[SpardaSon21]

You out-drank an Irishwoman?  Props, man.

[headdie]

Silly Irish girl thought she could outdrink me, but that probably wasn't a battle I should have fought.

Either way you still loose

[chief1983]

No she 'loose'

j/k

[LordMelvin]

I have a new desktop background! Yay!

[Raiden]

Oh what's this?  An update?

  Fantastic!

[rscaper1070]

It's a real good sign when the Vader theme starts playing in my head when I look at that picture. Nice work!

[brandx0]

And another update

[brandx0]

And yet another!

[Sololop]

Superb!

[swashmebuckle]

The unfinished areas are swallowed up in a wave of awesome!

[Pred the Penguin]

Really beautiful engines.

What kind of engine flares will FotG be using?

[brandx0]

Default FS ones.

Haha! kidding...

[LordMelvin]

Really beautiful engines.

What kind of engine flares will FotG be using?

Default FS ones.

http://nooooooooooooooo.com/

[starlord]

sweet! can we trenchrun?

[Luis Dias]

If only FSO could render it so beautifully as your renderer does....

[TopAce]

How do you know what it looks like in game?

[newman]

Those renders are basically simple clay renders with ambient occlusion. This is something you can bake into a texture easily and depending on texture resolution, the ship in the game can look just as well. Better, actually, once you introduce proper diffuse textures with applied ao, speculars and normals into the mix. Long story short, it can and most probably will look better than this in the game.

[zookeeper]

Looking at the engines it doesn't seem like the geometry was smoothed for the renders, but there's still some other lighting and shadows besides AO used there so pretty surely the game won't render it as nicely. However, it'll still look much nicer in-game than it'd really ever need to, so who cares, really?

[chief1983]

The only thing that doesn't usually translate as nicely to in game is normal maps.  Once brand starts working on those, he makes height maps, which his renderer can do much more with than FSO can with normal maps.

[brandx0]

These last couple renders have been done using what's called a studio lighting setup, which is a real world photography technique designed for advertising, where the product is photographed with a couple of large, diffuse lights (meaning large and soft, not the texturing use of the word Diffuse) of slightly different temperatures in order to still allow it to have some shadowing and detail showing, as well as contouring, but also to minimize the amount of the product that's hidden in shadow.  The only real major difference that you won't get in game is the soft shadows, but once in game it'll have normal maps and baked in AO (Which I include the normal maps in, making them a bit more realistic) so all in all it'll probably look better in game than these particular renders.  Once I get it mapped and lit of course, a professional renderer will look better for sure, but you can take your pick, a model that looks pretty damn good in game and is playable, or a quad core processor spending 10-15 minutes chugging away at each frame (That's about 0.07 FPS =P)