Oolite Bulletins

In my opinion the best modeling program is blender, and now it looks exactly the same as maya and does the same things its all I use... the texture unwraping is not as good as wings though.

@griff, I had a similar problem with the polygons when my normals were not perfectly alined, it ended up flipping some of the polygons to create that ridged error

Griff wrote:

ramon wrote:

Have you had a chance to do some more work on that amazing looking asp remake?

This one:



I actually went off the design and I started it back in the day without shaders and normal maps. You or anyone else on the boards are welcome to the .obj & texture files but I'm going to work on other ships now.

I'm tempted to start work on the Frontier ships and I'll design them to look a lot like your ships Griff to keep a bit of consistency with the graphics. Also, with Oolite 2 round the corner it kind makes sense to do a few more Elite 2 ships.

I am working on a batmobile as a joke ship (kinda like the santa one) but after triangle clipping it is has 'cough' 6691 'cough' triangles... so it makes griff ships look low poly. I am interested to see how it will work in game, but I'll need some help sorting the normal map out.

and here it is (without normal map)

Griff wrote:

hmm, that looks really weird - like it's filled in the engine hollow bit with some crazy polygon - i'm not that tidy a modeller, could this be caused by me slicing through and extruding out polygons and not worrying too much about clean edge loops?

I haven’t looked into it yet, but it’s probably a bug in my triangulation code.

Griff wrote:

Annoyingly LightWave's modeller program doesn't support edge weights and i must admit to not paying a lot of attention to them, i'll have to have a go at setting them in wings3d, what's the best method for weighting a model with so many edges? after importing the model set all edges to soft and manually mark the hard edges or set them all to hard and manually mark the soft ones?

It depends a lot on the modeller. I’ve grown into the lazy habit of assuming everyone’s using Wings3D (whose approach to surface normals is a bit odd, because it’s designed for a specialized type of modelling). I really don’t know what would be good in Lightwave, and thinking in terms of edges might be wrong for it.

Killer Wolf wrote:

wouldn't that depend on your vision for the ship? if it's all smooth except for crisp engine lines you'd do it one way, it if was all edgey apart from, eg, a cockpit bulge you'd do it the other?

This is of course true, but I assume people’s visions for ships are informed by some notion of the technical limitations of the game. If your mental model is wrong, you’ll constrain yourself needlessly.

Besides, it would be a mistake to assume smoothing is only for smooth models. The built-in Asp, Cobra III, escape pod and Viper Interceptor use smooth groups.

Here’s the “old” Griff Cobra, alongside a version I’ve mucked about with. (Click to embiggen.) The obvious changes may or may not be improvements, but look at the subtle creases in ostensibly flat areas on the old version, which are gone on the smoothed one.

(Unfortunately part of the UV mapping was destroyed because I had to rebuild some of the geometry.)

Incidentally, my version has more than 100 extra triangles, partly because of some bad geometry in the original and partly because of bugs in Wings3D’s exporter, but it has 1649 vertices compared to the original’s 2216 (or 2490 in Oolite 1’s rendering system).

Our friend Staer9 wished to skin the pirate version of the Accipiter.

His textures will be used. He sent shader code. My machine doesn't support shaders and I do not know how to test if the code is working so will go with diffuse and emission maps.
Thanks S9!

"Fear-naught" as in "No Fear" or a play on "Dreadnought"?

Sorry DH but was correcting a typo while you posted. Play on words yes.

Wow, that looks nice in game! glad you could get it all configured (you can tell that the code is working due to the hull lights being lit up).

I did not test it in game because I didn't want to write out the full shipdata.plist, I'm glad you like it and I would be happy to set up the shader textures for other ships you may create in the future.

Great pirate texture there.

i like the batmobile ship - that's a nice ship in it's own right (you don't need to call it a batman ship)

The non-pirate Accipiter version. It looks uncommonly like a bat from the front view The back-story will attribute it to the Xeceesian Shipyards. I searched G4 in the wiki for a planet populated by birds. I've been studying Smivs emission map techniques to add the glowing parts. Critique as always is welcome.

Looking good
Another lovely ship, and very much in keeping with the look of the core set.

Very nice! I like that glowing cockpit at the front


and as a side note: everybody that previously downloaded the Hauler p30 please update to the latest version that will fix all bugs previously stated in the readme, it can be found on the wiki here: http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Staer9_haulerp30
or downloaded on box.net here: http://www.box.net/shared/jjh6c03uyn

Captsolo's accipiter pirate version is complete... and here it is (with shaders thanks to Griff)


accipiter demonstration by Staer9, on Flickr

SUPER! I like the lights!