To explain the story behind this... i was fiddling around with some ancient models i made a looong time ago, all procedurally textured, to find one which i actually could get into FSO with a "reasonable" polycount. With "reasonable" resolution textures.
oh how little did i frikkin know
basically after having shaved off every amount of useless polys from the control mesh (1342 polygons untriangulated) i could, i put it through subdivision (NURBS), to give it that rounded off look. anywho... end result is a monster of 20k polys untriangulated, aka 40k polys triangulated. i've rendered out the textures in 4096x4096 resolution and assembled them in photoshop and then converted via collada to pof, grabbed retail ulysses tables made a mockup mish and tried it out. after 5 minutes of waiting for the cache to be made, the damn thing came into view.
I do not believe in first attempts being successful, however, this one went pretty much straight from Cinema4D -> collada -> PCS2 -> 5 minutes fiddling the normals to correct points -> made a quicky mish in fred -> looked in awe at how good it actually looked ingame.
full textures here, diffuse, glow, specular with env reflection map in the alpha channel and normal maps.
for the record, here is how it looks while being rendered in Cinema4D
Lesson today for me? It looks pretty, 5 of them at once dont rape your PC, but it is not something for mass consumption. Apart from all that? Its awesome. Feels good to have something work properly for once...
