How to reskin a Neolite Ship.

[ovvldc]

Advance warning: the warning gets there before the Viper does ...

Best wishes,
Oscar

[Simon B]

Flashers are small plasma nozzles - each globe is actually a cooling ball of superheated gas, much brighter than can be achieved with regular lighting. Thus, useful for the kind of long-distance visibility you want in space.

Downside is, you don't really want them to touch the hull. It can take it, it just messes up the paintwork and shortens the life of that spot on the heat shield.

The flashers don't touch in the classic model either.
You'll see the same thing on the witchpoint bouy.

[Simon B]

In case you haven't seen it... another way to do additions is to mix and match the models:

[Capt. Slog]

Your converted model will have lots of extraneous lines - so your first and most tedious task is to remove lots of them. When you are happy - enter the UV Map window.

How to use Wings is not part of this tutorial.

What are your criteria for extraneous lines? Lines that mark a triangle but not an edge? If I try to delete one in Wings and it comes up with a warning does that mean that the line is not extraneous. What would be the problem with not deleteing these lines?

[Simon B]

.. I'd like you to focus on the side panels: see how the y have lots of corners (nodes)? - when you convert the dat file, those panels are criss-crossed with lines, connecting all the nodes, making lots of triangles.

However - can you see that you don't need so many to actually define the shape. See how the side bends a bit though, towards the back? That line is needed. There is actually another one towards the front as the nose changes shape slightly.

Now go back and look at the UV Map for the anaconda. Compare.

In general - if the line puts a bend in the panel, you need it. Even then, you can usually get away without it if the bend is small.

Judgement is called for - it's an art.

If Wings3D produces an error, in this context you probably need to keep the line. Hopefully I have removed bad edges and stray nodes before adding the model to the oxp.

If you believe you have found a bad line, please let me know.

[Simon B]

(double-post apologies)

[pagroove]

I think the scaling of the texture is a bit off. It looks now like a cruiser of almost 700 meters in length. Alternatively make the windows a little bit larger. I like the paneling though. It's great now.

[Simon B]

Well - the anaconda is 198m long.
That is covered in 864 pixels. Which gives 1px -->24cm

At the same scale - the coriolis texture has scale 1px --> 98cm ...

If I was to use the same-scale texture for both, I'd have to enlarge the pattern 4x and set the height scale on the normalmap to 3x, which looks ... odd.

The windows on both are 3px square... but the coriolis windows are at a 45-ish deg slant to the texture ... with a sort-of correction for this in the normalmap (I stuck them on the edge of a dip).

Anyway, that makes the coriolis windows 3-4m tall and a bit under 3m wide.

The anaconda windows are flat to the texture, so that's a direct 72x72cm. Still a substantial window size.

Perhaps I can show you.


Though it ccurs to me that the coriolis texture may look better if I rotated it 45deg so the grid-layout lined up with the edges of the square.

It's probably not fair to compare with the megaship edition, since I've inverted the normalmap so it can represent a different kind of structure.

[Capt. Slog]

Simon
No problems with your model, it looks great. I was following your postings to learn how to create my own ships but didn't understand which lines I could delete. I found loads of lines towards the aft maybe on the underside (cargo doors?) will try again. Many thanks.

[pagroove]

I think you are right about the rotation. But only on the anaconda where there is a diagonal line now that runs through the row of windows.

[Simon B]

It is important to identify the roles of the different bits of the model - make sure you understand it. You can also compare the obj model you got with the pictures of the "cleaned up" version in the tutorial - and the final UV-Map. The lines on the uv-map correspond to lines on the model.

Here's the bottom of the neoanaconda.obj file imported into wings but not altered:

... I've painted the lines I consider extraneous in red.

... bear in mind, though, that the only reason for this is that I get Wings3D to put these lines on the created texture ... so that I can use them as a guide when I paint the texture, and so I can blur them as a cheating way of giving the model a messy look.

Too many of these lines make the model look crumpled. Too few make it lack definition. But there are other ways to get the same effect.

The back end tends to be quite complex - what with the exhausts etc. I usually leave the exhausts alone (see the viper example) since they are going to be dark anyway, and the blurring at the end will obscure such small details anyway.

Similarly, in the anaconda example in this post, there are four lines I did not paint red - the main cargo-bay door is recessed slightly into the ship making a door-frame effect. The extra lines are in the sides of this frame ... you have to zoom in close to see them.

Because of this, there's not much point removing them.

Bottom line - if in doubt: keep it. You can always use the eraser in your image editor later. But relax - something surprising happens, like large chunks of the model vanishing with your line, just do edit > undo.

Trick: if you try to see close-in on part of a big model, wings often won't let you. Select nodes or surfaces in the area you want to look closely at, then do view > align to selection ... then you can zoom in as close as you like. Useful for investigating tricky corners.

[DaddyHoggy]

Although I have no current plans to build any ships of my own (or attempt to texture the neo's) I am enjoying this tutorial very much!

[Simon B]

Simon
No problems with your model, it looks great. I was following your postings to learn how to create my own ships but didn't understand which lines I could delete. I found loads of lines towards the aft maybe on the underside (cargo doors?) will try again. Many thanks.

I'm thinking that the scaled-up alien-hull skin on the anaconda would work better without the deep grooves - they are too wide and dominate the texture.

Otherwise, little things like the big dent across the window-line is not an issue - I'd just put a box structure around the windows so they are raised above it. The dent would stop at the windows, and continue on the other side.

I've also tried adding the original normalmap, faintly, to this ose to create a fractal effect... repitition on smaller scales. But I think that may be better on the more truly alien ships.

Also - comparing the anaconda with the coriolis pattern (remember, they are supposed to be on the same scale) I think the anaconda would do with scaling down to smaller boxes.

When I get a spare bit of time where I'm bored, I'll have a go removing the dark lines from the height-map.

[Simon B]

I think you are right about the rotation. But only on the anaconda where there is a diagonal line now that runs through the row of windows.

The diagonal is not such an interference if I paint a mid-grey box over that part of the height-map - or just do without the deep grooves completely.

These lines are on the original skin too (go look) but I got away with it because of the scale.

What's interesting from the POV of a re-skinning tutorial is the problem of getting ships to fit-in with an existing set.

Here I have a general texture which is reused over several ships. So players may feel the textures are supposed to be the same scale. The same effect may happen for similar style elements - like station vs ship windows.

It is sensible for me to put similar scale windows on all the stations - when I get around to windows on the other stations. Also that I keep this consistent to the megaships' windows. But, to what extent do I need to keep this consistent across the other ships? Clearly a gecko won't have 4m windows ... but the anaconda may be just big enough for a player to expect station-level scaling on its structures.

Or, perhaps it is just the station-like texture which is misleading the eye? (I had hoped that the color change would be enough.)

These are issues which won't be answered within the context of a tutorial, (there is a thread for discussing the neolite ship set) but this is an issue that a modeller/reskinner needs to be aware of.

[Killer Wolf]

"The normal map is easy to make but tricky to make right - often involves lots of messing about with small changes. Which is why it is good ta have a realtime preview program. "

can anyone recommend a preview prog? preferably a free/cheap one, for PC?

TIA