[sigtau]

Hate brigade can keep hating, this is pure win.  I can't wait to see the glowy domes being... well, glowy.

While we're on the subject of replacing old tilemaps, though, I'd be interested in seeing the Aeolus getting an upgrade akin to this one (the current one looks fine, but looks a lot like the GVCv Sobek in terms of HTL quality, so yeah).

DISREGARD THAT, I SUCK COCKS

[Droid803]

WTF u smoking sigtau.
the Aeolus has a UVmapped texture. it has no tilemaps.

the Sobek looks and is for all intents and purposes is retail except for its multipart turrets >.>

did you even look at the aeolus and put it next to the retail one? the difference is big. do the same with the sobek, and I can barely tell the difference (assuming both are using mediavp tiles)

maybe u mean deimos.
or orion.
or ヘカテー.

[mjn.mixael]

This thread is the reason why the Orion will never get a good HTL...

[esarai]

While I can almost see how people get the impression the HTL Chary textures are similar to the Solaris', The Solaris has faaaaar more contrast, and the plating density is nowhere near as high as the Chary.

Sab0o, this model is awesome, and I think it fits the GTVA design themes perfectly.  Keep up the good work.

[Flipside]

It does make you wonder, though, if the modellers had access to the facilities available to the FSO/FSU team, how would these models have looked? I get a feeling that a lot of stuff was just done using stock textures, not as an aesthetic choice by the modellers themselves, but because the textures were already available and it's cheaper, easier and faster to use what you already have than to create new ones.

I suppose that's part of the point of reimagination, not simply a question of upping the textures, because that's just polishing what was, at the end of the day, a trade-off between convenience, speed and production costs and putting them onto the same low-detail models. I suspect any member of the original FS2 team would look at that and say 'That's more how we would have liked the Charybdis to look if the game engine and deadline-setting had permitted it'. Well, now it does.

[bigchunk1]

I think the model is a definate upgrade. It's different from the fs2 one sure, but I think that's more because it's been modernized rather than changed from a design perspective. Assuming the blue domes are going to look awesome, only one thing really strikes out at me. Many of the grey plate faces have little to no detail except around the edges. Maybe that's the intent to give it a 'clean' look. I'd really like to see it rendered in game in some nebula mission before I say much more.

[Rga_Noris]

The model and texture are fantastic, actually.

Everyone must bear in mind that when HTLing ANY ship, a large portion of what is to be done will come from the artist. There simply are too few decent references to tell what V would have done. Take the Sath... Shape you can copy, but since the textures are largely tile maps, any details must come from your head, as I am positive that V would not have modeled the repeated details in the retail textures if given the chance to.

In the case where textures are not tiled, then they are truly the only reference we have... there is no telling the motives behind the design choices of the textures, be it due to stock/available textures or intentional design. Which ones to keep and which to toss are entirely up to the designer.

The other issue that arises is one that arises anytime anyone tries to redo something from way back when. Take Deus Ex: HR. It is, by itself, a good game. If you pick it up and expect to play the original Deus Ex, you will likely be disappointed. Now apply that to these models: On its own, a fantastic model. Compare it to what you think the Charby should look like, that image that has been in your head for years, and will not match up.

In both the cases of the game and models, members of the community will have a choice: Either except the new, or be constantly let down. That does not mean that you must like every model that comes through the door; instead it means that you need to judge a model based on the craftsmanship. Does it look well made? Does it look Terran? Does it look like a ship that is built for the task it was designed for? This model is a "yes" on all three accounts, so it gets an A in my book.

If you walk in an and ask the question: "Does it look like I think V would have wanted it to look?" you will almost always answer "no", occasionally "kinda", and very seldom ever "yes."

[Hades]

I'm not saying anything about tilemapping, just adding more 90 degree angles and regularity to the lines. It is an awesome work, but IMHO, it's too much like BP designs. It makes the AWACS look like it's from the same yard as Solaris and the new Narayana.

90 degree angles are ugly. That's why you'll rarely find many on my models, because I try to get rid of them. And no, it doesn't look a damn thing like Esarai's ships.

FS2 ships have, in general, quite utilitarian, angular look.

No they don't. The Hecate is curvy, as is the Deimos and Aeolus, Myrmidon, Artemis, Boanerges, etc. Need me to continue? I think ****ing not.

Irregular panels or varying shades of gray are staple of Esarai's designs, especially Solaris and Kvasir.

That's all the FS2 terran tilemaps are, irregular panels and shades of grey. Learn to use your ****ing eyes and not your nostaglia goggles.

