[IncendiaryLemon]

How difficult would it be to create an original work of that fidelty, without NASA for textures?

[Bobboau]

imposable

[Fineus]

Not necessarily, just very long winded. It could be done though...

[Bobboau]

ok, prove it

[Stryke 9]

Yeah, Thunder, take hours out of your life to prove some niggling point to a guy you barely know on an internet forum!


You think some peer pressure from other largely anonymous strangers will help?

DO IT! DO IT! DO IT! [others join in]






Anyway. That resolution really isn't necessary for the subject, and it'd be a system killer to run. It doesn't improve anything to have it so... uber, and as was mentioned the tiled textures seem to give it rather ugly problems around the edges. A single texture of 2048xsomething would be plenty, I think, plus at the distances where you'd even be able to notice individual pixels people'd already be too busy going on about "WHAR IS TEH GRAVITIE" to notice the nice tex job on the planet.


It's a cool job, but really background stuff like planets is just there so people have a setting for the action- if people are going sightseeing in a shooter, you've probably done something wrong, and it's a pain in the processor to handle stuff like that- especially when people'll be wanting to spend that memory and ****e on things that actually have a real bearing on the game, like cruisers and bombers and Christ knows what shooting at you.

[Fineus]

Hey, I said it was possible - I never said that I was the man for the job

*glances at Lightspeed*

[Flipside]

Omni, I think you'll find no matter how much smoothing, you will always be able to see the specular polygons to a certain degree because specular is calculated on a per-vertex basis (I think) the more polys you have in an area, the less noticeable the 'poly' effect. Once pixel shaders are implemented however.....

Also, I am assuming you are surface baking on the textures? If so then I've found that lightwave doesn't account for smoothing whilst doing this, so it can actually make polygons more noticable.

Anyway, don't know if that's any help whatsoever, but that's my pennies worth

[Omniscaper]

I guess I'll have to either reduce polygon count or remove shinies all together. I really don't want to give up water shinies, it looks so purdy.

No surface baking here Flipside. The photos where that good. I would think bumpmap baking may look better better when composited with diffuse textures. Lightwave sucks at baking spheres though.

In regards to original textures, whats wrong with using satellite composites from NASA when it comes to our home planet? There are lots of wonderfull sources for Earth photos, it would be ashame to not utiliz them. I would be willing to work on original textures for other planets.

I'm more of a painter (oil and acrylic)  than a photoshop guru, but I'll take up an original project via traditional media thanks to scanners and digital cameras. I can take care of 2 birds with one stone with this art project. It will take awhile though.

I just exploded earth a little while ago and it takes quite awhile for a 45000 meter model to finally disintegrate. I believe it took a good 3 minutes for it to finally disappear. Is there any way I can control the vectors of the debris? I'm working on an Earth defense mission and debris models are currently in the works. I was thinking of putting at least 10 debris models of molten earth.

[Bobboau]

been watching enterprise I see

[Omniscaper]

Enterprise!? You mean the Captain Cheese Beagle series? I feel insulted. I haven't watched that show for over 4 months. I gave up on it's premise.

I'm REALLY having trouble removing the seams of those textures without obvious overlapping. Unless some can give me pointers on Truespace texturing. Any UV mapping I do in 3dsmax is altered by Truespace when imported. For I'll just have to stick with a single texture of 2048.

Hey Bobbaou, when your decal engine is perfected, I forsee awesome planetary bombardment effects, as long as I can control the decal size instead of have it locked to the weapon size.

[Bobboau]

I only say that becase it has the coolest sceen of earth getting blasted to bits ever, man that was cool/ and the thiird season is great, if you just sit back and accept the fact that it's about a time war, not the foundation of the federation.

truespace displays things wrong, all textures will be off by one pixel.

[Omniscaper]

Would it help to resize my textures to overlap by one pixel? That woul require an overhaul in photoshop. Truespace's materials editor is a joke compared to 3dstudio's. Its a poain to juggle texture alignment of 8 textures which requires precision. SEAMS ARE KILLING ME.

The last Captain cheese beagle episode I saw was of some probe making a slice at the eastcoast. It was nifty, I admit, but this expanse twist thing seems all to Voyager esque. Scott Bakula doesn't cut it as a captain unless Starfleet wants whiny captains. That Vulcan minx is quite a looker though.

[Turnsky]

jesus man, you're really pushing the fs2 engine to it's zenith...

kudos.. i don't really care if there are lines on the planet, it is after all a first test... it can be improved over time methinks..

[Bobboau]

that's were it started getting good

[Ace]

Originally posted by Bobboau
been watching enterprise I see

I was thinking the same thing.

If someone has a model of the NX-01 in FreeSpace, it'd be great to have a beauty shot of it and the Earth

Plus I'm thinking about Bob's decal code and a custom decal being used as a beam weapon re-enacts the east coast of the Americas getting zapped

[Bobboau]

decals don't work for beams yet,
eh, technicaly they don't work at all

look for the eppisode "Twilight" all you need is the first five minutes of it

[Woolie Wool]

Originally posted by Omniscaper
*snip*

It has eight 2048x2048 textures for the earth and clouds have another eight textures of same size. I'm not sure if this is an efficient way of handling textures, but using a single spherical mapped texture didn't produce the level of detail that tickled my fancy.

My only problems with this version are the texture seams and shading issues with specular. What are the best settings for auto-facet? I toyed with a number of settings which all still produce a faceting effect with the speculars. I really wanna keep the water shine.

The model is 45,000 meters in diameter as to keep it within clipping distance when far away and is composed of 2 5k poly spheres (60 sides in truespace)

Any help or suggestions for better auto-facet settings,  texture handling and seam reduction would be appreciated.

Now that clipping limits have been extended, blow it up to full size and release it! That just kicks so much ass!

[Omniscaper]

Let there be night light. I decided to concede with a single 2048x2048 texture size. Until I fix the seam problem, I'll have to settle. Once I get my debris models finished, I'll release this single texture version.

[Turnsky]

[Lt.Cannonfodder]

Originally posted by Turnsky

I second that and add: