[General Battuta]

They look way better than 2D thrusters, and furthermore, they are hot and sexy

[General Battuta]

I want to date a 3D thruster pof.

[Hades]

agreed

e: i should have mentioned, above thruster work is the work of dahblount

[mjn.mixael]

I made updated maps for 3D thrusters that are included in the MediaVPs. We just need someone to go through and add the actual geometry to the models. That's not going to be me for quite some time.

[DahBlount]

I already tried the MVPs thruster anims.


With the method I plan to use to update the thruster geometry, all the detail gets drowned out. The only way to fix this would be to either use less geometry, which leads to quite a bit of empty space in the thruster, which looks poor, or to increase the transparency on the anims.

Diaspora modelled thrusters look awesome, but they have a bunch of geometry and very transparent anims, so I would prefer the latter option from above.

[General Battuta]

You're a cool dude MjnMixael and also you DahBlount.

[mjn.mixael]

Uh, DahBlount, you just need to alter the UVs to use more of the blue part of the flame than the white. I can alter the textures as well, but they won't be in a MediaVPs for... well.. who knows when that will be.

Actually, given that those thruster textures were rendered back before bloom was a thing, they probably do need some alterations. But yours are all blown out because you have highly contrasted color settings. We can't make textures for your specific color settings, we have to find a balance.

[DahBlount]

Indeed, I did forget about that, I even made a sticky note to see how changing the UVs would change the effect in game. I'll do a quick test with that. There was apparently some discussion about making a feature to support multiple thruster anims. I can already think of a way to do that, so I'll start working on that soon.

Tidbits of discussion that I got:

Code: [Select]

<Hades> so an idea for thrusters
<Hades> the inner-most plume has the aggressive and active retail style thruster plume and the outer ones have the diaspora, semi-transparent and 'calm' effect
<Hades> but i dunno how possible mixing them is
<The_E> Have to check that
<The_E> But if it isn't, we can make it


[General Battuta]

If there's no new MVPs for a while we'd ****ing hell yeah do this in Blue Planet.

[mjn.mixael]

Unfortunately, there has been next to no progress on anything with the MediaVPs. We rely heavily on the community to make new things. We just package and test them to release them in a unified modpack. The only thing I've seen on here is some sporadic work on the new Orion and a few hints at a new Dragon. If you all want a new MediaVPs... go PM your favorite 3D/texture artists and tell them to get to work.

(Not me, though.. I'm busy trying to get my mod finished.)

[DahBlount]

Mission ****ing accomplished:

Inner flames are current MVPs, outer flames are Diaspora Bolitho anims.

[mjn.mixael]

Now that looks sweet. Nice work.

Now go do the rest of the MediaVPs ships.

[DahBlount]

Well, this raises possible issues, as from directly behind, the thrusters look kind of crappy without proper glowmaps, I can try and modify each ship to use them, but it may take awhile without the original psds or xcfs.

[headdie]

Legends

[DahBlount]

Final Medusa thruster design?

[Col.Hornet]

Are they a bit bigger and more intense then these ones on the previous picture?

I must say that in some models, modeled thrusters look very good. But if you decide to make them, the model must be good. I mean everything near the exhaust is well visible so you can't just make a random circle-like nozzle with random texture and say "mah, don't care, the thruster will cover it anyway"

For well made high poly models... I say YES

[DahBlount]

Overall, it's larger yes, but I redid the UVs to use less of the MVPs anim so they weren't as bright and aggressive.
As for your worries, the Medusa does have modeled engines, they just need glow maps to look better with the way I have the textures set up.

A good example of modeled thruster design would be the Sobek from Diaspora.


The Sobek has glowmaps, and combined with post processing hides most of the apparent layering from behind.

[perihelion]

Man, every time I see that ship it hits me all over again.  That is one SEXY beast!

[Mongoose]

dat ass