space background tutorials

etheral walker · Post by **etheral walker** » Wed Sep 01, 2004 7:30 am

There is many nice things here,
http://www.solarvoyager.com/tutorials.asp

peteyg · Post by **peteyg** » Wed Sep 01, 2004 7:56 am

Wow, I was just browsing the tutorials there last night!

I'm hoping to make some unique space backgrounds for Vega Trek... we'll see how they turn out.

etheral walker · Post by **etheral walker** » Wed Sep 01, 2004 8:16 am

lol mine are for B5, I'm remaking the worsts ones.

etheral walker · Post by **etheral walker** » Fri Oct 29, 2004 8:00 pm

http://www.seds.org/messier/indexes.html
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/lib/aptree.html

2 links about nebulas, next time I find interesting things I make a sticky named space backgrounds ressources

Post by **hellcatv** » Fri Oct 29, 2004 11:25 pm

oooh unique space backgrounds! send some our way--I know VS and priv remake have some very awful backgrounds

etheral walker · Post by **etheral walker** » Sat Oct 30, 2004 12:21 am

I got many many ones, I finish selecting the ones I want for b5 and I upload the others. But basically space backgrounds are really easy to do. It's only a question of choice of colors and lightning, all textures are procedurals. You just need to draw a sphere, texture it by playing with different procedural noise textures and fallofs, and spawn some point lights of different power and color out of the sphere. You spawn a few fog to make the lights more "nebulus", you set the alpha of the sphere around 75%, turn the camera around the 8 faces of a cube and it's ok.

etheral walker · Post by **etheral walker** » Sun Nov 14, 2004 5:41 pm

more stuffs, many more ....
http://magmarama.deviantart.com/ and here http://www.lwg3d.org/forums/showthread. ... ge=1&pp=25 (loging required)
here you will find many textures packs and photoshop presets, from nebulas to panneling, nurnies, atmospheres.....

etheral walker · Post by **etheral walker** » Sun Nov 14, 2004 7:13 pm

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/11060993/

zazen · Post by **zazen** » Mon Nov 29, 2004 6:04 pm

First post.. first post

been here awhile and just decided to sign on to vs forums. Nice work. Really like the game, spent one weekend playing it.. didn't get too far but I really enjoyed the in game atmosphere. Some nice artwork in this forum.. just wish there were more gimp tuts like that first one..

btw.. how much knowledge of VS would the creation of a VS in game space art howto take? I mean to add the nebulas maybe comets.. shooting stars.. and some other cosmic events.. I guess this could go into a fairly deep area of algorithm development and opengl stuff.. that's ok.. but what about from the VS perspective?

P.S. what do you think of my avatar? I'm designing a new ship for vega strike.. I call it the steeple.. got the idea from alien resurrection.. I think it's designed mainly for planetary assault.. good for strafing the enemy on land, but could also be used as a fairly capable starship.. Seems to be a bit different to most of the ships i've seen in VS so far.

Post by **hellcatv** » Mon Nov 29, 2004 7:43 pm

it doesn't take too much...are you speaking about the background cube map? or are you talking about adding other types of objects to solar systems themselves...if you can make nice 3d models we could add them to the generator script--what is your skill set?

adding new openGL effects could be cool--but I think we need to revamp the engine entirely to get some of the nicer effects in there--- i.e. adding GLSL support and taking out the multipass stuff

zazen · Post by **zazen** » Mon Nov 29, 2004 9:18 pm

Well, I havn't done any programming in a couple of years. My last effort was working at a small isp in Brisbane. It was pretty much a complete Debian/Linux based setup. I developed websites in perl and c. Did a fair bit of mysql work. I have a college degree in applications programming.. I still have an excellent knowledge of c and a little c++ but i've never done much c++ past the small mfc app. I've done some majorly small 3d programs but that's it.. basically i'm a newb with opengl.. i can do breslines an polygons and xml and transformations etc.. never loaded a texture using opengl though. What I really like about programming is the algorithms. Now that I'm out of the IT industry I am starting to miss it after a couple of years

So, i want to learn and get involved in some kind of open source project and hopefuly pick up some new tricks along the way. Since vega strike is a damn fine looking project, I thought I might try and contribute something to it.. I don't know about my modelling skills.. I am just learning. My avatar was a rendering of my third project in blender. I suppose that's the best indication i can give of my current skills in that area. But yes, i would like to consider adding some models if they can be construed as space art in VS oops there's alot isn't there <waves>.

I've had a bit of a look around the site looking for something to do. I think that the best thing for me to do is to start working on a developers manual for vegastrike. This would allow newcomers like me to get a better overview of the design of the project and of the internals. Sortof follow in the footsteps of Silverain.

So I need to learn the opengl shading language as well then? cool. Would be nice to support the latest hardware. That seems like a big step however

Did you already have that in the roadmap for vega strike? Sigh, looks like i'm already making contributions. I didn't really want to start anything major. But it could be kinda cool as you say <nice thoughts> I just thought it might be another use of the VS engine to create some nice scenery.. as in an art generator, for a cosmic hippy kinda community sorta thing

and, enhance the immersivness of the game. Seems like that's a long way off. Finally, that's my motivation for a Developers manual. Hopefully it will make VS easier to improve. It shouldn't take long.

Hope it's ok to add you to icq. I'm adding everybody atm -!> I'll need a bit of help with the dev guide/manual.

I'm liking those shaders.
Need to get some new coders.
To get the flexical scanners,
and the mathmatical shaders;
licking the cosmic masses.

I'll be back.

Post by **hellcatv** » Mon Nov 29, 2004 10:31 pm

wow sounds great

we'll help you get the dev manual as much as possible

if you want to hack on the graphics engine--that needs as much work as anything unless you're willing to delve into the networking code and revive that project

Silverain · Post by **Silverain** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 12:16 am

Welcome aboard zazen.

Open Source projects often suffer from lack of documentation. Its the nature of the beast - developers (read - people who are computer literate and interested in playing around with programs) are often the coders, artists etc and they're having more fun with the actual programming to worry about being able to tell others what they've done/doing.

As to putting together a dev manual - please refer to the online wiki as a place to put any work in progress, pages, notes etc. You will also (if not already) note a section called HowTos - feel free to add to them. I only developed the .pdf as a downloadable version of the wiki manual to start with.

With whatever contributions you make - good luck!

Duality · Post by **Duality** » Mon Dec 06, 2004 7:18 am

This reminds me..

I wonder if anyone has a tutorial on how to make a ship texture using GIMP..

I used corel photo paint 7 in the past but I wanted to try a different program.

pontiac · Post by **pontiac** » Mon Dec 06, 2004 10:19 pm

Duality wrote:This reminds me..

I wonder if anyone has a tutorial on how to make a ship texture using GIMP..

Well i don't have a complete tutorial, but a complete gimp file (relay.xcf) with all (ok, nearly all) effects seperated into layers. You just have to look at the attributes of the layers (overlay, subtract, grain merge, etc...) to figure out what each layer does.

The only things i didn't seperate are bumpmaps, but the source layers should be in there too.

Here's the complete archive with all files of the model solar_relay_01_12_grouped.tar.bz2
(~3,2 Mb)

In the file antenna.xcf you can see how to do transparent textures (they are quite handyl for adding pseudo detail

)

If you have questions about how i did some of the 'effects' just ask.

Pontiac

PS: Gimp rocks

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