Post your space station concepts and designs

[Kangaroo]

Calm down, Chris, just take from the post the information you need and if you don't care about his attitude, just don't mind it. I know it's not easy, but Ryder has experience we both lack and thus should respect his opinion about modelling or texturing. About my qouestion - as much as I have seen, models that have light maps do not have patterned textures on them. Yeah, never mind.

[Kangaroo]

Another attempt to make a good looking base with low polycount. Here I made a small factory. 1175 polys.
Images:

[chrisdn]

I like it and it has the scope of being coupled to similar stations making a larger structure.

[Ryder P. Moses]

Stuff's gonna be a bit slower for the forseeable future, doing some design work for some mates' project on top of everything else now. Bout time I started using more complex geometries here, too.

Parts of the redone Modular Station. First was a bad design from the start, and might as well include at least SOME structure.


Basic apartment, power plant, hydroponics section with provisional texture bases.


The layout of the rings. There'll be up to five modules for each ring (generally fewer for the outer two- rings stack), and there are about seven different kinds of module for each. The Cargo Ring will just be outsized cargo pods, indicating what general kind of goods the station has in what quantities.



The overall profile, with the big central spar.


Each pod is about 5000 polys or fewer- the solar panel one is by far the most complicated geometry of any of them thus done, and I've got at least layouts for nearly all.

[chrisdn]

I hate myself to post comments because it's you!!!!! Anyway, nice design...totally impracticale though. A central spar of that scale denotes a non modular build but a build which needs a spec. Modular means in bits...each bit can fit together and make a very larger station.

The stuf you did with the small units a while backwas great, although a bit 21st century. If you could scale up concepts you had then,it'd be great!

From a purely artistic take...station looks beauiful (part from shit textures)- HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

From practical view...never in a million years would anyone ever design or deliver a practical concept like that.

Enjoy...thanks for the contribution mate

[chuck_starchaser]

Calm down, Chris, just take from the post the information you need and if you don't care about his attitude, just don't mind it. I know it's not easy, but Ryder has experience we both lack and thus should respect his opinion about modelling or texturing. About my qouestion - as much as I have seen, models that have light maps do not have patterned textures on them. Yeah, never mind.

Pretty damned close
The problem is not combining texturing and light maps, as you can do that statically, with Gimp; --just multiply them together.
The problem is having light maps and textures that *tile*. For that you need more than one UV-coordinate per vertex. Povray probably doesn't support dual UV's; and the VS engine doesn't support them *yet*, but will soon; I believe.

Now, why you'd want tiling textures and lightmaps?

Suppose you're writing a game that happens indoors. You couldn't make the interior of a whole level use a single, 1024 by 1024 texture. Not even 2k by 2k or 4k by 4k would be enough. And it would be very inefficient. If you can define the texture for a floor tile, and have it tile across, that's a lot more efficient. Same goes for walls and ceilings.
But this doesn't allow you to bake ambient illumination, because if you bake that floor tile, it will tile across the light baking
And why you want to bake ambient illumination?
Well, because the way the lighting equation for lights in OGL (and D3D, all the same) sucks. Well, it's fine, really, as it defines lighting the only way that could realistically be expected of a real time gpu to compute. The baking of ambient light is basically a long computation you do off line, so that when the game is running, all that complex light computation is already done. So, you place the lights in your indoor level, and comput how light bounces around of 2 or 4 surfaces. Thus, a bright green table will produce a subtle green coloring of wall next to it. For things that won't move you can pre-calculate their shadows and so on. Now you produce one big texture mapping, --a single texture that maps to your whole level, but only has light information, and can be much lower rez than your typical diffuse textures, and is highly filtered. Then you use multitexturing, and, at run-time, you multiply this filtered lighting texture value (light map) by your tiling floor tile texture. Looks like an exquisitely well lit and highly detailed ambiance, but without costing you gigabytes in terms of textures.
But you need two sets of UV coords per vertex, for that: One for the tiling texture, and one for the global light map.

Now, for space stations, you guys don't need tiling textures. A UV-map to a single texture would be fine, I believe, and so the "light map" is simply a light baking texture that UV-maps the same way as your (single) diffuse texture, and which you premultiply together (in Gimp) to become the basis of your glow map.

