I like the geometry, but the skins look very 8-bit and blitted. I realize that since you built and optimized them for an older game engine, you had to work with its limitations, so don't get me wrong here- it's not like you suck or anything. I do feel that the skins are too dark in areas- a lot've subtle details aren't showing up well, and I have a big bright CRT with high gamma settings here. Dark colors are hard to work with, because it's easy to end up with mud where you were intending to end up with subtle, y'know?

Man, these forums need a quote button...

> Argh wrote:
> The model's looking very nice, but the number of verts that obviously
> have welding issues is a little scary. I'd split most of the edge seams
> and unweld it before exporting to MS3D... Milkshape has an annoying
> tendency to interpret any welding in the way you least want it to, so
> if you want your edges sharp and your verts to look clean, get it clean
> before export. Gonna be a neat ship, though.

I've noticed both that, and a tendency for objects that start out flush in Gmax suddenly having vertexes that no longer make contact... it also seems that in transition a good number of welded vertexes become unwelded, not a good sign...

Seems like the only real 'fix' I'm able to do is to do a 'manual edit' of the vertexes looking for those that 'jumped' +/- by .002 or so... It often seems that it refuses to change some of the positions on one axis unless I change the value of one of the other axis... is this some sort of wierd rounding error or something? Maybe it's just because I'm working with a base unit of 1 instead of ten... to me a hull 4 units wide is just easier to keep track of than 40.

The bottom is driving me nuts because some vertexes just refuse outright to weld, and I can't figure out why. I can move them apart so I can see through the model, but I can't seem to get them to combine...

In any case, I have the skin about 90% done. This one is much simpler and cartoonish because, well, it's supposed to be cartoonish, it's from a 1970's anime... Even so I threw a few markings and panel lines on it the 'original' doesn't have, mostly because it was too clean looking, even for me.


Let's see if I figured out the thumbnail/image thing on these forums... What the devil software is this running anyhow, and why is the site down for >10 hours a day?

if you think freespace is obsolete i assure you that you are very much mistaken. freespace open is running models in excess of 50,000k polies and textures as high as 2048^2 thanks to its new htl renderer, and with good performance as well. currently the engine supports difuse, glow, env, and specular maps on all models, and a new material system is in the works to support much more

actually the criuser uses 2 high res maps with a bunch of converted 8-bit tiles i borrowed from freespace. i figure eventually il texture the rest of ths ship. the fighter on the other hand uses a single 2048^2 texture. this and this is what those ship looks like in a recent compile of the freespace engine. the ship has the usual diffuse map as well as a glow map, and env map, and a specular map. not sure if freelancer even supports those so all i added to my material was the diffuse map. also i need to figure out why my glass texture didnt convert properly. milkshape seems to have stripped away most of the smoothing data on both ships. a side effect of converting through too many formats. theese were modeled in truespace 6 and only had to get converted once for freespace (scn->pof) as compaired to 3 times to get it into freelancer (scn->3ds->ms3d->cmp).

....looking for the final solution to the human problem....

@Deathshadow:

The top fins and the accordionlike connection between the nose and body have pretty nasty welding issues. I can see the stuff on the bottom you're talking about, but most people won't notice- they'll sure notice the rotating anti-highlights on the connection though.

If you've got the skin and geometry about where you think they should be, email them my way- I'll take them into Rhino and see if I can't repair that stuff. Usually weld issues are pretty easy to repair.

As for the mis-aligned stuff... well... what can we say... Gmax was free. The MD3 Export Plugin hosted on this 'site, while much better than the one that Id Software released, still has a lot of quirks. Among other things, it has an absolute ceiling on the number of objects that can be in your model Still, it's free, and it's easy to use, and reasonably accurate.

I found myself exporting the meshes from the other artists working with me on Warriors of the Sky over to Rhino for low-level fixing quite often, though. Among other things, I learned that Gmax is inconsistant about mirroring vert positions, even then the modeling steps on both sides of an axis were the same- I frequently would optimize some problematic geometry and then just delete the other half in Rhino and mirror it- Rhino does vert-for-vert perfect mirrors

@Nuke:

I wasn't aware there was a "Freespace open" o_0...

