[mjn.mixael]

That would be pretty neat.. at least for some of the major texture details!

[The E]

IMHO, no. I don't think the Knossos would really benefit from that many polies.

[Rga_Noris]

I'm not sure that your wirefram shot is telling the whole story, as that poly count seems oddly high. The Hatty is near the 30K mark, and it's surprising that the Knossos would approach those numbers. Am I missing something in regards to where all of those polies are going?

[Kolgena]

I think he means that that's the total for all 8 subunits, unless I'm missing something here.

[Vasudan Admiral]

It sounds a heap, but 32k polys total would mean a poly budget of 4k per component, which isn't really all that much compared to most HTL ships of comparable size of an individual component. As such, detail is going to have to be somewhat limited I guess. :\

[Mongoose]

That doesn't really matter a massive amount in the long run, I think, since the components are just about always in motion, so you won't be able to pick out fine details anyway.

[Rga_Noris]

That all makes sense. I would also say that the knossos being in motion will make it hard to pick out any details.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

Okay, so no modelled-in waviness then? Like Kolgena and VA said, it's the grand total polycount I'm talking about.

[peterv]

Knossos being in motion is one thing. There's also Knossos in stills.
And since this is a very beautiful (and big) design i think that the polycount is not that important.
Afterall it's less than 10 high-poly fighters.

[Angelus]

Knossos being in motion is one thing. There's also Knossos in stills.
And since this is a very beautiful (and big) design i think that the polycount is not that important.
Afterall it's less than 10 high-poly fighters.

The poly count is important, especially on objects like the Knossos, where you can't see the detail.

[Zacam]

The poly count over all is less important than the texture count.

And normal maps can only go so far.

And how many of these are in any one mission?

I'd say, keep the existing working item. Make a duplicate where the "ripples" are modeled in. We'll see how much it increases poly count during smoothing and conversion and which impacts performance the most. If it's negligible, we'll put in the "ripple" version.

Of course, I'm only speaking as someone who can barely manage to import a DAE, size and smooth it, export it and have it turn into a POF in Blender, so I realize that this is something I can't really do and I appreciate the amount of skill and work it takes to do this, and I think it would look really sexy. And I think the engine can afford it, but it would be better to have one that isn't to fall back on, just in case.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

Okay, well, here's a preliminary conversion attached. It's a tilemapped, unLOD-ed version. What I intend to do is unwrap this model onto a single UV-space and bake these textures onto it, and combine it with an AO bake.

I'm aware of two texture-distortion issues in the current model, which I'll fix before baking - see picture below. If you spot any other errors, please let me know.

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[attachment deleted by admin]

[CommanderDJ]

These are looking really good!

[FreeSpaceFreak]

About done unwrapping detail1, I'll create the detail0 mapping based on this one.

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[FreeSpaceFreak]

In PCS2, Header tab, there's a section called "Cross Sections". The original Knossos has 25 of them. What is that, does it actually do something?

Also, do I copy mass, centre of mass offset and MMOI from the retail model or does that not matter?

Edit: Oh, and does anyone know how to bake textures with alpha channel in Blender?

[Galemp]

Copy over all the retail data that you can. Don't change things unless you have a good reason to.

In fact, when the Mass was incorrect on the high-poly Cain model, it actually broke a mission.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

Right, if nobody knows what those cross-sections are for, I'm not gonna put them all in manually. So yeah it's done. MediaFire download
If anyone feels like improving on the maps, that would be much appreciated; because of my inexperience with texturing, the shinemap is just the diffuse map without AO, and there's no normal map. But otherwise, it's just plug and play.

Edit: Download here

[Enioch]

Edit: Oh, and does anyone know how to bake textures with alpha channel in Blender?

I don't. But I know how you can cheat:

Extract the Alpha channel from the image in photoshop/Gimp. Use it as a diffuse map. Apply it to your model. Repeat for as many tiling textures as you have.

Bake the Black-and-white textures to a single black-and-white texture.

Use the black-and-white bake texture as an Alpha channel for the final texture.

Profit.

I suppose it's for the shinemaps?

P.S. Very good job, BTW.

[Lukeskywalkie]

Loving these - I just finished another run through FS2 (with BP shaders and a new hud, although antipodes is still rather unstable), and I couldn't help but notice the knossos as it is now.  an upgrade has been a long time coming, thank you!

[FreeSpaceFreak]

Enioch is awesome

Shinemap
Normal map

Edit: See here