Proposed Model for an LIHW Civilian Carrier Rorqual

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Oblivion
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Proposed Model for an LIHW Civilian Carrier Rorqual

Post by Oblivion »

Mighty proud to present you the product of three days experimentation in connection with the ahrbor station model (see :arrow: :wink: ), a capship with less than a thousand vertices in all, and with a sanely unwrapped UVW map.

An experiment that I hope will bear fruit and shower the future of VS with more ships like this. GLOWY! :P

..cough*...

okay, this ship is blessed with ebing VERY low poly, and is cursed with a massive MAP!

oh well..

what is the highest resolution for texture maps in VS acceptable? I've set it at 2048x2048 but seeing it's target size, it needs something bigger to avoid the blurring when you get too close. Not yet finsihed will still have to redo the windows BY HAND. relying on randomized window like noise is not as pretty as I imagined.

Image

Image

Image

A close-up of the bottom details, a little blurring shows.... :( ach! *tears hair*

wish I had a larger RAM. :wink: my 256mb can't handle texturing maps larger than 2048x2048 without slowing to a stop motion that moves once every 3 minutes, and occassionally giving the dreaded warning: YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON VIRTUAL MEMORY. hehe

So if you people are not satisfied with my maps, just enlarge it in your machines and add further details.

Image

In high ambient and low ambient light

Image

Image

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finally a little playing around. :P

Image

expect to see this finsihed before next week.

Oh, the working name is... ta-da!

the Rorqual :roll:
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Post by Kangaroo »

:D :D :D :D :D

Remember that 2048 size uv map is better than 17k faces, so this ship tehnically is one of the best that you have :)

Dude :shock:

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Post by klauss »

Wait.
2k is about the maximum you can afford with pre-PCIX.
4k is "acceptable" in some controlled cases (few instances onscreen - and I'm reserving most for planets) with GF6200 and further models (ATI R9800 also handles them pretty decently).

8k - not yet.
1k - better, if you can.

Remember: you can use detail textures.
Remember2: you can use several sets of detail textures (two or three), selected by an extra "detail selection texture". Hm... that's a concept I'm toying with for planets, and I couldn't spare enough time to implement a proof of concept. But, still... detail textures go a long way.

So, you have a few options:
1 - use a tiling texture.
2 - use two or more texture layers: base + detail
3 - use more geometry, and two textures.

Believe you me, two batches (two materials) is preferrable to a 4k texture. For one, it scales better with hardware. For two, most cards that do support that kind of big textures suffer a significant performance hit, so the extra geometry gets compensated by the higher texturing performance of having smaller textures.
For the curious, it has something to do with texture cache misses.

Oh... and it's good having lots of polies when you have heavy texturing costs (like big textures), as it keeps both processing units (vertex and pixel) busy, rather than overworking the pixel unit and leaving the vertex unit free.

BTW: Sleek design, and overly low-poly without sacrificing looks. That means: you can add lots of polies where you could use them, like for pipework, greebles, and whatever you want - you have a poly deficit.
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Post by rigelan »

How well would this ship fit into your station? Can you post a pic?
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Post by klauss »

Oh - let me add, the numbers I used are for in-engine resolutions.
Usually, you want a higher-res "master" file. Like, if you're authoring a 2k texture, you want your master file 4k or higher.
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Post by Stakhanov »

More LIHW ships to down ? Yay :twisted:
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Post by Oblivion »

@Klauss:
two batches (two materials) is preferrable to a 4k texture
:? ...... :? ..... :lol:

:roll: didn't understand half of what you said at first pass. got more confused at second pass. Decided to split them by idea groups, got better understanding... :lol:

Sorry. I'm really not a techie. Probably why chuck got mad with me... :P

1)Tiling texture is way too ugly.

2)Would love to know how to do that, if this is the most efficient way of making textures. Teach me? :wink: I learn fast, honest... :lol:

3)The only way I can go now. So okay. It's a relief really, I was having major problems getting the windows to be as detailed as possible and having to zoom all the way to max res on a 2048x2048 map to create tiny pixel perfect windows is VERY frustrating.
BTW: Sleek design, and overly low-poly without sacrificing looks. That means: you can add lots of polies where you could use them, like for pipework, greebles, and whatever you want - you have a poly deficit.
Not pipeworks again, why should ships expose pipes? ;)
Affirmative. Higher polies, more small maps.

I think I'll make two maps, one for the hull colors itself (hmmm..IS 2048x2048 okay or do I need to change it to 1024x1024 or something smaller?) and another for the details, like windows and stuff, which will be used over and over in certain parts of the ship, so it remains detailed even when near to it.

rigelan:
How well would this ship fit into your station? Can you post a pic?
still unknown. The name rorqual suggests something really big. But unless I can learn how to create detail in very big ships, I'm doomed. So it's still a question on how well I could texture it, that will determine it's final size (and probably name... if rorqual is made smaller, I'll call it dolphin or narwhal or tuna lol).

Klauss:
Usually, you want a higher-res "master" file. Like, if you're authoring a 2k texture, you want your master file 4k or higher.
now, I'm really confused. ... It's okay to have big maps but set ingame res to something smaller? :wink:

@Kangaroo22

thanks.:)

@Stakhanov

if this ever gets ingame. Please don't blow it up. ;) It's CIVILIAN. Think of the children clutched in their mothers' arms bawling as you strip off the hull armor and it sucks them off to oblivion....