I agree with Dragon. I like current textures. They're awesome, but maybe for some next-generation Charybdis. Current ones don't reflect original Charybdis textures. Hull plating from Sab0o's version is totaly different than retail Charybdis textues. Hades, Iceni, Colossus, Typhon... They're the examples how the mediavps models should look after revamp.

Who the **** do you think you are, telling people how things should look?

Awww... Polish hate brigade. I feel honored Mr. My-taste-is-only-good-taste-and-my-subjective-opinion-is-only-righteous-opinion

Now back to the ground.
If you think the Charybdises are silmilar, take a look at this:

THIS is something similar. Iceni is the best example. Textures are THE SAME as in retail Iceni, but UPGRADED. The same color scheme, the same textures layout the same details, the same armour plating, the same everything, but uvmapped and refreshed. This is quintessence of VA's texturing genius.

The Iceni is a ****ing terrible example, it's just the tilemaps made into a uvmap, which is fairly ugly. Vasudan Admiral himself ****ing hates the Iceni.

This is Freespace UPGRADE Project, not the Freespace Artistic Reimagination Project. Idea of FSU is upgrade everything, not add artistic inventions of the autors.
Open your eyes and look. You're trying to change the aiming of the FSU to your subjective tastes, and you don't care about everyone who think different than you. Keeping everything the same as in FS is the most important. Leave your artistic invention to mods.

Go **** off and die. If we can't use any artistic license then we shouldn't even try to upgrade any of the models, because something will always be different and we'll always have a better way of doing something. Were it not for artistic license, my Medusa would have never been as good as it is.

The retail models for both the Charybdis and the Iceni are prime examples for 's sloppy modeling/texturing work for FS2.. i.e. some random geometry with some tile map slapped on it. This always made me cringe when thinking that they made fully UV-mapped cruisers for FS1, but resorted to this rush job for FS2... and that style is in my opinion totally not worth of preserving

So, any deviation of the (FS2) retail look can only be better in my book.

Hit it square on the head. The retail FS2 ships had awful textures and fairly bad shapes.

These new textures look so much better than that old random tilemapped brick wall texture its not even funny.  Polish hate brigade gonna hate.
Also that iceni is a terrible terrible example. That's not even an upgrade in any kind of shape or form. What the hell man 

Yup.


Yes, I'm angry. I'm angry because this type of nostalgia replies are what demotivate good working modelers and texturers. It's can also cause good **** to never be finished. It's baseless, rude, and just downright obnoxious and I'm sick of seeing it.

[Zacam]

This is Freespace UPGRADE Project, not the Freespace Artistic Reimagination Project. Idea of FSU is upgrade everything, not add artistic inventions of the autors.

As has been pointed out, you cannot have one without the other. Adding polies to a model when the end result is indiscernible from the original = fail. Only UV-mapping a series of tile maps, where again you can tell no difference at all = fail. Why? Because those are not UPGRADES, those are simply up-conversion housekeeping.

If the SCP did only that, we'd not have cool sexps, just faster retail sexps. We wouldn't have cool as hell OpenGL Features, we'd just have more hardware flexibility to current hardware. We wouldn't have more table options, we might not even have modular tables.

Our changes are not as significant as the BSG Re-imagined differences between the Cylons. Because we are still keeping to the identification of what makes the model the ship that it is. Love it or hate it, the new Medusa is still very obviously and distinctively a Medusa. The same way that this is quite obviously a Charybdis. And that is the FSU mandate: Retain the singular identification in a way that does not break or cause issues of balance for the use in Retail Campaign. Nothing in that says "preserve the exact mapping, the exact tone and don't touch a damn thing other than to upscale it". The SCP writes the code; we make it pretty.

As for all the broken up tile panels and what not, that's also been covered in detail by others, Herra put it best. And when you look at the "ears" on the Hecate and you see that, it doesn't look modern, it doesn't look futuristic, it looks like a badly tiled slab of something that is supposed to imply armor. I'd rather it look like a -functional- piece of armor, but what, your telling me that can't be re-textured from it's current appearance because that will kill the Epic Awesome? I think not.

Open your eyes and look. You're trying to change the aiming of the FSU to your subjective tastes, and you don't care about everyone who think different than you. Keeping everything the same as in FS is the most important. Leave your artistic invention to mods. I won't continue this pointless discussion because I told you it so many times and it's starting to be boring. Kudos only for Sab0o, for having keenness to texturing all of these models.