(finds link)

Hmm. Looks kewl, and the lighting engine is definately more advanced than FL's- you can actually attach light sources to ships. Much better for making single-player stuff with, so long as you're content with FS2's gameplay. I loved FS2 when it was new... still have my CDs... but quite honestly, after playing FL, It'll be extremely hard to talk me into playing a fly-around-and-blow-things-up game that requires a joystick ever again- no offense meant, FS2 was a great game, and what's being done with the source looks neat. I'll reinstall the game just to see how all of this work translates into gameplay

As for what things FL supports... here we go:

FL supports glowmaps, mipmaps, alpha-channels, and transparency. It uses a fake specular system that can be manipulated for other shading effects (I've been talking to people about this this week, actually), and it has varying specialized variations on the above. It supports TGA and DDS textures (DXT3 and DXT1).

FL does not support bumpmaps or material shaders, and its specular system, while adequate, has its quirks. You can have a ship with different specularity- it is theoretically possible. But it's not really practical. Not that that matters, most of the time- if you want your ship to have soft shading, simply remove the line:

material_library = fx\envmapbasic.mat

...from the ship's Shiparch.ini entries.

What's going wrong with your ship in FL could be any number of things:

1. Your DDS may need to be re-exported using better settings. I use DXT1 without any mipmaps the majority of the time. I only use DXT3 (sans mipmaps) when I really, really, REALLY need an alpha channel, and only use mipmaps when making ships with multiple textures (iow, once in a blue moon). Your texture in the FL version looks like we're viewing a blurry mipmap, which would explain a lot of things

2. Your texture may look great so long as you're against a dark background, or it may just be relying heavily on the specular maps. FL features a lot more real light sources than most other games, and the lighting is much brighter. It requires that you really work hard with dark textures, to make them subtle but interesting- if you don't add some glints of false specularity to them, then they'll just look like mud.

Edited by - Argh on 5/14/2005 12:11:20 PM

both games have there good and bad points, in both gameplay and modding capabilities. i must admit that freespace is alot easyer to mod though. all settings are more grouped together rather than spread across alot of inis. model conversion is easyer so long as you own a copy of truespace. but you need to edit your model file to add firing points and such, unlike fl, where you place the points from the modeling program. fs open can pretty much use most any texture format you can think of, i usually stick to dxt1 and dxt5, and you dont have to flip them. transparency in fs has more restrictions, you cant make a subobject transparent. you can do cockpits but thats about it. env and specular maps are on a per ship basis, a single 32 bit with an alpha chanel, alpha being used as the env map, the spec map is color, so you can do irridessence effects as well. i usually use an 8-bit glow map, to save vid mem, and because they usually never require much detail. fl mods seem to be alot more stable, as its more tolerant of bad data. fs is really sensitive to model bugs, usually resulting in a ctd. i consider myself an expert fs modder but im still learning my way around this engine. ive modded descent 2 and quake 1+2 as well, but so far my best stuff was for freespace. i added another ship along time ago, but i dont want to fly back to planet pitsburg to buy it and take screenshots.

....looking for the final solution to the human problem....

Edited by - Nuke on 5/15/2005 7:37:10 AM

Thanks for the input Argh, but I actually worked from memory on that ship, I once had the shots you made reference of but that was some time ago, I lost them somewhere on my hard drive, if I looked hard enough I could find them but I don't care enough. I like to work from memory it helps to be creative and also it forces better problem solving and modeling techniques. Also I agree the texturing from the original ship, which was rather welcoming to those who watched the show was a little old and beaten looking, not something this class is in the Lathysian war, so more sleekness is required. And the back is the best part, I agree sleek and elegant but tough and durable. I have taken lately to building fighters; I wanted the opinion of the group on these designs, so please tell me what you think.


Not yet textured as I am awaiting request information.

CHF (Commonwealth Hel Fighter)
(Heavy Extended Lead)

CLI (Commonwealth Local Interceptor)

CTF (Commonwealth ------ Fighter)


Featured at Xtreme Team Studios

Edited by - parabolix on 7/28/2005 7:18:55 AM

...

