RFC: Fancy classics

[Simon B]

That's cool, and nice ideas, I think that entrance looks grand, gives the structure more scale.

Makes it look fat, you mean?

I cannot avoid thinking it looks like a wanton and well-used (without shame and with a great deal of pleasure btw) vagina ... but that may just be the Rorschach thing. Of course, this could just be some sort of artistic statement - why not have erotically female stations?

On that note - I've seen manga space stations drawn as huge statues...

Oh, and welcome to Photobucket!

Well ... all these pictures were messing up my website.

It would be good to see a variation in quality and repair according to the tech level.

Depends - I understood that the stations were not maintained by the planet.

I looked a bit at the politics in the game-background while on vacation and some intreguing stories emerge.

But - frontier stations could be quite new.

In oxps - some stations are govt controlled - so you would see differences.[/quote]
I started messing around with a grander look for the factory dock in Dictators, I'll fetch it....
[pic removed][/quote]OK... I always thought a bit of impact damage on the sign would be useful...

It's a bit of a mess where I'm trying to work out where the different bits are represented on the texture, but any way, it's possible to add 3D elements like the doorway, the grills on the floor are still being experimented with.

Which is where normal mapping comes in yes?

The point is I can add details like this if you want in my spare moments, the only problem being the time factor as there's no easy way to view the texture in game. If you supply me the dock texture, can you mark where the boundary of each part lies, then I can set it up as a mock up in blender and much more easily see wether the elements I'm adding work.

The torus station displayed is a single 1600poly unit right now and not intended to end up in the game. I keep it for the lessons.

As stipulated - I do not like it.

Not to say that I will not turn my hand to exotic stations in the future ;)

Also as a bit of a request, I personally think the dock textures should be bigger as you see them so close up, any one else bothered by that?

Well, they zip by so fast - when you are fugitive, you get to work on entering the dock obliquely with injectors engaged ;)

Still, I agree. The dock interior for the coriolis model has all five sides on a single 512x512 png - top and bottom, left and right, are paired. (I use flat projections to the normals in the uv-map so the panel boundaries are easy to see - though the edges can be tricky to line up.)

[Simon B]

The standard shaders I have use the alpha channel of the diffuse map to control the tightness of the specular effect (IIRC: the more alpha, the tighter the speckle), an external color-map is used to color the speckle - for which I normally use the diffuse map again. A seperate effects map is usef whose rgb channels are controlling engine-glow, laser-glow, and constant glow areas. It's alpha channel is currently unused.

I'm thinking in terms of using either diffuse map or constant color specular for the neolite models - probably gold and green (I can set the color to the ship as a vector-constant in its plist entry.) Probably allow constant color to mix with the paint-colors - after all, a blue painted area should reflect more blue than bare metal.

I do not plan to use the laser heat effect on ship hulls - I'll have seperate gun models where it counts. In general, the laser exit point is not in a player line of sight for most models, which leaves the rare instance of an npc ship zipping by with hot guns.

Thus - it seems reasonable to use the green channel for normal-mapping. Which I do intend to use a lot.

However - it is more economical to bandwidth to put all the special glowing bits in their own texture and leave the main textures for each ship fairly flat. In this approach, few ships will have extensive effects (concentrating on the windows, glowing panels, exhaust etc.) - probably just a standard specular for the overall map.

This means that I only need one effects map for many ships.

Some ships I expect to be extensively textured and shaded - thargoids for eg

I'm pondering how to get the specular tightness into the alpha channel - a greyscale map used as a layer mask? This can create very transparent textures, which can be difficult for players to reuse, so I'll have to figure out how to distribute that. (I want players to be able to retexture ships, lets make it easy). Probably involve a "sources" file with the obj, a blank (B on W) texture, and the greyscale specular-map.

... AND: how do I use the imported color vector?

[Simon B]

ZygoUgo's textures on the models ...


The cobra textures have been added to (my) oxp as Cobra3-alt and Cobra3-prt I'll save the adder for the pre-loved ships oxp (whatsitcalled?) "Oldships.oxp, IIRC, contains different ships - Iguana, Slamandar etc.

People who don't want to wait for the next release to try out the "bridal" edition FDL skin, here it is:

(Hope that comes out the right size...)

The characters are what Babel Fish returns as japanese for "bride" - I expected something shorter ... can someone check?

Note the license - attribution+share-alike - pretty permissive. You have fulfilled the terms by leaving the cc there, or adding the information under "inspired by" or whatever to your own.

I could have just made it "no derivs" and had dane with it - but I want you to use this to make your own versions. That's why I laid it out like that.

[Simon B]

Caveat: People who think it's OK to let the obj2dat script handle the triangles need to take a close look at the cobra mk1 in the preview - there are supposed to be some grills an the back corners - they are still there but one is only visible on a narrow range of angles because the script messed up the edges.

I've gone through and fixed that.

Some of the models have a jagged look due to the scripts edge placement. So there is a bit of additional tidying t do. In most cases this does not distort the texture. Sadly - the adder texture is slightly distorted by the diagonal lines across it. If it is noticeable (I can see these things, but normal people may not) then I'll have to redo the skin.

[Griff]

Wow, these all look fantastic Simon! Great work on the beaten up textures too ZygoUgo.

Thus - it seems reasonable to use the green channel for normal-mapping. Which I do intend to use a lot.

