Oolite Bulletins

Can anyone recommend a good modeller and renderer for doing models with animations/flashing lights and realistic metal textures? I am currently using Wings3d but would like to emulate the textures people like Griff and Thargoid can achieve - any advice would be appreciated

Flashing lights and shaders are created in the shipdata.plist and not in the 3d modeler

subentities

Can assign other objects, lights and turrets, to be associated with the model, fixed to a relative position. The first three numbers are XYZ positions, however, controlling positioning of enslaved objects is done by means of quaternions.
Lights follow their own recipe.
*FLASHER* x y z hue speed offset size
x y z is the position relative to the origin of the main model.
hue describes the colour of the light as an angle on a colour wheel.(0DEG = red =360DEG)
speed describes how fast the light pulses (on a sine wave) in Hertz (at 0 the light is constantly lit)
offset is the offset to the sine wave (0..1) to time-shift each light
size is the size of the light's corona in metres
Example:
<key>subentities</key>
<array>
<string>mySubEntity 0 -5 10 1 0 0 0</string>
<string>*FLASHER* 0 5.5 10 30.0 1 0.0 12</string>
</array>

located on the wiki at
http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Shipda ... ubentities
information on shaders located here
http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Shaders_in_Oolite

Hi parazaine
There's a free 3d package that includes modeling & rendering called Blender ( http://www.blender.org/), i haven't tried it myself but the new release is getting a lot of praise, it might be too complex for Oolite oxp-ing though, especially if you've no previous experience using 3d software - have you had a look at wings3d www.wings3d.com for a free modeling package (used for building the actual ship geometry) and GIMP www.gimp.org for a free texturing package (used for painting the metal surfaces (sometimes called 'textures' or 'skins' onto the ship once you've built it in wings)?
There's a great thread here https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?t=5580 with a lot of tips on how to paint really great looking texture maps!


The griff thargoid gets a lot of it's shiny metal-ness from its 'shader'* files in it's oxp, the actual texture maps are quite drab and unexciting. The shader adds a fake reflection effect to the ships surface as well as ramping up the specular highlight intensity, these are what is really giving the ship its polished metal look.

You don't have to write a shader to access Oolites shader effects, most of them are available using the 'Materials' settings in your ships shipdata.plist file ( http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Materials_in_Oolite ), eg, for a shiny metal ship painting out a custom specular_map would be an option - make a greyscale copy of your colour texture map and then work over it using the brightness/contrast painting tools (dodge and burn). A specular map works like this, the parts of the image that are darker in tone will appear dull and less shiny in oolite than the parts of the specular map image that are lighter in tone.

*A shader is a small program written in glsl ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLSL) that 'plugs into' oolites graphics engine and is used by oolite when it wants to know how to draw the relevent ship onto the screen,
if you want to experiment with shaders i highly recommend downloading a shader development program (i think maybe Apple Mac's come with a free one built in? If you're on a windows xp/vista pc you could try AMD's free 'Rendermonkey' program although annoyingly you have to register an email address with them before you can download it http://developer.amd.com/gpu/rendermonk ... fault.aspx ).

Thanks for your replies guys - lots of info i wasnt aware of - didnt realise a lot of it. And thanks for the links, I have been using wings3d in combination with paint.net and got reasonable results - will check out your links Griff (by the way i think your models are unbelievable!) I am only just starting to get into 3d modelling but have managed to use wings (seems fairly easy to use) and have tried some of the texturing tips using layers etc - theres a lot to take in for someone who wouldnt even have dreamed of making his own models until about 2-3 weeks ago but i'll stick with it. The forum and the people on it have been incredibly helpful (thanks to Rustybolts for all the info he's given me) and im sure to have forgotten some other contributers - thank you all...Oolite is even better than Elite was and that's saying a lot

just to overload you with even more links , you could also have a look at google's sketchup program http://sketchup.google.com/ , i don't think it's compatible with oolite (i might be wrong about this, has pagroove used it recently to build some ships?) it's a lot of fun to use.
good luck with your ship building, i don't know what it is about Oolite, the oxp-ing side of it just draws you in and it's just so cool to see a ship you've made pottering about the Ooniverse doing it's thing, i remember seeing one of my adder remakes race one of the built in ships to scoop an inactive tharglet that was floating about whilst testing my thargoid oxp, i was really proud of the little guy! *gets all misty eyed*

I'd also have to point you to Blender as a freeware 3d modeller. It may be a bit complicated at first (or a lot, just depends on the person), but once you get used to it, it can be a very powerful tool (for open source). I don't think you'd need it as much for Oolite, because of the simplicity of the models, but you can add reflections, without messing with shader code, and normal maps (if you are interested in 1.73, like myself!), etc.

thanks again for the info, i downloaded Blender some time ago but havent persevered with it as yet - a bit of a learning curve - but i've seen some good things said about it in the forums and elsewhere so i might put more effort into using it - as you say, Oolite kind of ensnares you (i havent played anything else since i downloaded it) and already its got me learning how to 3d model etc - I love the way you can tinker with it - ive already changed the game start-up music and added my signature to my ship - The Oolite community seem a friendly lot too, i guess we all have to start somewhere with modelling/oxp writing - it may take me a while but i intend to model some ships at least and perhaps write an oxp or two in the future