Author Topic: Imperial II-class Star Destroyer Reborn  (Read 174979 times)

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Re: Imperial II-class Star Destroyer Reborn
Wow, cool.
Time to re-enact Rebel Assault's chapter 4. ;)
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Offline Deathsnake

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Re: Imperial II-class Star Destroyer Reborn
Star Citizen No. 250

 

Offline mandobardanjusik

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Re: Imperial II-class Star Destroyer Reborn
 :jaw:  looking good, now I want to finish my stuff even more!

 

Offline Herra Tohtori

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Re: Imperial II-class Star Destroyer Reborn
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMOpjNV12lA


video description...  :nervous:

...that said, an ISD is an excellent milestone. Congratulations for the good work so far!
There are three things that last forever: Abort, Retry, Fail - and the greatest of these is Fail.

 
Re: Imperial II-class Star Destroyer Reborn
ERMAHGERD! :eek: I can't wait to strafe this baby!

Wow, cool.
Time to re-enact Rebel Assault's chapter 4. ;)
You beat me to it. lol  :yes:
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Re: Imperial II-class Star Destroyer Reborn
Looking good, zookeeper. How many textures, and how big are they?

 

Offline zookeeper

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Re: Imperial II-class Star Destroyer Reborn
One 4096x4096 texture. :D Might sound ridiculous but I think it actually works well enough, although I could end up increasing that (by adding another texture of same or less size) depending on how things will develop.

 
Re: Imperial II-class Star Destroyer Reborn
Maybe I'm just texture crazy, but I'd have more than that! You'll probably want to scale up the texture for the hangar bay, so that'll eat up a lot of room. And if you have another map, the panel lines on the normal map will be a bit finer, which will help with the scale.

  

Offline zookeeper

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Re: Imperial II-class Star Destroyer Reborn
Maybe I'm just texture crazy, but I'd have more than that! You'll probably want to scale up the texture for the hangar bay, so that'll eat up a lot of room.

Well, mainly I went for that because Brand had already unwrapped the ship into a square shape and I'm not sure whether 8192^8192 would already be too large for some hardware.

And if you have another map, the panel lines on the normal map will be a bit finer, which will help with the scale.

The thing is that at this resolution, I have a comfortable amount of pixels to work with WRT the normal map details; if I had more I could end up in a limbo where I wouldn't know what to do with them. :nervous:

In any case, the smaller panel lines will actually end up being 1/3 thinner, as currently they're generated from a simple heightmap resulting in them being 3px wide whereas eventually I'll turn them into 2px wide grooves.

 
Re: Imperial II-class Star Destroyer Reborn

Well, mainly I went for that because Brand had already unwrapped the ship into a square shape and I'm not sure whether 8192^8192 would already be too large for some hardware.

The Home One was mapped into a square, then divided into four. Are there any obvious lines? Still, I think you might need another texture for the hangar. That's the thing you'll see up close.


The thing is that at this resolution, I have a comfortable amount of pixels to work with WRT the normal map details; if I had more I could end up in a limbo where I wouldn't know what to do with them. :nervous:

In any case, the smaller panel lines will actually end up being 1/3 thinner, as currently they're generated from a simple heightmap resulting in them being 3px wide whereas eventually I'll turn them into 2px wide grooves.

Sorry, I thought they were the real thing. That's why you're planning to draw directly onto the normal map?

 

Offline zookeeper

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Re: Imperial II-class Star Destroyer Reborn
The Home One was mapped into a square, then divided into four. Are there any obvious lines? Still, I think you might need another texture for the hangar. That's the thing you'll see up close.

There's quite a few islands which go from one edge of the texture to the other, so splitting would mean re-organizing stuff a lot and that gets annoying fast. As for the hangar, Brand left plenty of space for extras like that so I can already spare about 1400x1400 for them. If that's not enough then yes, splitting the hangars into a separate texture would be very easy. We'll see.

Sorry, I thought they were the real thing. That's why you're planning to draw directly onto the normal map?

Yeah, that seems to be the only way to get really crisp and clean details; all the heightmap->normalmap generation tools seem to do the job by simple sampling algorithms, resulting in a rectangular extrusion getting 2px wide edges on each side and 1px-wide lines being turned into 3px-wide grooves/ridges.
« Last Edit: July 09, 2013, 02:37:16 am by zookeeper »

 

Offline Herra Tohtori

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Re: Imperial II-class Star Destroyer Reborn
You can circumvent that (to some extent) by using higher resolution height map to generate a normal map, then scale the normal map down to final size (which is the primary reason why I've been doing height maps at higher resolution than the final normal map resolution basically from when I first started fiddling with normal maps).

I did a little testing, and indications are as follows:

-If you have a height map with 1 pixel lines on it, you apply normalmap at 4sample or 3x3 setting to generate a three-pixel wide groove with sloped edges and flat bottom, then downscale that by factor of two at Linear setting, you end up with a nice, two-pixel wide groove without the flat bottom. After that it's simply a matter of enhancing contrast as required on both red and green channels.

