Oolite Bulletins

Hey Spud I just noticed in your screenshot that your ship is aligned along the x axis, ships fly along the z axis so your current model would fly sideways. You will need to rotate it around the y axis.

Its a little old, but, there is some really good info on uv mapping in this thread.

Shipbuilder has an awesome shader tutorial here if you are interested in giving your ship glowing effects and bridge lighting.

spud42 wrote:

but i can sometimes be persistent

Attention all planets of the Oolite Federation,
The Darkside has assumed control,
The Darkside has assumed control.

Looking good...keep it up.

Stormrider wrote:

Hey Spud I just noticed in your screenshot that your ship is aligned along the x axis, ships fly along the z axis so your current model would fly sideways. You will need to rotate it around the y axis.

Well spotted!

On the bright side, at least it's properly centred on the axes.. so there won't be any weird-looking pitching motions, or over-sized bounding-boxes to worry about.

Stormrider wrote:

Hey Spud I just noticed in your screenshot that your ship is aligned along the x axis, ships fly along the z axis so your current model would fly sideways. You will need to rotate it around the y axis.

Its a little old, but, there is some really good info on uv mapping in this thread.

Shipbuilder has an awesome shader tutorial here if you are interested in giving your ship glowing effects and bridge lighting.

spud42 wrote:

but i can sometimes be persistent

Attention all planets of the Oolite Federation,
The Darkside has assumed control,
The Darkside has assumed control.

Looking good...keep it up.

Cheers Stormrider, thats a nice thing to know..... would be embarrassing to finish and then find it was going sideways!!!!

nose of the craft in the +z side i assume? maybe this should be mentioned somewhere? if it was i didnt notice..

humpf..darkside.. control.... i can stop any time i want to .... really..... just 1 more cookie........

Just a thought; earlier in the thread Spud suggested that perhaps the frame and strut work maybe be a little too much to re-create, but maybe it's possible to add a faux strut work onto the main body of the model. Pipes (cylinders) are reasonably easy to create in Wings? (although I will qualify that I have no experience with Wings, but I do play with 3-D [geology] modelling software at work). Perhaps large diam 'pipes' can be drawn along all the panel joins in the main body of the Eagle, and thinner 'half pipes' (to use skater terminology) could criss-cross flat along the body panels to give the impression of a strut frame.

Now, I mocked something up with one of Spud's images to try and give you the impression, so I hope it comes out. On a difficulty rating, is it practical to do this?

https://app.box.com/s/2cfphq98y3z9xxb9xr4q

the idea at this stage is to do that in the texture/image wrap. i think at this stage i just want to see it fly. any tweaking could be done later.

ok as i just found out the ship has to fly along the Z axis so here is the model duly rotated and also the center line adjusted.

correct orientated model

and here is the detailed model by James Murphy.

no comparison really, James's model is super detailed.

Thanks Griff for Dertien's tutorials. very informative but i wish he had gone on to show how he textured it. he broke faces up into "panels" and the model looks fantastic but how do you map/texture something like that?

just going to make a cup of Tea , grab some more cookies and sit down to watch the tutorials about UV mapping and shaders that Stormrider linked....

I need help!
Thats a given, but specifically i need help with UV mapping and then colouring the model.
Most tutorials i have seen just skim over this bit or are from much older versions of Wings 3D that they simply dont work.
So here is the present progress i have.
The model is separated into 13 parts currently , now with a couple of the textures i can cover several parts at once.
1 for all 4 landing pods
1 for all 4 engines
1 for both service and engineering module
1 for cargo pod
1 for the spine
1 for the command module.

Now in tests i have unwrapped the spine and the cargo pod as well as the landing pod and engine assembly.

Here are my questions.

Does it matter if the scaling is different? i have put the spine and the cargo pod on the same UV map sheet but because of different scales the default letter boxes are different sizes on the pod and spine.will that matter?

Now what do i need to do to be able to edit these in a paint prog etc? I have somehow managed to save as a .png on transparent background but all i have is a outline of the edges no "white" inside them this seems to make it impossible to do anything with them. I can load the .png up in MSpaint and slap colour on just to see what happens but when i save the .png and open the model in wings the coloured texture isnt loaded. One tutorial said to right click and then click refresh. but i dont get a refresh option?

Currently this is stalled till i can figure this out. using Wings 3D ver 1.5.3 , i also have photoshop CS6, can easily get GIMP or any other software required.

A project like this will always be complicated, but I wonder if you are not complicating it in the wrong way!
When an object has many parts, many of which are identical, the usual approach would be to construct it using sub-entities. So for your ship have the six main parts (Command module, spine, service module, cargo pod, landing pod and engine) as separate models each with a dedicated texture. The benefit of this is that instead of a big complicated mess you have six relatively small and straightforward objects to work with, which are joined together later. The landing pod and engine would just be used several times each. This would also mean that changes could be made quite easily - for example you could re-texture say the cargo pod without having to touch any other part of the model or textures. Or you could remodel (and retexture) just the spine later if you wanted to do a more detailed version as your skills improve.