I think the normal map will need 3 channels unfortunately, Ahrumans normal Mapping example also uses the alpha channel in the normal map to control another effect - Parallax mapping

[Simon B]

Wow, these all look fantastic Simon! Great work on the beaten up textures too ZygoUgo.

Thus - it seems reasonable to use the green channel for normal-mapping. Which I do intend to use a lot.

I think the normal map will need 3 channels unfortunately, Ahrumans normal Mapping example also uses the alpha channel in the normal map to control another effect - Parallax mapping

Thats unfortunate - I'll have to look closer.
I was thinking mostly in terms of putting raised and lowered lines on the surface. Nothing like the brick wall in the example.

Otherwise it would be a little tricky to normal map the entire ship-set. It's almost easier to model the bumps in.

All the models which do not have a ridge around the engines will need a dent there. (Gecko is one of these.) The textures are trying to use blacklining to mimic this effect - with varying success. But if I'm going to need a full separate normal map for each model, the oxp size will get HUGE!

There are also places where I have used bump-mapped flat textures ... which has a tendency to flip over depending on the view angle - though, see the cargo bay doors on the cobra mk 1 - the door "crack" is in the texture. For some reason, the effect remains consistent for me. Context is important for optical illusions though.

[Griff]

parallax mapping only needs one channel so maybe you could use that, i'm not sure if parallax mapping can exist without normal mapping though, hopefully Ahruman will pass by and explain, he knows his way around a shader,
i've taken the parallax mapping out of the normal mapped cobra - i couldn't really get good results from it - it just seemed to make the texture slip and slide over the model - i imagine the height map i'd painted was not at the correct scale or something!
A seperate image as a normal map shouldn't be too demanding for the game, it doesn't have to be at the same resolution as the colour texture, as long as it doesn't get too jaggy.
possibly we should be making the normal map the 'big image' with the detail in it, and the colour map a smaller image - since we don't need to paint fake bumps into the colour texture anymore it simply just needs to be that - a colour texture with no detailing in (might look bland for people playing oolite without shaders though)

[DaddyHoggy]

possibly we should be making the normal map the 'big image' with the detail in it, and the colour map a smaller image - since we don't need to paint fake bumps into the colour texture anymore it simply just needs to be that - a colour texture with no detailing in (might look bland for people playing oolite without shaders though)

Shader and non-shader versions of the ships then...

[Selezen]

Please forgive my ignorance fellas, but has anyone tried to tart up the exterior of the torus stations?

I started a model butneed to finish it. Other stuff at home has got in the way again.

[JensAyton]

parallax mapping only needs one channel so maybe you could use that, i'm not sure if parallax mapping can exist without normal mapping though, hopefully Ahruman will pass by and explain, he knows his way around a shader,
i've taken the parallax mapping out of the normal mapped cobra - i couldn't really get good results from it - it just seemed to make the texture slip and slide over the model - i imagine the height map i'd painted was not at the correct scale or something!

A normal map requires at least two channels. (The Nz component can be calculated from Nx and Ny, since a normal must be a unit vector and the sign of Nz is always positive in sensible normal maps, but you lose a bit of quality due to quantization and scaling artefacts.)

Parallax mapping can be used on its own, but it’s unlikely to be very noticeable without normal mapping as it doesn’t affect lighting.

A higher-resolution normal map with lower-resolution diffuse map is certainly worth experimenting with.

Shader and non-shader versions of the ships then...

Nah. Just shader and non-shader textures.

[DaddyHoggy]

Nah. Just shader and non-shader textures.

Erm, yeh, that's want I meant - as in the shady (animated) and non-shady (single frame static) billboards from the constores oxp.

[Simon B]

shader and non-shader textures.

Maybe I can get away with stripping some layers off the current textures and just scaling down ... but what is the saving when both are provided? (Perhaps keep one set separate for players to add if they want high-res skins without shaders?)

We'll want to do an experiment for which I have not the tools - <looks at Griff> nominate a ship for the experiment - tell me what you need.

Right now - plan is to keep the fancy textures, use a scaled effects map - which will be shared, for many of the ships, juries out on the normal map.

Can not just code for a color-channel value proportional to the "height" along the local surface normal and hard code the way the edges fall off?

[JensAyton]

shader and non-shader textures.

Maybe I can get away with stripping some layers off the current textures and just scaling down ... but what is the saving when both are provided?

If I may interpret that as “advantage” instead… a high-resolution normal (and specular) map with a low-resolution diffuse map would give you “live” bumps, reflections etc. interacting with the environment, while a high-resolution shader-free texture would allow you to burn in more detail for those without shader support. There’s no additional runtime cost since only textures that are used are loaded.

Can not just code for a color-channel value proportional to the "height" along the local surface normal and hard code the way the edges fall off?

It could be done that way, but you’d then need to sample at least four adjacent texels to calculate the gradient, which is costly. (Texture sampling always takes full RGBA values; there is no “discount” for only sampling one channel.) It will also give you lower-quality results than real normal maps.

[Simon B]

shader and non-shader textures.

Maybe I can get away with stripping some layers off the current textures and just scaling down ... but what is the saving when both are provided?

If I may interpret that as “advantage” instead… a high-resolution normal (and specular) map with a low-resolution diffuse map would give you “live” bumps, reflections etc. interacting with the environment, while a high-resolution shader-free texture would allow you to burn in more detail for those without shader support. There’s no additional runtime cost since only textures that are used are loaded.

Understood - but why not just have a high res diffuse map as well?

[Simon B]

Guess the Ships (Again)
See if you can do it without looking at the tags ...