Ah, but you ARE using tiling textures, multiple objects and materials, and separate texture files for this and that?
Well, that IS a problem; as you can't export that into the game; or your station will be ultra slow displaying. Whether by learning Blender or by some other means, you need to come up with a way to turn a station into mostly a single object, UV-mapped to a single texture. The texture would have "islands" corresponding to the different parts of the station. Then you can "radiosity bake" the station, or ship, to get light and shadows from global illumination put into that texture automatically, which looks really good. You take that baking, and multiply it (in Gimp) by your (single) diffuse texture, and the result becomes your basic glow texture. You could also put all the street lights that Klauss was suggesting and do a radiosity baking of those, multiply that by your diffuse texture, and blend the result to your glow map.

[Kangaroo]

Just tried my hand at texturing again, made a diffuse map of a part of my station. Have to admit that it sucks, but at least need to know everything that needs improving. Um, Chuck, if you could explain things in a simpler manner, I'd be very happy. You know, no one teaches terminology (?) of modelling in the eighth grade.

[chrisdn]

A few renders for the comdcom station and Atlantia in full size.

[Kangaroo]

Had a lot of time today, so I made an experimental base of unknown meaning. Any particular mistakes I made?




And two renders of the same model




Still need to master the fine art of controlling the camera angle in Povray.

[Paslowo]

You know... I think I might have a UV mapping tip to tell everyone.

What I do for large objects is.. for texturing them, I make a bunch of rectangle like metal textures inside a 1024x1024 texture and I apply a couple of faces to one square texture, the other set of faces in another square texture.. Sort of like mapping where you apply a texture to a selected face or something like that.

[chuck_starchaser]

If you map multiple faces to one area of a texture, you prevent yourself from using radiosity baking, or shading them differently. If your model is symetrical around a central plane, you can overlap symetrically corresponding faces and use the texture twice as efficiently, and still use radiosity baking, since the two sides will have similar ambient shading, but using more overlap than that will prevent proper ambient shading, which is a terrible pity, as baked on ambient shading looks very cool.
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/ ... in_Blender

[Zeog]

Or one applies the "Chuck Starchaser Trick" (tm): one high-res (low color depth) texture for simple color a la Paslowo providing more space for little details and a low res grayscale every-tri-separate texture for ambient shading. Mixing is done by hardware(?).
Unfortunately one then needs to unwrap and UV-map twice.
Dunno, if the data format supports two uv-maps per object...

[chuck_starchaser]

LOL Thanks for the credit. The new engine Klauss' working on will support dual UV-mappings, I believe; but my trademark trick doesn't require them; in fact it's just a way of optimizing textures that is independent of UV-mapping philosophy:
Hi-rez / low color depth, for diffuse.
Lo-rez / high color depth, for glow map.
Hi-rez / grayscale?, for specular.

The other trick, which isn't mine at all, is the use of "detail textures", that the engine automatically tiles across an entire model, and fades-in on approach; increasing the apparence of detail at close range, and helping hide pixelization of the main texture. It's a super-cool feature that Hellcat added to the engine, and nobody is using...

[Zeog]

The specular map should support color as well! (Remember the difference between the plastic looks and the metal looks due to specular color when you worked at the bengal?)
Paslowo's method allows for different high details whereas the hellcatv detail texture looks everywhere the same which is great for vessels with a uniform hull. Will klauss' engine allow different detail textures? That would be very interesting!
Apart from that i also think that it's a "super cool feature". I can only speculate why it isn't used. Maybe it's an uncommon technique? On the other hand, who many modelers supply all of the other suppoted maps (glow, spec)?

[klauss]

Actually, I haven't added detail textures to any shader-based material yet. Mostly because it's a high strain on the shader (for lesser shader models), and thus highly incompatible.

I'm not saying that it's impossible nor that it won't be supported, only that I didn't get to it.

But... in short... with some knowledge about shaders and Ogre material scripts, you can build your own material templates (or tweak existing ones... say... adding detail maps) quite easily, and use them quite transparently. And all that is a dataside change that doesn't even need re-exporting meshes. So... it's very easy to play around with materials.

