Small Aeran asteroid fighterbase with improved asteroid field objects. Includes separate turret and pod subobjects for articulation and destruction modelling. .OBJ format.
The normals map was glitching in tests and seemed to invert in random clusters, I'm not sure whether because of an error in the conversion process or my never exactly stellar test renderer, so I've included an improvised bump map as well. Primary skins in 2048x2048, which I figure is about the right compromise between the size of the model and the hardware limitations of the game. Artifacts are visible in the bump map at close range - use the normals map if possible.
Sure, whatever. Last I was here this was something JackS wanted for his thing, and this is just a closer approximation to what he was talking about than the original design.
If anyone's running a recent version of 3DS MAX and wants the texture bases, let me know. Having 3D algorithmic textures for all the large shapes was a lifesaver on these irregular forms; anyone else who's gonna have to suffer through designing nonhuman architecture'd do well to have some handy too.
The plugin I rely on mainly has a Blender version, actually, and the MAX-specific procedural elements are generally pretty generic (if you're running a 3D suite that can't do fractal noise, free was too expensive). If you wanna try the version for your modeller(http://www.darksim.com/html/download_simbiont2.html), I'll look into putting up instructions for recreating a few of the simpler texture stacks.
That would be great. The only one around here I know of that knows how to use procedural texturing is Kangaroo. If you could write a tutorial and stick it in the how-to's wiki that would be fantastic. http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/HowTos
Don't know that there's really that much to teach. It's like texturing; 99% of it is just experimenting to see what works in that specific case. Once you're aware that map/modifier stacks exist for a reason, and that every map is useful for something that's probably not it's labeled function, you're pretty much good to go. The rest is very much suite-specific, and in the case of stuff like MAX also depends on which of the jillion plugins you have installed. Some of the textures I used for that one are just color-tweaks of prefab stuff or even just a layer of flat color; one of them goes at least seven layers deep in the glow channel and invokes all kinds of shit like vertex shaders and the Blur suite. And then there's a couple that are just scratch textures from Photoshop.
More worth learning to skin and photoedit in Photoshop, anyway, for regular shapes like spaceships and trash and stuff at least. Texture by procedurals is kinda a lazy way to do it and doesn't have quite as good results; I just did it for this one 'cos way too much of the mesh couldn't be broken down into primitives.
Well, no idea what even the "stack" is; never done it; but I suppose if someone is asked to come up with a meat texture procedural and in a few minutes they come up with one, they must have a pretty good idea of what needs to be done; and I've never seen a results oriented tutorial; I've seen tutorials that go like "if you do A you get X" but never like "if you need Z try C or B" if you know what I mean.
So, in the asteroid, I suppose the texture is like spherical and centered on it? Or like a volumetnic thing? And it gets computed in space coordinates and baked to the UV map?
Yeah, spherical mapping would have come out looking pretty bad, for reasons that'll become apparent when you look at the shape of the model. I'm not just talking a little funny when I say 'irregular', I coulda worked with that. It maps clusters of effects to random feature points in 3D space and generates details (change in color, impact craters, etc.) based on the surface intersecting or coming close to those points. Some of them, like the shader effect with the network of lines that I used for laying out and detailing the central complex, generate really damn cool designs and I wish there was a way to convert the space they use to mesh or something.
The problem with 'if you need Z try C or B' is that there's roughly infinite permutations available with a reasonably varied package of procedural shaders, and aboout as many potential different demands for different effects as there are different kinds of surface in the real world. More, actually, since a lot of the time people don't want something simply real. Which, out of the billions upon billions of potential results, should be listed as a formula?
Once you start doing it yourself, you'll learn what each procedural generator does in a practical sense, and then have a pretty good idea what to use to get X result. There's no real sense in teaching how to get only one result; if you want that just take a prefab texture that's close to what you like and reverse-engineer it to figure out how it was made.
Skinning and scratch texture making, now, there's a lot more technique to and a lot less hit-or-miss. That, there's specific things to learn, starting with 'take lots and lots of pictures'.
OT (maybe):
Remember when I modelled that round station for EliteStrike, and you textured it? To this day I suffer heart pangs about the material you used for the central hub; looked sort of like grey teflon with some sort of scratch marks. Any chance I could get that material from you? Pretty pretty please... Or was it something procedural you did there?
/OT
Ow, that's embarassing to look at. Hate seeing old stuff of mine. Yeah, the central thing is a pretty much unaltered stock procedural from that plugin I linked. The one for the outer ring (the scratched bit) is a custom job that uses the same plugin.
The first one is called TechoHull; you can change the scale of the procedural to get different effects but that's about all I did there.
The latter is a 30% mix between a [92/255pt gray texture with no highlights and for the bump map a {Division Darktree component with the first two color channels set to black and the last to white, gap width dialled down to 5}, with 30% strength] and a stronger base texture as follows:
Blend using a Smoke map (or whatever the Blender equivalent is, it's basically a soft, non-rounded perlin noise map, in this case very small-scaled and with 20 fractal iterations - experiment with the scaling for whatever you've got for best results) a [Galvanized Steel DT with 11.6% specular and a {texture-scaled, 1/5 size black/93pt gray Pumice DT component, a Density of 4, and a Pit Size and Contrast of 32} in both color channels] and a [texture with a diffuse-channel {black/92pt gray Pumice DT component using texture scale and a Pit Size of 20}, and a bump map mixing at 40% a {Scratches DT set to White/Black, with a Density of 3, Width of 5, Scratch Length 100, Taper 80 and Curviness of 5, 1/3 scale in the X dimension and 1/20 in Y and Z} and a {1/30 scale Blobs DT with blue and white color channels swapped and a Blob Size of 10, Density of 15, using texture scale}]
It's a little sloppy; you could probably rearrange the components so as to get a similar effect that's easier to scale, but I don't have the time right now and it does its job for me, which is about the point where I stop tinkering with it.l
Thanks; I'll try that; just dl'd SimbiontBlender. Good time to do a cleanup, defrag and reboot windows, anyways. In the meantime, what kind of parameters do you use for an asteroid?
Okay, here's a visual breakdown of how to do that one; it's a composite that includes both the asteroid surface and the parts of the structure flush with the surface (fighterbases and turrets and stuff are different, mostly handmade, textures). The asteroid surface alone is number 1 in the first blend; ignore the custom bump map for that one, the craters are the default map for it.
Actually, haven't rebooted or installed Simbiont yet; doing too many things at once, in RL and VL; but I've saved this whole thread and the example screens; I'll get to it tonight after work. Thanks. If I can figure all this out I'll try and write a tutorial myself. Best time to write a tutorial on anything is while learning it, I think.
Nope, I've been working on other things and hadn't been back here until I posted this thread. I'll give it a look, though.
I figure since I've got all my rock-making tools all set up right now anyway, I might as well do something for that new mining station y'all want too. Here's a small preview of a small part - thing's a fair bit bigger and more complex so it's still in the laying-out stage.
Er... big. I'm a little shaky on absolute scales in VS, and vaguely recall most ships being like a gazillion miles across, but the general idea was that capital transports can at least get a nose in there for loading. One story is about four to six pixels there, I believe, and I'm working on making the sense of scale more explicit. More stuff later, gotta go get paid.
Or was it something procedural you did there?