As for the texturing, forget MSPaint. It's a childs toy, not a graphics tool! I use Gimp but it sounds like you have access to Photoshop which is as good as it gets. The UV maps you are producing don't sound quite right yet - I would expect to see the outline of the faces, normally white on a coloured background or vice versa, which can then be developed in the graphics software. The texture can be built up using layers to give you a finished result. Take a look at my texturing tutorial for one way to do this. This tutorial could use updating but is still valid, and although it is using Gimp, the same principles and techniques would apply to photoshop, and even most of the tools will be similarly named I expect.

cheers Smivs but

or if it is a new ship you have designed your 3D modelling software will present you with a diffuse_map with a silhouette of your ship on a coloured background.

this is exactly what i mean, its esay if you have done it before but not the first few times. wings 3D still hasnt given me a map called "diffuse" even though another tutorial i just read said it would....

However i just did the cargo pod, marked the edges for cut, right click, continue,unwrap, right click create texture... BUT this time i saved as a jpg as the tutorial said.
still didnt get a diffuse just a Cargo Pod_auv.jpg.. this was white with the cargo bay outline in black. i opened in photoshop and cut and paste and resized my texture. saved this then in wings THIS time i got the refresh option when right clicking on the highlighted cargo pod_auv.jpg VOILA the Pod she is looking Good.....well different lol.

spud42 wrote:

I have somehow managed to save as a .png on transparent background but all i have is a outline of the edges no "white" inside them this seems to make it impossible to do anything with them.

When you create the texture in wings a Draw Options window opens, Draw Edges is default, change this to Draw Faces to get the UV map you need. Once created, select the texture in your outliner window so its highlighted in blue then right click and select make external. You may then paint the texture with gimp or photoshop, then go to wings and refresh your texture.

Smiv's tutorial is excelent, it really helped me to when I started texturing, thanks Smivs.

Cheers Stormrider, i left out the make external bit in my previous post. what is the prefered graphics for textures is it png?

spud42 wrote:

...still didnt get a diffuse just a Cargo Pod_auv.jpg.

The naming system does seem complicated (even to me) as different people seem to refer to the same thing by different names. If there is a 'correct' naming system or convention, I don't know what it is.
I'm not a trained artist, just self-taught with lots help from other Board members, and I'm even less a modeler, having only recently started tinkering with Wings3D myself, and TBH getting a basic texture from my pathetically simple models has been a real struggle for me as well. There is a lot to learn, but it does get quicker and easier with practice as you will find. There is plenty of help to be had here, and you'll find you can't beat the feeling you get when you see your creation in-game for the first time, so the effort is definitely worth it .

Edited to add:- To answer your last question, yes, use .png

Smivs wrote:

spud42 wrote:

...still didnt get a diffuse just a Cargo Pod_auv.jpg.

The naming system does seem complicated (even to me) as different people seem to refer to the same thing by different names. If there is a 'correct' naming system or convention, I don't know what it is.
I'm not a trained artist, just self-taught with lots help from other Board members, and I'm even less a modeler, having only recently started tinkering with Wings3D myself, and TBH getting a basic texture from my pathetically simple models has been a real struggle for me as well. There is a lot to learn, but it does get quicker and easier with practice as you will find. There is plenty of help to be had here, and you'll find you can't beat the feeling you get when you see your creation in-game for the first time, so the effort is definitely worth it .

Edited to add:- To answer your last question, yes, use .png

i agree, thanks for the encouragement...will have to do it all again with png but each iteration makes the next that much quicker...

for everyone criticism her is a screenshot from wings... my model and my skin are different shapes so i am having to resize... this isnt the final its just a work in progress as i learn to do it better....

Nice progress! You must use png format due to jpg is not processed by Oolite.

You can make your ship in three way.
1. You make everything into one 3D object (you can use more texture files in this case also).
2. You make the parts of your ship into more separated objects and concatenate these in shipdata.plist using subentities, and set the frangible flag to false to act as a single object in the game.
3. The most flexible way if you make subentities and set frangible: in this case your ship can lose parts, you can use the cockpit model as escape pod and there are scripting possibilities, for example if cargo bay is destroyed then lost all cargo carried, etc.

Norby wrote:

Nice progress! You must use png format due to jpg is not processed by Oolite.

You can make your ship in three way.
1. You make everything into one 3D object (you can use more texture files in this case also).
2. You make the parts of your ship into more separated objects and concatenate these in shipdata.plist using subentities, and set the frangible flag to false to act as a single object in the game.
3. The most flexible way if you make subentities and set frangible: in this case your ship can lose parts, you can use the cockpit model as escape pod and there are scripting possibilities, for example if cargo bay is destroyed then lost all cargo carried, etc.

back to the drawing board... literally...

aaarrggghhhh more decisions to make. More reading to do.... first step is to get the damn thing textured with png's not jpg's....

EDIT:

how do i assign the texture to different parts of the module. i.e. i have a texture for the engineering module but the service module is the same. how do i do that?

here are some new pics...

the spine texture really needs tweaking on the small sloped sections. also on the rear of the engineering module the pipe work is a bit wonky.......