the xmesh file, and ran VS without updating the bxfm. Odd, indeed.

Edit: Nah, I'm just an idiot. I must have typoed or something. The spec map works great, now...I just need to tweak it to make things look pretty, now

As for adding a glowmap...how does that work, exactly? I figure we want the windows to be illuminated. I also want to add blinkie lights (an unprofessional term) to it, but I don't recall seeing anything about that in the wiki.

[klauss]

About specmaps: I prefer b&w specmaps. Why? Because you hardly ever see colored specularity, and when you do, the color is uniform, and not textured. So, if you want colored specularity, use it wisely (and moderately). But, if you don't, use greyscale textures, to use 1/3rd texture memory.
Also, always start with a contrasty version of the diffuse texture (inverted or not), and then tweak it manually section by section, either by drawing things on it, or by selecting areas and further playing with contrast/brightness. Starting with a version of the diffuse texture leaves some correlation between the specmap and the diffusemap, making the diffusemap seem much more real.

About glowmaps: Just draw the additive component (have in mind that texture coordinates are shared by all textures), and add texture3="elevator_glow.png" to your xmesh. As simple as that.

[CoffeeBot]

About specmaps

Sounds good. I just made my first specmap primarily black, and gave the doors some shine (should add it to the windows, too) and the guide posts at either end very shiny.

About glowmaps

I assume that black = no glow. Or is it transparency?

[klauss]

black=no glow, transparency is discarded - so don't use transparency, a waste of video memory (it gets loaded)

[CoffeeBot]

thanks, klauss. It's really looking pretty keen, now.

Aside from doing the wear and tear effects on the texture, I want to add the navigational lights on the various points, so...how does one go about doing that?

[klauss]

Oh... I forgot about that.

You have to draw a "Special Sprite". That is, three quads overlapping each other, one at every axis plane: XY, XZ, YZ. They must be textured with an animated light texture: one of the .anis, greenlight, redlight, whatever you like. They go as separate meshes on the bfxm (separate xmesh files), since they use a different texture. They must be blended with blend="ONE ONE". I think there's a way to include them in the CSV with the LIGHTS column, but it's not being used, because that's where engine exhaust goes... but I think there's a flag or something to use it for lights as well. If not, there should be. But, in the meantime, the first method I described is what's being used.