Oolite Bulletins

I most certainly agree. One of my idea's I had whilst sketching some possible Feudal Lodge variants would be to create two or three different asteroids using the existing texture styles so that they matched, then using those to spawn randomised 'clumps'.
My intention was that these would act like large modular asteroids suitable as a platform for randomising castles/rock hermits, but the probabability of some terrible z-fighting has discouraged me so far.
When I get round to adding more to the asteroids I'll make sure the textures are a match for one of the existing variants and at least that way I'll maybe grow there in the end

Cody wrote:

The Zygoroids look great in-game - but more variants would be cool.

I use them too, to add to the variants I already have, eg Asteroid Storm's, Griff's, etc.

More variants would be good. I'm trying to get asteroids to be a lot more random rather than having them look too samey.

Hi JazHaz, thinking about this and seeing as the modules scripting would be OXP separate anyways it would be better for it to have its own matching astro-blocks to work with, and to be honest part of the fun of Zygoroids was giving them their own personalities anyways, so yeah, shut up me

Disembodied wrote:

Rather than make a whole 3D model, another option might be to square off one plane of the asteroid and add a bas-relief carving around the dock port - like the "mouth of truth" from Venice:

or the (much older, and much flatter) one from Rome:

have you ever been tempted to try out Pixologic's free sculptri program ZygoUgo? - http://pixologic.com/sculptris/
it could be just the thing for sculpting out asteroids with faces! Not sure how dense the final mesh would be though and it will probably need UV unwrapping in a 3d programbut it should be able to generat the normal map for you from the high res sculpt
edit: ah, it looks like it has painting and polygon reduction tools on its menu, hmm might have another go at using this

Hey Griff, I did have a go with Sculptris but have found Blenders inbuilt sculpt mode gives out the results I want more intuitively, with Sculptris I found using textures to add detail left repeating hard edges everywhere, but in Blender these were faded out avoiding the problem altogether. I haven't really looked at Sculptris since but it could well be better at producing faces.
I looked up various tutorials and generally face modelling was done the same way that I can't make ships with, IE with mesh shapes and vertex manipulation, I find myself too clumsy and always mess the form up, or it takes the sort of fiddly tweaking that has chore written all over it.
I'm more inclined to stick to designing things than ham fistedly making a mess in modelling programs, the level of detail I would want to achieve would take a long time to master, the discipline is very different to bumping an asteroid together.
I might have another go over the cold winter months, I'll see.
What I would really like to acheive would be taking the high-low poly method I use for the asteroids and using it to make the ships I've been designing, but this currently evades me, however the current set-up I have on my computer is begging me to do something with this at some point.
I have PS-CS-6 extended, which allows for importing models, Blender, Sketchup, and xNormal, all of which you can pass the same model between using each programs best features.
Would be silly not to have a proper look at that, however for now I think starting a thread to post my designs might at least give them a purpose other than sitting in a sketch book.
Currently I have decided I like the idea of the Thargoids being a collaboration of three seperate races, all of whom's minds are only able to make sense of each other, and we are as confusing to them as they are to us, so really it is all just a political misunderstanding.
So far I have one beetle type, am drawing another, and an old mock-up of a tarantula space man I could improve on.

I didn't even realise blender had a sculpt mode! I didn't get on all that well with Sculptris to be honest, I think a lot of these sculpting programs really work best if you have a pen and pressure sensitive tablet, I just use a mouse and I feel you really loose out on a lot of the finer controls you need to stop your model from blobbing out like it's just had a bad allergic reaction to peanuts.

Griff wrote:

you need to stop your model from blobbing out like it's just had a bad allergic reaction to peanuts.

But that would be good for making new asteroids, Griff!

Pen and tablets are fairly cheap these days, 50 Earth credits will get you one, I use a UC-Logic which is getting on a bit but still works great.
Blender is getting more complete and amazing by the minute and Jaz Haz is exactly right, that's what I use for the asteroids, and indeed my attempt at a face did look like an allergic reaction
I sculpt the high poly model then duplicate the .blend file under a low_poly name, than I use the 'decimate' modifier to simplify the model down to as few poly's as it will take without looking too obvious, then you unwrap the low poly model for the UV layout. Next you upload both the high and low poly models into xNormal to bake out the normal-map information that gets mapped to the low poly UV layout. Blender can also do this but xNormal is dedicated and gives better results, although Blender may have been updated by now. With xNormal I also bake out ambient occlusion and a height-map, the ambient occlusion helps with the texture and the height map goes into the normal-map's alpha channel for added parallax.
It's quite a fiddly process hence I don't often feel like emersing myself in it, but I would like to get at least one spaceship through this mill at some point, and considering there are curves all over my designs it would have to be done this way.
There are an awful lot of video tutorials on youtube worth browsing.

EDIT: I'll scan and post my initial castle scribbles, none of which are very good but just toying with directions, but it's all good to share these things

Your Nebulas and Asteroids look , awesome dl now !

I just started using Zy&K_Escort_Contracts_1.5.9.oxp.
A couple of small points could you change the scanner_display colour to green (indicating something NOT to shoot) and change the beacon from "M" to "E" ("M" being Main station, "E" being escorted ship).
P.S. I have changed this in my copy of Zy&K_Escort_Contracts_1.5.9.oxp in shipdata.plist.

Wolfsstar BH wrote:

I just started using Zy&K_Escort_Contracts_1.5.9.oxp.
A couple of small points could you change the scanner_display colour to green (indicating something NOT to shoot) and change the beacon from "M" to "E" ("M" being Main station, "E" being escorted ship).
P.S. I have changed this in my copy of Zy&K_Escort_Contracts_1.5.9.oxp in shipdata.plist.

In the meantime, please feel free to post your tweaks in the Tinkerer's Workshop thread..

Can I install the asteroids along with Griff´s? If yes, which version do I have to install? The replacement or the no - replacement?

Greez SARR

Hey there away from, my computer at the mo visiting friends, the asteroids you can use either and they will appear alongside Griffs and any other packs containing roids.
I've noticed the nubulas are very grey in 1.79 so will do an updated OXP for the new version with the bold colours restored.

ZygoUgo wrote:

I've noticed the nubulas are very grey in 1.79 so will do an updated OXP for the new version with the bold colours restored.

Do you mean the nebulae in your Cinematic Skies OXP? They look fine to me in 1.79.

Hey Cody, yes, the few systems I looked at in 1.79 were all murky colours, perhaps that was just by chance then, but I have seen how different things can appear on different monitors/screens, I'll check it out when I get back from my visits