Hard Light Productions Forums
Community Projects => The FreeSpace Upgrade Project => Topic started by: Galemp on April 25, 2008, 02:34:18 pm
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The Typhon maps are done. Any volunteers for screenshots? ...If I don't get any within the next two hours you'll all have to wait for tonight. :) (http://www.b3ta.cr3ation.co.uk/data/zip/capital03.zip)
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GalEmp: First problem was that with the "a" in the filenames, the new normal, shine and glowmaps weren't being used. Renaming the files from capital03-01a* to capital03-01* fixed that problem.
EDIT: This issue was caused by TrashMan's Typhon model - the retail model requires the a letter... how troublesome. :blah:
Well, here be screenies of things I took note to...
1. The shinemap needs an alpha channel to control environmental mapping. There's some visible on the dark side, and I don't think that's very characteristic for Vasudan ships.
(http://i27.tinypic.com/a0fggw.png)
2. The shinemap is... shiny. Perhaps too shiny for Vasudan ships? I have always thought of Vasudan ships as matt surfaced (apart from machinery)...
(http://i26.tinypic.com/2q1ewrl.png)
(http://i26.tinypic.com/29dwh92.png)
3. There's some kind of seam going along the length of the ship in the middle. Nothing serious, but noticeable nevertheless.
(http://i28.tinypic.com/2dgt8n5.png)
Also, very close to the hull, the normal (and especially hight map, which probably won't be worth using for majority of users, kinda the opposite) distorts the bright square "windows" or lights or whatever they're supposed to be... I would recommend flattening them out of the normal and height maps since they get a bit of a weird appearance from them and cause some strange shimmering and some also look like they are inverted (?)...
(http://i30.tinypic.com/29qdtw5.png)
Regarding shinemaps, I took the liberty to edit the shinemap (basically I increased saturation, reduced brightness, and then alpha masked it to eliminate env mapping problems. Oh, and converted the files to DDS format to eliminate shimmering with MIP maps.
Here's how it looks after that (on my specifig lighting settings...):
(http://i25.tinypic.com/208afdd.png)
(http://i27.tinypic.com/2ntcmfn.png)
(http://i26.tinypic.com/10zz7rp.png)
Relevant lighting command line switches: -ambient_factor 0 -ogl_spec 20 -spec_exp 15 -spec_point 1.2 -spec_static 1.5 (at least I think these are the relevant ones... Can't bother to re-check Wiki at the moment. :nervous: )
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I love them!
That ship is awesome!
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I love them!
That ship is awesome!
That's like answering "yes please" to the question "Which is more appealing to you, mammaries or the posterior area of a female member of our species?"
Could you be more specific? Like, do you prefer the matte version or the shiny version? :p
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er... you didn't get them yet. :blah: Try clicking the smiley face in my last post for the most recent ones.
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I really like Tohtori's modified set vs the first set, at least with that graphics setup. Definitely the right amount of shine and the detail is noticeable.
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er... you didn't get them yet. :blah: Try clicking the smiley face in my last post for the most recent ones.
:lol:
Well you did post an earlier version... earlier, and unless one happens to move the cursor on top of that smilie it's not guaranteed that one notices that it's a link in the first place... I'll check the later ones out now. :nod:
EDIT: Mirror mirror on the... space? :shaking:
(http://i30.tinypic.com/9fp7jn.png)
Alpha maps needed, badly.
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er... you didn't get them yet. :blah: Try clicking the smiley face in my last post for the most recent ones.
It was too ingeniously hidden!
Hmmm...I just have a mission I'm making that has Typhons. Great timing~!
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Okay, here's some new screenies of the newest set of maps that was hidden by Galactic Emperor's clever ruse...
There's some... I dunno... cartoonyness present around the hangar bays, and the tiling of the texture around the hangar looks a bit excessive to me but I don't think it's the maps' fault, the model and it's mapping just blows.
(http://i28.tinypic.com/ouph7t.png)
Otherwise, it looks quite good (the overall brightness in these shots is because there are three suns in my skybox test mission and I couldn't be bothered to change them...):
(http://i31.tinypic.com/apfe0.png)
(http://i31.tinypic.com/28anif8.png)
Although, the main texture's normal mapping could possibly be a bit more sharply defined and/or more detailed - on close inspection it seems to fade out for whatever reason (could be the sun glare brightening the whole screen as well, at least partially):
(http://i31.tinypic.com/148fbzq.png)
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I'm confused. Am I the only one who thinks the earlier version looks far better? Maybe it's just the angles, but I can't even make out the normal maps on that new one.
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I love them!
That ship is awesome!
