Oolite Bulletins

Griff's ship remakes are very cool but da big G is only like this one guy y'know?! I figured I'd have a go at griffifying other ships to compliment the main set.

I figure the ships to start with are the ones in Random Hits ... even though these ships are scattered through other OXPs. Since I'm already modifying the navy and behemoth related oxps (stalled) I'll be keeping an eye on griffying these too.

But first up - back in November, Griff asked me:

could you do a fer-de-lance like your new gecko & Mamba Simon? the one i made i really don't like but i've attempted it 3 times now and i don't think i'm going to get anything better made

I can sympathise... with the neolite ships the fer de lance was the toughest remake and I only got there with a contraversially extreme makeover.

So FDL is the first one to try - also helps to learn the griff style on something already done.

I came up with:

and


But then there was a hiatus during which griffs style matured and I rethought the complexity of the model. Taking simpler lines but keeping the bits people liked in the above model gives something more like:

... I'll want comments on this one and some statement from Griff as to whether he still feels the same way about his fdl.

The above is not fancy, since I have not figured out how to coax blender to just render.... I have to use the in-game engine:

Griff uses 6 maps - he describes them as follows:

1. a diffuse map (y'know the usual colour 'skin' texture map)

2. a specular intensity map (greyscale - could just be a greyscale version of your diffuse map for a quick & dirty solution - lighter tone areas are more shiny than darker tone areas)

3. an illumination map for lighting up any cockpit windows, spotlights on the hull etc (a greyscale image, white = bright)
4. either a) a normal map or b) a greyscale heightmap which i will convert to a normal map with the nvidia plugin

5. an effects maps for the engine glow and up to 2 'paintmaps' (gets recolured and mixed into the final colour texture - allows you to re-paint your ship, randomly or via settings in the shipdata.plist)
rules for this effects maps are:
Red channel = orange heated glowing metal around the exhaust
Blue Channel = Blue/Cyan glow from the exhaust plume
Green Channel = Paintmap mask 1 - this is optional
Alpha Chanel = Paintmap mask 2 - this is optional
6. a decal map if you want random decals - this can be done differently to the decals on the cobraIII, you can provide full colour decals with the alpha channel acting as a mask in-order to cut them out neatly, provide a power of 2 number of decals, arranged in a horizontal row with a final image size as a power of 2 dimension, eg (64px high, 512px wide)

After mapping I got:


... I'm unhappy with this - particularly the stockings-and-suspenders look across the top. Currant status - studying griffs shaders for the player fighters to get something more ... more.

Comments?

I'm liking it Simon - I'm liking it very much!

Just some thoughts from the first impression (I haven't yet invested any interest or thoughts in re-modelling, re-texturing or shadering ships, so please forgive me for any dumb comment):

Comparing the FdL to my memory impression of the Griff Cobra III (which for me is the ship best representing the standard set, that's why I choose it for reference), I see a big difference. The FdL doesn't feel like it's related in any way to the Cobby. The impression of the Cobra is that it's compact and everything is in place. Your FdL doesn't (yet) convey this impression.

To me it seems that one of the factors contributing to that is the split bows. They make the ship not feel as "rounded" as other ships. The other thing that springs to the eye from your pictures is the relatively big, plain, straight frontal hull-plates. Two thirds of the ship feel like just one triangle, which looks a little boring. In the first and second picture the gritty panels at the underside help breaking the huge triangle up into smaller areas. Perhaps this could be the way to go for the upper side, too?

Finally I am not sure about the chess-board like colour scheme with the alternating red and grey. Indeed reminds me too much of a chess-board.

I hope these observations somehow help you. If not, feel free to disregard them. It's just my 0,2 cr.

Your FdL looks a lot more menacing than the stock model--I like it a lot!

Very nice artwork Simon, I don't know what it is about the FDL but it's such a difficult ship to 'highpolygonificate' - the standard braben/bell model shape is both pointy and boxy at the same time!

To be honest, i wouldn't restrict your design work trying to get your ships to complement my shipset, i get the general feeling that Oolite players love lots of variety and will quite readily fill their Ooniverse with all types of ship remakes & original designs without really caring if they fit together aesthetically (oo,long word! had to look the spelling of that up ) Your stuff is amazing and it's going to be great fun for us all seeing where you end up with your remakes!


I will probably have another go at making another FDL for my shipset, the 2nd attempt i did just got bogged down with shader fancyness trying to emulate sports car paint effects and chrome and all that without really fixing anything about the boring texture it was using and the first attempt had some nice bits of moddeling, but looked too beaten up and knackered texture wise, the cockpit shouldn't really be there either so i'll probably take that out and just extend those polygons the whole length of the nose, add more engine piping and pointless bits, basically rip off some really expensive super-car designwork!

Griff wrote:

basically rip off some really expensive super-car designwork!

Sounds pretty, though a grille will not have much use in a place with no air flow (i.e. space).

Best wishes,
Oscar

Thats true if we assume the grille is for airflow for cooling, but there are other possible reasons for having a grill section, it might be a place to put sensors, or be an aerial. Or it might even be a radiator!

Or it might be a non functional piece of plastic bodywork, like many of the "spoilers" fitted to "sports cars".

All fair comments - as Griff points out, the fdl is both boxy and pointy, it also has lots of false perspective (eg. the overhead view looks like it slopes away from the middle when it is flat L-R but slopes from stern to bow.)

More complicated panel layout for normalmapping is indicated, I agree.

Note on grills: there are lots of reasons why we may want to pierce a spacecraft hull, we may want to vent gasses or radiate surplus heat ... as mentioned, we may want it as bling.

The side cuts in the last fdl above are clearly bling for eg. Though I'm imagining that it also serves as a means of dumping surplus heat from, say, the power supply. This: cutting bits out of the hull to expose glowing bits - is more of a hotrodder mod though and is probably why this design looks like a candidate for fdl-ng.

Once we've poked holes in the hull, it is probably a good idea to put something over them to stop some fool on EVA sticking a limb in one - a grill serves that purpose without impeding the original point of the hole.

I'm a bit puzzled about the description of the cobra mkIII as "compact" though. The hull surface certainly has a busy texture but "compact"? Probably there is a need to load the models for side-by-side comparison??

Anyway - I'm looking at following the other craft that have big triangular spaces on them - yeah, cobbie is one of them but griff got around that by bending the hull more. Craft like the Krait and the Sidewinder have similar issues which have been solved nicely. The current Griff FDL likewise.

But Griff wants to have another try on his own, so I may be better advised to scrap my griffesque fdl and start on other craft???

i wouldn't scrap is simon, it must have taken ages to do and it looks really great, why not just release it as an oxp, you could even make it a really rare player buyable ship only available from some mysterious station on some hard to reach planet or something

Simon B wrote:

But Griff wants to have another try on his own, so I may be better advised to scrap my griffesque fdl and start on other craft???

I'm with Griff here, please don't scrap it, it looks too good for that!

Simon B wrote:

I'm a bit puzzled about the description of the cobra mkIII as "compact" though. The hull surface certainly has a busy texture but "compact"? Probably there is a need to load the models for side-by-side comparison??

"Compact" may not be the word I'm really after. Would "rounded" sound better (probably not, as there isn't actually anything round about the Cobbie)? "Balanced"?

I guess what I want to say is more or less that the design doesn't seem finished yet, while the design of the Cobbie does.