-If you have a height map with 2 pixel lines on it, you apply normalmap at 4sample or 3x3 setting to generate a 5-pixel wide groove - 2 pixels on each edge and 1 flat pixel on the bottom of the groove. Then you can downscale by factor of 4 with Linear setting, and you end up with 2-pixel wide groove on normal map.

Finally, probably the most impressive and useful magic trick:

-If you have a height map with 4 pixel wide lines on it you apply normal map at 4sample or 3x3 setting, end up with 6 pixel wide grooves (2 pixels for sloped sides, 2 pixels wide flat bottom on the groove), downscale on Linear setting by factor of 4... and you end up with 2 pixel wide grooves on normal map, the thinnest that can exist.



What this means is that if you have a height map drawn at intended resolution, and need the normal map details to be sharper, you can upscale the height map by factor of four (preferably with "None" setting for scale-up, which preserves all the sharp edges of one-pixel lines and turns them into sharp, four-pixel lines), apply normal map and then downscale back to intended resolution...

Of course this works ideally only for horizontal and vertical lines. Diagonal lines are a bit trickier and results are not always optimal - but then again, diagonals are always a problem in textures due to aliasing effects and you can't apply anti-aliasing without thickening the lines, and if you thicken lines on texture you end up needing to use a higher resolution texture to keep the visual thickness of the diagonal lines acceptably thin. Problem is, of course, that at the resolutions we're talking about... there's not much budget for further upscaling, is there?

Thankfully, the post-processing anti-aliasing will hopefully mitigate some of the aliasing effects. And, even more luckily, most of the smallest details on the ISD seem to be horizontal and vertical lines... so this upscale-heightmap-apply-normalmap-downscale magic trick SHOULD work.

Hopefully it'll save you some work re-drawing normal maps by hand, but if it doesn't provide satisfactory results, there's always the bruteforce hand-drawing method available. Worth a try regardless, I'd say.


Pictured: Progression from one-pixel wide line on height map, to three-pixel wide groove on normal map, to two-pixel wide groove on a downscaled normal map. Testing done with GIMP.





« Last Edit: July 13, 2013, 11:07:33 pm by Herra Tohtori »
There are three things that last forever: Abort, Retry, Fail - and the greatest of these is Fail.

 

Offline zookeeper

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Re: Imperial II-class Star Destroyer Reborn
That's really cool. Thanks a lot, that ought to come in handy. :yes:

 

Offline zookeeper

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Re: Imperial II-class Star Destroyer Reborn
A WIP shot of the texturing of the main internal hangar:


 

Offline Luis Dias

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Re: Imperial II-class Star Destroyer Reborn
what sorcery is this?

I didn't know the ISD had this kind of hangar. Always learning new stuff... thought that only the executor had this.

this is bloody amazing :yes:

 

Offline zookeeper

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Re: Imperial II-class Star Destroyer Reborn
Well there's supposed to be a hangar for launching/landing various assault craft behind the big door at the back of the main docking bay. Of course it's never shown in the movies (except for Vader's arrival on the Executor, but that's a different ship anyway) nor did I particularly follow the few glimpses one can see a few non-movie sources.

Here's (much more WIP'ier) shots of the other hangars; two small landing hangars for TIEs and the frontal docking bay. The latter features a roof that opens up to reveal a hangar just big enough to hold a single Lambda shuttle.



 

Offline Luis Dias

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Re: Imperial II-class Star Destroyer Reborn
Yes, I checked in the internets. The sheer amount of lore schematics people have created for this ship alone is mind boggling! :yes:

 

Offline Cobra

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Re: Imperial II-class Star Destroyer Reborn
not enough cables
To consider the Earth as the only populated world in infinite space is as absurd as to assert that in an entire field of millet, only one grain will grow. - Metrodorus of Chios
I wept. Mysterious forces beyond my ken had reached into my beautiful mission and energized its pilots with inhuman bomb-firing abilities. I could only imagine the GTVA warriors giving a mighty KIAAIIIIIII shout as they worked their triggers, their biceps bulging with sinew after years of Ivan Drago-esque steroid therapy and weight training. - General Battuta

 

Offline Mongoose

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Re: Imperial II-class Star Destroyer Reborn
If the Imperial March is not playing in your head after looking at these screenshots, you're doing it wrong.

 

Offline Cobra

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Re: Imperial II-class Star Destroyer Reborn
What if it came on just as I clicked the link to view the thread in my email?
To consider the Earth as the only populated world in infinite space is as absurd as to assert that in an entire field of millet, only one grain will grow. - Metrodorus of Chios
I wept. Mysterious forces beyond my ken had reached into my beautiful mission and energized its pilots with inhuman bomb-firing abilities. I could only imagine the GTVA warriors giving a mighty KIAAIIIIIII shout as they worked their triggers, their biceps bulging with sinew after years of Ivan Drago-esque steroid therapy and weight training. - General Battuta