That's like answering "yes please" to the question "Which is more appealing to you, mammaries or the posterior area of a female member of our species?"
Could you be more specific? Like, do you prefer the matte version or the shiny version? :p
Ah yes, definitely the shiny - not a fan of the fighter bays but everything else looks great.
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ahh, you're using Trashman's typhon which has messed up mapping. Try it on the original model... without 3 suns.
And remember I myself haven't tried these in game. These are straight from Gimp and Crazybump so there's bound to be some weirdness.
I'm wondering how the black rectangular paneling will look... I tried to move a lot of the shading present in the original map to the normal map but I'm uncertain about how it looks.
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Yeah, the new capital03-01-normal looks significantly more blurry than the older one. Here's a comparision of new and old ones:
Old normal map:
(http://i30.tinypic.com/2liergy.png)
New normal map:
(http://i32.tinypic.com/96xoj5.png)
I prefer the sharper one of these... (EDIT: although it has to be said that the latter has a lot less compression artefacts on the gradient blurred areas).
Crazybump is not the best thing to use in my limited experience about normal mapping, though. I prefer using the GIMP normal map plugin (http://registry.gimp.org/node/69), with 4 sample mode, multiplier anything from 20 to 40 tends to make pretty good, well-defined plating details. CrazyBump just bumps stuff crazily and the controls are somehow pretty awkward...
Regarding TrashMan's Typhon: OH SNAP :shaking:. Someone has put it into the 3.6.10 MediaVP's for some reason... and with no ill intentions towards TrashMan's job, I don't think it should be there. :rolleyes: EDIT: This was also the reason why the "a" caused the textures to not work initially... the retail model does seem to require the letter in the filename in order to use the textures.
Can't take screenshots right now, the morning sun is making my room very bright even through the curtains and it makes my TFT screen practically worthless when it comes to viewing something like a dark-ish ship on a darker background... :nervous: Mapping did improve though as I put the retail typhon model into mediavps/data/models.
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Regarding TrashMan's Typhon: OH SNAP :shaking:. Someone has put it into the 3.6.10 MediaVP's for some reason... and with no ill intentions towards TrashMan's job, I don't think it should be there. :rolleyes: EDIT: This was also the reason why the "a" caused the textures to not work initially... the retail model does seem to require the letter in the filename in order to use the textures.
At least its not glitched as badly as the HTL Ravana... :rolleyes: For one thing, it can be hit.
The model itself isn't bad, TrashMan just needs to fix the mapping.
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TrashMan's HTL Typhon just messed up the textures for a few more polys, which i didn't find inviting. IMO he should've spent more time giving it more details like he did with the Orion.
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Maybe we should bug him about it :P And about the HTL Demon.
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I happen to like the shiny version. Oh well, we'll see how things progress, since this is a work in progress of sorts.
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I happen to like the shiny version. Oh well, we'll see how things progress, since this is a work in progress of sorts.
They look like they've got plastic film over them, kind of defeats the purpose of normal maps IMO.
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ahh, you're using Trashman's typhon which has messed up mapping. Try it on the original model... without 3 suns.
I mapped mine following the originals pattern (except for one glaring mistake just in front of the bridge..couldn't fix it before exporting).
To make a really good HTL Typhon you'd need new textures, since the stock one just don't cut if for the ammount of detail you might want to add. Like the lower fins - using stock textures to map that - damn near impossible unless I strech the texture to infinity.
Hmmmm...I don't recall the tiling around the hangarbay to be that excessive.. :wtf:
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IMO the Typhon should just be UVmapped.
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What exactly is UVmapping?
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Basically you just unfold the model, texture the flat sheet, and fold it back up into the model.
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Look at the way the textures are applied to a fighter, then at the way they're applied to a capital ship.
Then open up the original Aeolus and the new high-poly Aeolus.
UV Mapping (in this context) refers to using one, large, high-resolution texture over the entire ship instead of multiple smaller textures and tiling them. The original Freespace engine got better performance with smaller textures; the new one gets better performance with fewer textures.
Technically, UV mapping is the process of applying texture coordinates to polygons. Whereas each face has X, Y, and Z coordinates (its location in 3D space) it also has U, V, and W coordinates (its location on the texture map.) Every textured model has UV coordinates but here we're talking about the painstaking process of combining all the tile textures onto one huge texture and reassigning UVs for each face in the model.
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Oh, okay. That's interesting, I had no idea. So, UV mapping means that each ship has its own big texture, instead of applying textures to each face. I'm not a modder, so I didn't really understand.
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IMO the Typhon should just be UVmapped.
