Griff wrote:Wow Simon, those are much better than i was going to do! I love the detailed engines, i really wouldn't change them, normal maps are great for a lot of stuff, but it's also really great to have proper geometry in there too, and since as players were usually spend a lot of time looking at the back of npc ships trying to get them in our gunsights it's great to have some eyecandy there.
Yes I agree - its the barrel of the engine I have a thing about - the back end actually came out better than I expected since this was supposed to be a mock-up which took about 10mins.
My main beef is that the engine is about 650 triangles after tesselation. Those inset panels on the barrel could be done in the normalmap as well.
could you do a fer-de-lance like your new gecko & Mamba Simon? the one i made i really don't like but i've attempted it 3 times now and i don't think i'm going to get anything better made :(
Well sure - I kinda like your take on it there - turning it into more of a javelin than the classic flying-coffin. I take it there is something about the model?
Here's a 'Moray' design i'm picking away at
[snip]
I thought i'd try and texture it a bit 'submarine' like, with port holes and stuff along that spine thing on the top. The 'Dark Wheel' mentions the Moray having lots of lights running along it, i imagine this looking like those deep sea jelly fish and whatnot, if i can manage it, i'll give this ship a shine like the viper, with maybe a bit of thargoid fresnel and lots of freaky thargoid running lights - what i am excited about trying to do is to make the 'hostile mode' really exciting to see, pulsing red lights and lots of flickery/fizzing electricity stuff running over the hull - hopefully Ahrumans active camo shader will work for this but i really wanted to save that for the griff_constrictor so i don't know.
It'll be good for practise - if you think the pirate version would go for intimidation and the med-boat switches its lights off and runs for it?
For the constrictor, you just make it hard to see.
Yep, the CobraIII shader is the base shader i always start using, it's the one that has all of Ahrumans example shader effects in it an d the Normal mapping, the other shaders in the griff ships are variations of it really
OK - I'll just copy that and focus on providing something tweakable ... I'd appreciate a rule of thumb for figuring out the channel values for the basic effects - especially the metal ones. You have a basic hull metal, a dull one, and a very shiny one.
There's a thread somewhere which goes though one of the shaders i've used line by line somewher on the boards, it's fairly recent too, i'll have a look through the forum to find it, they are easily adaptable to any oxp ship, but i've got a feeling that the bunging of texture maps into the alpha channel is putting people off using them, they open the textures to see what's going on and see nothing but some weird dots on a transparent surface, i should do more to document and explain them.
If I figure out a bunch of rules, I'll post a howto like the neolite one.
There's a really cool free image viewer called XnView (i think it's windows and mac only though) that's great for viewing texture with and without the alpha channel and lets you export Alphas seperately from the rgb channels too
xnview is non-free freeware. The license is pretty liberal as freeware goes - no source code and no commercial use or distribution. Hmmm - looks like it may be possible to get the source but the licence does not say what you can do with it.
There
is a version for linux, according to the forums. We don't really need it. What I really want is the ability to use a custom mesh with the Gimps normalmap plugin... or some way of turning wavefront files into typhoon labs format.
Gimp will seperate the alphas too - and export as a greyscale image. I can also view images without the alpha. So there.
While I'm here - I also did an asp:
Also not too happy with it - giving a bunch of the small craft the same engine suggests scale and groups them - these are the newer fighters. Its just that the asp is the fastest thing there is so I should use a different engine model. The actual hull is not too bad - the boxy things on top are supposed to end up like the boxy bits in the cobra, so need more shape but you get the idea.
I noticed that part of your style is to have an explicit gun, so I've been putting them in and trying to copy the way you build them.
I was looking at your anaconda, I like how you have used a brushed rust with vertical panelling to create a sense of mass. I like the hull lights under a bit of a lip from the upper hull. I like the long narrow bit that runs over the top.
I think there is a small style thing that you may want to consider - basically, lowering the top at the back slightly, I'll show you what I mean:
I've fiddled more than that because I can't help myself - and this model is too long, but you see what I mean? If you lowered the back just a bit like this, the beast won't crash as it tries to dock and it will play tricks with the perspective on more angles to it looks huge-er.
Hmmmm... I think I've figured out the fdl.
