Space Elevator

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chuck_starchaser
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Texture job is finished. Well, there maybe some dingbats added but pretty much it's done. I simulated a couple of renderings in Gimp to see what it will look like, in game.

At high noon:

Image

Full rez (2048x2048):
http://www.deeplayer.com/dan_w/goodies/ ... e_noon.png

At the stroke of midnight :D:

Image

Full rez (2048x2048):
http://www.deeplayer.com/dan_w/goodies/ ... _night.png

The images above are thumbs, really, 1/3 size; be sure to click on the hi-rez links...
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Post by CoffeeBot »

More updates!

Here's the top section of the "military base" of the station. It still needs some work, and a few parts added (like the lower half), but it's still something to look at :)

Wide shot of the base. The lower half will be 1/2 to 2/3 as thick, and just as tapered. Significantly less detail features, b/c most of it will be obscured by the connections to the rest of the base.
Image

Getting closer.
Image

Beginning to see the detail in the buildings surrounding the elevator "shafts" (each set of 3 buildings, arranged in a circle, indicate one shaft)
Image

Even closer to the 'mini-city'.
Image

Here's the scaling image. Not only is it a close-up of the rapid-launch bays, it shows how massive this thing is. The trapezoid just below center on the left edge is one of the exit points. Figure the smaller end of it approximately 2x larger than your average starfighter.
Image

Close up of the rest of the docking bays. The topmost bay is about 6m high (if I recall correctly...don't have my measurements in front of me).
Image

Current poly count is appx 5000. I'm shooting for 5500 all said and done, but it will probably be more like 6000.
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Post by hurleybird »

looks cool
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Cool! This is really coming together :) I doubt the 6 meter figure. The smallest details in the geometry, right now, should be about 6 meters, by my calculations.
Texturing will add a lot to it, I predict, as pixel size is 2 meters for the main texture, and possibly 1 meter for the buildings.
I'm thinking, we may need to use a separate texture for buildings, as we want to make generic short strips that tile along, and can we do tilings out of single shared texture?
Actually, it's possible:
What we cannot do out of a shared texture is specify UV coords like
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 ...
But we could make a short strip be mirrored back and forth, like,
0.1 0.2 0.1 0.2 0.1 0.2 ....
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Post by CoffeeBot »

I'm not completely sure what you're getting at, chuck. But, either way, I am not looking forward to unwrapping this beast. The docking bays, though, are going to be great places to use the baked radiosity, so they're illuminated on the inside, as they should be, regardless of exterior lighting.

WRT the 6m thing -- you're totally right. In pic 6, the tiny section between the top of the bay, and the upper platform with the divots is 20m tall, which probably makes the smallest bay 25-30m, perhaps more. I need to measure it.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Well, I was kind of thinking ahead of myself. The problem: A 2k by 2k texture, like the one I have for this thing, already slows down my video card, so I'm kind of hoping against hope we can use the unused portion to the lower right to texture all the rest of it. That would necessitate a lot of texture tiling.
Now, traditionallly, the way of making a texture tile is, first of all, making it tileable 8), and then you specify UV coords at the vertices that go above 1, say incrementing integers or whatever, at the grid lines; so like.
0,0 0,1 0,2 0,3
1,0 1,1 1,2 1,3
2,0 2,1 2,2 2,3
and so on.
The videocard then interpolates between vertices, and ignores the integer part, so it just sweeps the texture repeatedly.
But with a shared texture you can't do that, because the texture you want to tile may be a little piece of the whole texture, and if you specify a sequence of integers, it will tile the whole width or height of the texture.
However, specifying zig-zagging numbers we can do a mirroring tiling.
Suppose our tiling subtexture occupies the region of from 0.78 to 0.82 along x in the original texture. Then, if along a wall we keep alternating vertex uv coords between 0.78 and 0.82, that piece of the texture will be mirrored back and forth along the wall.
The problem is, we cannot use radiosity baking with this method; or at least not at the global level.
The solution is to have a small texture for a lightmap. With the new Ogre format we'll be able to have more than one set of uv coords per vertex; so one can specify a hig-rez tiling texture; and the other a lo-rez global texture or light map.

Yeah, those towers came out great. They look gargantuous, which is kind of surprising to me.. I was worried they might look too small. Maybe the could be a bit smaller, come to think of it... How high are they? I forget...

Anyways, about unwrapping, you could just make an experiment, unwrapping *only* the top surface... I have to give you the diffuse, specular and glow textures. Gimmi till tomorrow evening.

Oh, BTW, at the center we need the big octogonal white building, with antenna arrays and stadium lights on top...
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Post by hurleybird »

Judging from the size of the thing, this station would probably benefit from vega strikes detail texture support.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

hurleybird wrote:Judging from the size of the thing, this station would probably benefit from vega strikes detail texture support.
What's that, Jeff?
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Post by hurleybird »

chuck_starchaser wrote:
hurleybird wrote:Judging from the size of the thing, this station would probably benefit from vega strikes detail texture support.
What's that, Jeff?
A while ago hellcat added detail texture support to VS. This could help you visual wise once you get close to the station so its not a big blurry mess. For example, the akira in this shot has a faint detail texture on it.

Theres a few ancient threads on the topic, but I think this is the one you need to read to figure out implementation.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

This is very interesting. I didn't understand Hellcat's explanation of those xyz numbers; but I guess I can figure them out through experiments. So this GL_ADD_SIGNED is what I'd want. Is that the default? This link,
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/users/ace123, there are a number of files there; not sure.. do I need any of that?, or is everything I need in the engine already, and all I have to do is edit the xmesh?
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Post by klauss »

Actually, one of the last things I replaced is the engine: GL_ADD_SIGNED, is now instead using the combiners with something like GL_MODULATE_2X (it doesn't exist... but if it did, it would be named like that :p )

Anyway, the effect is the same... only higher quality: gray is neutral (no change), white is brighter, black is darker (actually, black is black... you don't want black in your detail textures).
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