Oolite Bulletins

I like Sung's textures but I'm starting to think there a bit too busy, so I had a go at creating a version of the Cobra Mk III.



Even if there isn't much interest I might create more for my own use anyway, but was curious what the general opinion on this was.

Cor! If they're all going to look like that then yes please! i'd love another texture pack! Fantastic stuff!

You probably do this already, but it might be worth planning ahead and keeping a version of your textures with all the elements like exhaust glows, cockpit windows etc in seperate layers in the image file so if you do go back to them later to make effects maps for shaders it'll be easier to do

I think an improved texture pack would be a wonderful idea. Given the development of planet textures and stations and ships with glow maps, the original models are starting to seem a bit out of place.

If only I understood a word of all the glow map stuff, I'd love to work on my Cobra Rapier (it would be nice to get a glowy effect on the green areas of the ship to bring out an idea of a mix of hardtech and biotech)... Unfortunately, the whole thing went way over my head when I tried to read up on the stuff...

Looks not bad, CaptKev. However, my question is the same as to Sung's textures: What are all the small structures on the texture? It looks like the ship's hull was welded together from hundreds of tiny bits and pieces and then neither polished nor painted, so you see every single weld. On top of that, there seem to be dozens or hundreds of connections (cables?, hydraulic lines?, I-don't-know-what?) mounted directly on the hull.

I simply don't think they are going to design space-ships that way in the fourth millenium.

And sorry, I don't mean to offend you. It's just what I think in general about this style of texture. Fine for some renegade vessels that are obviously just slamped together in a backyard garage. But not for a ship that is supposed to have come out of a production line.

@Griff, I do try and keep everything in separate layers (when I remember), You've given me an idea maybe I should create a Shady Ship Texture OXP.

@Wolfwood, once you start playing around with the glow map stuff, it's surprisingly quite easy. The trick is to copy Ahruman and Griff's shaders.

@Commander McLane, no offense taken, it just looks a bit boring without any detail on the metal.
Maybe the self-repairing hull leaves small inperfections in the metal.

CaptKev wrote:

...it just looks a bit boring without any detail on the metal.

Yupp. Imagine a big area with nothing on it. That would only be interesting if Oolite would have real caustics. So I really like your idea of a new texture set. :-)

CaptKev wrote:

@Commander McLane, no offense taken, it just looks a bit boring without any detail on the metal.

Point taken. So I guess it boils down to finding a good balance between the amount of details and the overall texture. And of course to what kind of details you add. An alternative to the small-plates-and-welds structure could perhaps be a structured hull. For instance something like these cartons they sell eggs in. Lots of small peaks (sorry, can't describe it better). Or a wave-like structure with interchanging small hills and valleys. We could even come up with some explanations for the purpose of these structures (deflecting radiation; or something with the shield-generation).

Commander McLane wrote:

What are all the small structures on the texture?

It's a Cobra so they are scales!

Commander McLane wrote:

Looks not bad, CaptKev. However, my question is the same as to Sung's textures: What are all the small structures on the texture?

Greebles.

Even with shaders, Oolite still doesn’t have the technical thingummies¹ required for large blank areas to look good (i.e., not like paper cutouts). Good greebling can help hide this. Still, I agree that the random-bits-of-metal technique isn’t the acme of greebles.

¹Thingummies like ambient occlusion mapping (achievable), normal mapping (intended to be in MNSR) and high dynamic range lighting (not gonna happen).

Are greebles related in anyway to sturrgles?

Ahruman wrote:

Greebles.

I'm yet again surprised by the human ability to invent words and terms for practically anything they encounter...

Greebles serve a very useful purpose on FTL craft... they act like a checksum, ensuring that the information that comes out of a wormhole is the same, and in the same order, as the information that goes in...

A good thing,

Variation is the Key. So I would like it. I even more like it to have Sungs versions AND your versions running together with a randomizer between it to add variation

and variation
and variation ..........................eternal echo

CaptKev wrote:

@Wolfwood, once you start playing around with the glow map stuff, it's surprisingly quite easy. The trick is to copy Ahruman and Griff's shaders.

Hehe, I sort of understood it as long as it was only about making additional texture layers with special effects, but then the "manual" (might have been a thread somewhere) started talking about some crazy code that totally confused me. My first idea was that the effects are hard-coded and if I have a layer with a "glow" placed on an area which I want to be "glowy", the program would do the rest, but the necessity and the function of the code bits in that mess threw me off... (meaning that I did not grasp the reason for them, nor their function)

Variation is the Key. So I would like it. I even more like it to have Sungs versions AND your versions running together with a randomizer between it to add variation

and variation
and variation

I second that ...