I care rather deeply about people that offer a SUBJECTIVE, POLITE and WELL ANALYZED opinion on the matter of differences between the FSU and Retail. Further, you realize that you're giving Kudo's to the texturer who is just as responsible as the modeler for changing the appearance of the model away from the retail look while complaining that we need to keep artistic license out of the project? Make up your mind.

Artistic license and passion are the things that DRIVE modelers and texturers. Anything else is just cookie-cutter stamping. Again, adding more polies to call something an upgrade when you cannot SEE the changes? Useless. Even just the simple task of rounding bevels or bezels or curves a bit more are ALL going to impact the appearance of the textured vs the perceived. And even if you do pull off a spectacular minimalistic upgrade to a model, you need to make changes in the way it's now textured to accommodate those changes, otherwise, what was the point of making them? The new Colossus serves this purpose well. The original maps were used in definable elements to mapping tho new one. And it doesn't look anything like the old one. But it is most definitely a Colossus, even if you never see the full shape of it. The elements are there, but it's not a direct case of "I just ported the tiles over to a UV and called it a day", because that just doesn't work. Same with the Typhon and the Hades.

And the old textures have extremely limited geometry to work with, so all the detail that could be implied HAD to be done by textures. And the economics of it resulted in there being a plethora of tile-mapping in FS2 for convenience sake, not out of any sense that those tiles actually aesthetically or artistically provided any semblance of the functionality for the ship (other than massively armor plated).

...the defining factor, as far as I can tell, for FSU models is that they resemble the original and they do not break single- or multiplay experience compared to the original, The colour of glowy bits etc is entirely in the hands of the person who took the trouble to make the model and is not really a factor in the functional acceptability of the model.

People can argue over aesthetics, that's fine, so long as it remains civilised, but the final decision lay in the hands of the creator for details and the FSU team for functionality and are primarily based on the above conditions.

A thousand times, this.

Some Results from Dictionary.com on the word 'Upgrade':
3: a new version, improved model, etc.
5: something, as a piece of equipment, that serves to improve or enhance
9: to improve or enhance the quality or value of
10: to improve the quality, value, effectiveness, or performance of something

Nowhere in there does it say anything about "slavish adherence to former style or direction, to eschew application of artist license or creative interpretation".


And as has already been said and is pretty much the community mantra: If you don't like it, do it or get it done by somebody else in what your idea of "better" is, I'm open and welcoming to all submissions or you can keep it to yourself, it's all the same to me. But there WILL be politeness involving disagreements over direction or artistic interpretation. There WILL be civilized debate on the matter. I'm also getting tired of people arguing against each OTHER rather than the ACTUAL ISSUES. Which I suppose can't be helped, we all form personal opinion and biases for and against each other, but we need to start leaving those behind when having these discussions.

[Dragon]

I was beginning to wonder if Dragon had a point when I was reading these replies.
but then I

This comparision is excellent in visualizing differences. In the original, there's a clear contrast between midsection, wings and nose, as well as between wings and engines. Your is uniform on it's entire lenght. There's also a structure under the dome, which is absent from your version. Light strip amidships is clearly yellow, and the engine section doesn't have plating on the stern. Red lights on antennae are a nice touch, but they contribute towards "UEF-ish" feel, which isn't a good thing (yellow or green could be better, or leave them gray and place glowpoints at the end). If you could correct these things, layout of plating should cease to matter. Also, as a minor thing, the blue strip at the front should be glowmapped and more saturated, though it's a minor thing. Also, to all emotional people out there, I'm not hating nor saying it's a bad texture, but instead try to give constructive criticism on how to make it better suited for Mediavps (if this was supposed to be a UEF ship, I wouldn't say anything).

[Zacam]

...There's also a structure under the dome, which is absent from your version...

Uhm.....WHAT? Do you not plainly see the rotational mechanism on the new one? If you are refering to the "paneling" surrounding the turret, then that I can agree is different, but I see no reason why that difference should make any difference at all, other than to maybe think about making the turret collar more distinctive so that it can stand out a little bit more.

As for the "clear contrast" between the midsection and wings....it's all uniformly tiled in the old one, I fail to see how that implies any contrast what so ever. And again, keep in mind that the texturing has to follow the detailing of the model, so the front main body section is more integrated with the midsection body which means there is going to be more of a distinctive shift in texturing that transition rather than tiling two discrete sections that are fused together. The new end result makes it look more like the ship was BUILT for it's purpose and actually had an intelligent design behind it, rather than being a bad lego brick-fest made out of necessity by cobbling together some spare parts. Which is more what the old model conveys vs the new model and the textures bring that about a lot more. As for the stern plating, I'll leave any adjustments of that to Sab0o's excellent taste.