I agree, though I also think that a good HTL Typhon model (one that would well suit the type of texture) would be one of the hardest models to make of all the [v] ships. ;)
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Oh, okay. That's interesting, I had no idea. So, UV mapping means that each ship has its own big texture, instead of applying textures to each face. I'm not a modder, so I didn't really understand.
Technicly, UV mapped ships can use whatever number of textures you want. For fighters it's customary to have 1 texture, but in a game like FS to use one texture for capships would end up looking terrible. You can get away with that in a RTS because you can only zoom so far, but in FS you can actually fly around the ship just a few inches from it's hull, so a single texture would end up looking terribly overtiled.
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I think you mean blurry there rather than overtiled, as you don't typically tile a single UV mapped texture at all. ;)
I disagree that you can't apply a single UV mapped texture to capships without it looking overly blurry up close. With a large map, good use of texture area, maybe using detail boxes and possibly combining all this with a baked AO map to conceal lower detail parts, you can get around the slight blurry problem in most cases.
The end result will look a million times better than the tile mapped equivillant model, not to mention run much faster and more efficiently.
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You'd need a VERY big texture is you want it end up looking half decent.
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Depends on how good your UV mapping and texture space usage is, but a single 2048 res map is pretty good for anything symetrical up to around destroyer size.
However even if you end up using two or so huge maps to cover the surface area of a larger ship, it's so worth it for the visual improvements it provides over tiling the same ship.
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I know that it was stated earlier that the game runs better on fewer maps, but what would the performance difference be between using a 2048x2048 map and 4 1024 maps, since the actual memory usage would be the same?
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Taylor's post on how to model efficiently
Is it more or less efficient to have a really big ship use 2 big 2048 res maps as opposed to say, 8 smaller ones (256), and is the vastly superior visual quality worth the cost in terms of RAM usage?
The fewer textures the better. Try not to waste the texture, nearly every part of the texture image should apply to some part of the model. If you've got a bunch of black space in the texture then you didn't map it very well. As mention in the above responses you have to try and control the want of quality with the need for usability. Not only is the visual quality usually not worth the RAM and general slowdown of a 2048x2048 texture but since the texture will have to get resized 99% of the time it's on the screen the visual quality will actually decreased in when use. Use the fewest and the smallest textures that you can in order to get the required detail across to the gamer. This will mean sacrificing something but when it comes down to sacrificing some detail in order to keep the game playable I would think that no hesitation would come from ditching that extra detail. Remember than each model is just a piece of the game and needs to be created knowing that the more detail that's included in the model's textures is a price that the game as a whole has to pay. What you can get away with will always differ based on the model but that's why this is a consideration for the model makers and those that create textures. Oh and never, EVER use a texture larger than 2048x2048. That's the largest size that most cards can use and anything larger will get resized to that automatically but will also seriously hurt rendering speed, memory, and image quality.
Two other big reasons why you should use fewer maps.
One, there is a hard-coded limit to the number of textures that can be used at any one time; if more than that are in use you will get graphics corruption.
Two, with all the glowmaps, shinemaps, normal maps, height maps, and other maps that are being rendered with each texture, the performance increase is actually much greater than it would be if you were simply using a base diffuse map.
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IMO the Typhon should just be UVmapped.
I agree, though I also think that a good HTL Typhon model (one that would well suit the type of texture) would be one of the hardest models to make of all the [v] ships. ;)
And TrashMan's was just a smoothed out version at the expense of the textures. No offense, TrashMan, but I didn't like your HTL Typhon.
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Okay, here's some new screenies of the newest set of maps that was hidden by Galactic Emperor's clever ruse...
There's some... I dunno... cartoonyness present around the hangar bays, and the tiling of the texture around the hangar looks a bit excessive to me but I don't think it's the maps' fault, the model and it's mapping just blows.
(http://i28.tinypic.com/ouph7t.png)
Otherwise, it looks quite good (the overall brightness in these shots is because there are three suns in my skybox test mission and I couldn't be bothered to change them...):
(http://i31.tinypic.com/apfe0.png)
(http://i31.tinypic.com/28anif8.png)
Although, the main texture's normal mapping could possibly be a bit more sharply defined and/or more detailed - on close inspection it seems to fade out for whatever reason (could be the sun glare brightening the whole screen as well, at least partially):
(http://i31.tinypic.com/148fbzq.png)
I know its kind of off topic...but where can I get beautiful backgrounds like those that are used in these screenshots??
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It's Herra's skybox that's released for download on FreeSpaceMods.net
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It's Herra's skybox that's released for download on FreeSpaceMods.net
thanks buddy!