:cry:

lol

okay, i'll see if I can find info on detail textures in the wiki. :D
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Post by Zeog »

I think this is how to specify detail textures in the xmesh:
http://svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/vegas ... iew=markup

The idea is basically that you make a hull texture for larger vessels that contains the main features. Anf if you want to display something like single hull patches and the like you can apply that to a tiling texture that fades in as you come closer. This is much more efficient that quadrupling the memory requirement when going from 1024x1024 to 2048x2048 in order to show more details.
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Post by charlieg »

Looks cool and, importantly, looks big!
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Post by klauss »

Oblivion wrote:1)Tiling texture is way too ugly.
It can be done right, I've seen it.
But I grant, it's difficult, and probably not the best option for most models.
Oblivion wrote:2)Would love to know how to do that, if this is the most efficient way of making textures. Teach me? :wink: I learn fast, honest... :lol:
Problem is... I don't think it's possible yet in blender, not without ugly tricks.
You need two or more UV channels, or UV modifiers, or that kind of stuff that IIRC Blender does not yet support.
The idea is that one texture gets applied normally, while another gets applied over the previous (with some blending which I'll leave for your imagination as it's rather arbitrary) but, instead of using the same UV coordinates, it either uses a special-purpose one (which you unwrap specifically to make textures tile a lot, so you can use a single detail texture to, let me be redundant, add detail to the big one). That, or you use the same UV unwrapping, with automatic tiling. Difficult to explain, I ought to find an example. Ok - see if this link helps understand it. How exactly you do this in VS is really a point for discussion. I'm aiming at a way to do it with Ogre different than the one used in VS, but I don't consider the difference anything important since detail textures in VS aren't being used (shame on). In any case, I'm trying to take the oportunity to extend the concept a bit to "multilayer textures", in that you may specify multiple layers and how to combine them. In any case, the concept is simple: a base layer lays out gross features, and further layers refine details.
Oblivion wrote:3)The only way I can go now. So okay. It's a relief really, I was having major problems getting the windows to be as detailed as possible and having to zoom all the way to max res on a 2048x2048 map to create tiny pixel perfect windows is VERY frustrating.
Yep - I too would say you should pick 3, because of the fluxating state in which 2 is ATM. Besides, detail textures for glow maps (the windows) aren't supported currently in the engine - only a specific kind of detail textures: planar projected brightness modulation (fancy language for what you see here)
Oblivion wrote:Klauss:
Usually, you want a higher-res "master" file. Like, if you're authoring a 2k texture, you want your master file 4k or higher.
now, I'm really confused. ... It's okay to have big maps but set ingame res to something smaller? :wink:
Pretty much.
VS can downsample them on-the-fly, but you probably want to do it with gimp (and provide a separate file for archival, the hires, than the one for game data, the lowres) since that way you save VS the burden of working with huge pictures at loadtime.
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Post by Oblivion »

@Zeog: Thanks for the link and the explanation. :D

@charlieg:
thanks.

*sigh* I hope it does look big when it's finsihed tho. ;) This will need LOTS of details. so cross your fingers, toes, hair, and other appendages if present and wish me luck. :lol:

@Klauss:
1)Agree.
2)Take Note: I am NOT on Blender. I use 3dsMax. And 3dsMax supports different map channels. So a ship can be unwrapped differently in channel 1 than in channel 2, and etc, etc.

With tileable textures, I can even flatten EACH face out on a single map for the entire ship, (tho that would take eons :P ) so each will be as detailed with only one map used. Some seams will still show tho.

Anyway, I like glowmaps and without them I don't liek ships. ;) So I'll pass up detail texturing for now. But when Ogre comes.. man I'd splurge on this feature. :D

3)Yep. Thanks. BTW is THIS what I did with THIS http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... php?t=7420 model? I'm posting the maps I used, ahve some questions with animations too.
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Post by klauss »

I don't see detail maps, but I think I see good texture reusage.
Too bad texture reusage is bad for some techniques I'm using, but with these ships you can't not do that, otherwise you'd need humongus textures, so I guess I'll have to come up with something.

Ok - so... you have a way to do multi-UV-mapping, that's great. The current engine doesn't support it, though - be careful with that. Multi-UV-mapping is for Ogre, though I think there are tricks we could pull to have a different unwrapping for glowmaps.
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Post by jackS »

klauss wrote:I don't see detail maps, but I think I see good texture reusage.
- An on topic aside - The only model I recall using detail maps in the VS engine was one of the Vega Trek models, but I can't recall which one offhand... I want to say Akira (class?) or something, but I could be totally off target.
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Post by Oblivion »

@Klauss
you can't not do that, otherwise you'd need humongus textures
even with reusage, they're still a bit massive. :wink:
Multi-UV-mapping is for Ogre, though I think there are tricks we could pull to have a different unwrapping for glowmaps.
:( Okay. Thought the current engine supported that already. So I'll stick to this technique and try to re-use as much as possible.

@JackS

I recall the VS's proposal for a Planetary Docking Station used detail textures as it was also supposed to be gigantic. Tho it never got past the model stage.. :?: I'll look for that thread later.
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