[chuck_starchaser]

Here's a brilliant idea:
How about coding detail texturing into the shader, for a default. All we really *need*, for any model, is a bit of perlin noise, really; this doesn't need to be read from a texture; it can just be generated on the fly.
Actually, only ps3 has noise sources, right?
Well, just some fake hashing...

[klauss]

Perlin noise is very expensive to compute in shaders, and it still needs texture sources for some tables, IIRC.

A default detail texture with perlin noise would work well, IMO, and it fits nicely with material templates.

If you want a perlin-detailed normalmap, that can be arrenged just as well. I imagine such a thing very useful for self shadowing, since perlin noise can be efficiently filtered (don't compute higher octaves), and it provides a lot of detail, so perlin noise self-shadowing bumpmaps would look real cool, I imagine.

[chuck_starchaser]

For ship surfaces the (perlin noise) detail normal map I was envisioning would scatter surface normals within a fraction of a degree range; far too shallow to warrant self-shadowing. Barely noticeable to diffuse lighting, it would mostly be given away at the fringes of specular spotlights and apparent motions of environment mapped star reflections.

[klauss]

...it would mostly be given away at the fringes of specular spotlights...

...and that adds a lot of depth.

[Kangaroo]

A sketch for a resupply platform.

Any ideas how to make the shadow of the promenade less opaque?

[Oblivion]

In 3dsmax I think it would have to do with the light source. Something like shadow parameters, forgot it exactly. There are options there for shadow opacity, transparent shadows, atmospheric shadows, etc. Maybe blender or wings has such functions?

[chuck_starchaser]

Add some ambient light, more lights, radiosity, ambient occlusion...
Also, if you put a light so close, better make sure it fades quadratically, else it looks very unreal.

[Kangaroo]

But adding more lights makes all the shadows less opaque. I only need the shadow of the transparent glass to be less intensive.

um, what does radiosity mean? or ambient occlusion?

[DualJoe]

I'm guessing that you are using Blender, then for all things Blender check the following links.
http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Manual
http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/ ... llow_Glass
And I very much recommend:
http://www.blendernation.com/2006/04/20 ... er-manual/
If you still can't find the info you need there than it can usually be found at blenderartists.org.

Radiosity and ambient-occlusion refer to ways of calculating the distribution of light and shadows on your scene. Check the links above for more info. They are both very cpu-intesive though and can both be faked with the standard scanline renderer.

For your opaque shadows:

There are numerous ways to get the effect you want.
The easiest way would be to make sure that all the objects that should receive transparent shadows have TraShadow turned on in their materials tab. Then for the transparent object turn on raytransparency and adjust the fresnel and IOR values to get the glassy look you want. With the fresnel and the (blending)fac-slider you can adjust the opacity of the shadow. The colour of the shadow is adjusted with the filter slider. Don't forget that you need one light that casts rayshadows and that you have raytracing turned on in your rendering tab.

If you're thinking about animations then you should probably steer clear of raytracing and become creative. Do the lightsetup for your scene and then use a shadow only spot for your dome, you can adjust the opacity of this shadow with the energy settings of the spot. Add a coloured light with a very small spherical falloff for caustics. For reflections you can use an environment map, see the above links for a good explanation on that.

I'd advice against using raytracing in most cases, because you can get the same results in a fraction of the rendering times.

EDIT
BTW when you use fresnel you don't have to use alpha for transparency.

EDIT2
The next release of Blender 2.42 will have a lot of extra features for glass-like effects. Actually the upcoming release of Blender is a complete overhaul of the entire renderer and material system. It also has a completely integrated compositor now. Can't help you there though, I'll have to play with all this stuff myself first.

Check out the new to-do list for Blender 2.43: tangent-space normalmaps and possibly the integration of sharpconstruct with added normal- and displacementmapping features ala ZBrush. Also features like applying details from a high-poly mesh to a low-poly version which you then can export to new vegastrike engine. Ah man I can't wait, I need some of that stuff now. At least I'll have the chance to learn the new node-system first.

[Kangaroo]

um, bedankt!