And it honestly is graphically and resource wise LESS expensive to glow-map the tips to the Charybdis rather than using glow points. It also fits the shape of the rods better. As for their color, that can be easily changed and concepts tested on that, so no objection there to trying out different colors. Unfortunately, that is about the only portion of your statement that affords any modicum of agreement.

[Hellstryker]

The Iceni is a ****ing terrible example, it's just the tilemaps made into a uvmap, which is fairly ugly. Vasudan Admiral himself ****ing hates the Iceni.

You can do without putting words in people's mouths.

That said I'm not a fan of the Iceni myself, but the textures on this thing don't properly reflect how [V] would've wanted it to look, that fact is clear as day to me.

The Iceni may be a bad example, but the Orion wouldn't be the Orion without it's tiles. It would be a different ship, 'nuff said. Same goes for the HTL Hades, and the last time I checked, VA made that with... *GASP* ...Upgraded tiles.

I'll take a crack at texturing it myself if it's unwrapped already.

[Droid803]

the HTL Hades does not use "upgraded" tiles lolololol.
it does have some of the distinctive shapes in the tiles modelled in though.

was the last time you checked two years ago, before it had textures at all?

[Hellstryker]

I didn't mean to say it was tilemapped, I mean he tossed tiles on the UV map, unless that changed since the last render I saw of the beast. 

[Commander Zane]

but the textures on this thing don't properly reflect how [V] would've wanted it to look, that fact is clear as day to me.

Unless the dev team specifically stated this to you in private, you don't know a damn thing they would've done with anything in FreeSpace 2 if they could remake it all over again with today's hardware.
Unless that happened, you're just assuming.
Which it didn't.

In the end, whoever's contributing to upgrading assets for the MVPs can make whatever changes they want, really. This HTL Charybdis still looks like a Charybdis, take the textures off both of them, lay them flat on a wall in nothing but a solid black-and-white outline like a silhouette that you'd see in a military's "How-to Identify Your Target" poster, it still looks like the Charybdis, with higher polies.

If you want the Old Skool stuff, that's what the Retail game is for.

[Droid803]

I didn't mean to say it was tilemapped, I mean he tossed tiles on the UV map, unless that changed since the last render I saw of the beast. 

* Droid803 opens the texture file...

errr....no.

he did do a (exceptionally) good job keeping the look of the most distinctive tiles on it (the blue/yellow ones that run along the side), but the texture looks to me like it is "handmade" to me. There are absolutely no tiles tossed on.

[Hades]

You can do without putting words in people's mouths.

That said I'm not a fan of the Iceni myself, but the textures on this thing don't properly reflect how [V] would've wanted it to look, that fact is clear as day to me.

One, I'm not. VA said it himself. Two, where the **** are you getting that information from, your ass?

The Iceni may be a bad example, but the Orion wouldn't be the Orion without it's tiles. It would be a different ship, 'nuff said. Same goes for the HTL Hades, and the last time I checked, VA made that with... *GASP* ...Upgraded tiles.

You don't know a single damn thing you're talking about. The Hades uses a fully remade uvmap. Tilemaps look like ****, the job you did on that RHA battleship of mine included. An Orion without tilemaps would look great.

I'll take a crack at texturing it myself if it's unwrapped already.

No you won't. You can't do texture-making, from what I recall.

[Droid803]

To be fair he did say "if it's unwrapped already".

[Hellstryker]

* Droid803 opens the texture file...

errr....no.

he did do a (exceptionally) good job keeping the look of the most distinctive tiles on it (the blue/yellow ones that run along the side), but the texture looks to me like it is "handmade" to me. There are absolutely no tiles tossed on.

Err yes.

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y184/VA--Twisted_Infinities/Hades/HadesBadDay.jpg
http://i209.photobucket.com/albums/bb317/Tyrkeyz/Capital05-01.png

It's clearly used in several places. Just used -well-, unlike on the Iceni.

[Hades]

Err yes.

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y184/VA--Twisted_Infinities/Hades/HadesBadDay.jpg
http://i209.photobucket.com/albums/bb317/Tyrkeyz/Capital05-01.png

It's clearly used in several places. Just used -well-, unlike on the Iceni.

He REMADE the entire texture. None of the old texture was used once. It looks similar, sure, but that doesn't mean it's the same thing.