Well, um...

I dunno... they all seem so... familiar.

The first one should have the front end narrowed, and I'd extend the rounded thingamobs sticking out've the front of the wings so that they came to mid-nose, probably with a bridge-like curve so that they don't look as ponderous. It'd give the ship a much more original look, and it's pretty simple.

The second one and third one have the same problems- how's the pilot supposed to see anything above them? Why even have an exposed cockpit, if you cannot see out've it?

I dunno what to tell you about making the second one look like an original idea. Me being me, I'd do it with the skin, since you're pretty darn committed to the geometry you've built- I can see the hours of work there. It's very smooth and professional-looking, don't get me wrong here... but I keep hearing the Galactica theme song, instead of yours.

The third one's also pretty derivitive, but it's probably fixable. If it were me, I'd be brave and try make the cockpit on the end of the nose, so that it isn't nearly as obviously an X-wing clone, and I'd rework the wings a bit with some anime-style chunkiness, and ditch the "no, we're not guns" on the wingtips. Just my $.02 there... I'd rather see you push harder on originality and fail than not try at all...

Here's a little more playing around with glowmaps. I'm not entirely happy with the geometry- I ended up with a rather unsightly seam near the centerline, and I think that if I could go back and execute it again, I'd rethink the side sponsons, which looked really cute in the modeler and look too big for their intended purpose in FL, and maybe add some other greebles. Altogether though, it's not bad for an Invid ripoff, and I had a lot've fun with glows

Skitter 1
Skitter 2
Skitter 3
Skitter 4

Edited by - parabolix on 7/28/2005 7:21:28 AM

The texturing is very beautiful, but the form is odd and needs a bit of work. But i like the texturing.

Here is a new untextured ship called the MSAT, a transport build to both fly in space and make atmospheric landings and have the ability to walk on the surface for those deep range scout missions and scientific study, in addition to enemy ship breaching. I will post the legs extended when I have completed the work that entails.
MSAT (Mraxium/Seekers Assault Transport)
Transport 1
Transport 2
Transport 3
Transport 4

Also if any one would like to help me with the texturing, or texture it I would greatly appreciate it, and give them credit for their work of coarse.


Featured at XTS.
Xtremeteamstudios.com

Edited by - parabolix on 7/28/2005 7:17:13 AM

@Imperatodd:

Hmm... I like the new ship, but that's going to be a real challenge to texture well. Very good design there, though, and it looks like the polycount's not too terrible. Can't wait to see the final result on that one- it's a very original design, but not bizarre. But a lot of that surface greebling, while very impressive, could be done with textures for a lot lower polycount. It's going to require a lot of face-mapping or very clever angled-planar maps to get it textured right, though, and breaking it into Groups is going to take forever...

And yes- the little thing I built wasn't exactly the neatest model ever- I spent more time on the texture than I did on the geometry, and I didn't spend much time on the texture I'd rebuild it again, but ... nah... I can make other stuff. I hate messing about with a design when I've already skinned it, so I'll just make something new, and ensure that this one doesn't get seen in the mod very often

Edited by - Argh on 5/25/2005 4:28:29 PM

Tank 1
Tank 2
Tank 3
Tank 4

poly count? 736 muahaha now if only i could give these to NPCs

Edited by - parabolix on 7/28/2005 7:20:12 AM

Very neat stuff there- can't wait to see the final mod. You might want to take a look at the way I did Bases for WOS B1- you can make Bases that will go on the "surface" without any issues. And it looks like you got your custom weapon working just fine

yup meshconv is like second nature to me now i'm really tempted to start working on destructible subgroups but still intimidated by its complexity.oh and the ground texture?black & white i couldn't get the color-change by using the DcDtEcEt mat type but when i experimentally changed it back to DcDtOcOt it suddenly had color! so basically for a glow map with coloring adjust the Ec floats like you said but leave the type as DcDtOcOt

Edited by - Cold_Void on 6/2/2005 12:39:06 PM