[RELEASE] Upd:ZZBBS - New ships and updates 27-06-2014

[Sendraks]

Many thumbs up!

[dertien]

Yes indeed, Panther Clipper shaderized, and did some debugging on the Vipers' navigation lights.

Screenshots in first post.

[Griff]

Awesome work again dertien, these are looking really fantastic - love the colourfulness of them all, great design work too

[Sendraks]

Ok, quick quiz question.

There don't appear to be much in the way of texture files for these ships? How would one go about retexturing them?

[Griff]

You'll need to modify redo the UV maps for the ships if you want to make a painted texture, at the moment the UV's for each ship are quickly 'atlas' unwrapped then scaled down small enough to fit within a few pixels of a 'palette' texture, like this (please excuse the shocking spelling of the word 'panels' ) :


The Alpha channel and the effects maps work like this

[Sendraks]

Thanks Griff - advice on how to go about doing that would be welcome, as I have no idea.

[Griff]

As it stands it's going to be a tough oxp to mod to be honest Sendraks.
Dertien's designing and building each ship to work with this shader's workflow of really tiny UV 'islands' mapped onto a texture that's not much more that a palette of solid colour blocks, to do any more will require getting hold of the ship models in a wings3d compatible format such as .obj (you can convert them from the .dat file in the oxp to .obj using the Dat2ObjTex.py python script found here https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=12165)

Once you have the ship model then you can start flattening out the ships polygons into a flat 2d map in a process called 'UV unwrapping' so that they're ready for texturing, I'm sure Smivs has written out a fantastic tutorial series somewhere here on the boards, can't seem to find it at the moment! so here's an overview/tutorial from another site:
http://www.linuxforu.com/2010/12/wings- ... -airplane/
be aware though, if you haven't done this before then it's a time consuming and fiddly process, sort of like turning a paper aeroplane back into a flat sheet of paper

[Sendraks]

Cheers Griff! I have done a bit of texturing from an original 3D model, but I'm far from expert at it. Still, its enough to know I'd need to start from the 3D files and move on from there.

[CaptSolo]

Master Griff, I have learned some from a study of your normalmapped ship textures. I would, however, like an answer to one question though: How do you produce your specular maps?

I have attempted many times to follow SimonB's tutorial, which seems to combine specularity and glowing effects into one texture, but without success.

Edited to add: Sorry, Dertien, for the off topic reply.

[Griff]

hi CaptSolo, Do you mean the part where i merge the greyscale specular texture map into the usual colour 'skin' texture so i end up with a map that's all weird looking and transparent?
I've got a guide on how to do this in GIMP here https://app.box.com/shared/jk87l4f0gw - its from April 2008 though, so i hope GIMP hasn't changed too much!

If you just want to know how i make the specular map then i basically just make a copy of my colour texture, convert it to greyscale then adjust the brightness and contrast to get something with a lot of blotchy 'interest'. It helps if you've got things like the hull plate lines and grime textures on seperate layers to the rest of the texture as you can then play around with their brightness levels etc to help get the effect you want.
In the specular texture the white pixels will shine brighter in game than the darker pixels

[CaptSolo]

Thanks. Yes, I knew you merged or anchored the specular map to the alpha channel of the diffuse texture. Now I know the rest of the story, as they say.

Interestingly, with Simon's method one is supposed to end up with a green texture where the intensity of the green determines specular intensity. At least that was my understanding.

[spara]

Thanks. Yes, I knew you merged or anchored the specular map to the alpha channel of the diffuse texture. Now I know the rest of the story, as they say.

Interestingly, with Simon's method one is supposed to end up with a green texture where the intensity of the green determines specular intensity. At least that was my understanding.

Isn't Simon's method for his shader? It handles differently than Griff's.

[Griff]

yeah, simons shader is coded slightly different from mine, he uses the green channel in a texturemap plus he also inverts the colour values so that the areas with the most green are dimmer and more grimey looking in game than the areas that are left black (which appear the most shiny in game)

[dertien]

@griff, thx buddy, it's really working out well, especially with the new nav lights.

@sendraks and other potential retexture artists:

I have saved everybody the trouble of retransforming the dat files and I have wrapped up all the models that were created up to now in a neat little package of obj files that have not been triangulated and can be imported quickly into your favorite 3d program to UV-map them.

Download here:
https://app.box.com/s/tkqs4p2jizzi4i223noa

[Sendraks]

Dertien you are a star!

I'd also like to take this opprtunity to thank you for your very instructive you tube videos on modelling oolite ships. Great stuff!