[Bobboau]

http://freespace.volitionwatch.com/blackwater/fs2_open_bm.zip

it's still quite early in development and dosen't work on larger ships, but it is ...interesting

blow something up, there will be a 3d explosion based on the ships geometrythis code can be used in the near future to auto-generate black outlines for cell shaded mode, something I said I wouldn't do, but have sence changed my mind.

[Taristin]

/me runs off to try this

[Solatar]

sweet...

[Taristin]

Eew... no... I don't like it

What else can you do with it?

[Solatar]

Definantly a step in the right direction, but could you make the explosion create rounder explosions? I know it looks cool, but ships don't blow up in squares.  

Only problem with increasing polys would be some slowdown if you were to make it more round.

[Fineus]

Interesting stuff indeed, very ugly - but as you say it's in the early stages. This has potential!

[Taristin]

I don't quite understand why we'd want this... anyone see the bigger picture? I don't...

[Fineus]

Potentially better explosions I guess... but I think the effect needs to be refined before the uses become apparent...

[Bobboau]

maybe a specal explosion hull could be made so mid sections would be more rounded and things like fins wouldn't show up as part of the explosion.

[terren]

I've lost my FS2 install disks, so I cant see what these looks like, can some one post a screen shot or 2?

[Bobboau]

it would be hard to get a good screen shot of it, what it does is it works like the grow modifier in 3ds max causeing a version of the model that is scaled up via moveing each vertex along it's averaged normal, it looks better on some models than others, like the mantacore, I think it looks good, on a herc (1) not very good, I'm thinking the explosion hull effect is going to be the way to go, but before I go into working on it too much more, I'm going to wait for some more feed back, specificly people who know how to make good looking explosions (in 3ds) and what they'd do.
I think I'm going to talk to the art people about this

[terren]

dang, I guess I'll just have to look for those disks harder...

[WMCoolmon]

[Bobboau]

actualy it might look better if I just bumped the contrast of the texture up a bit

[Bobboau]

yes it does look much better, lower the brightness and rase the contrast both by aroud 50

[Carl]

err...no. FS2 has the best looking explosions in any game ever. they actually look like real explosions. not a bunch of orange and yellow photoshop cloud sprites like on other games. the only way to make a better one is to either actually film a real explosion on a black background, or spend 3 months in lightwave with hypervoxels.

[Bobboau]

well yes the sprites are very well made sprites, but they are still sprites, for big explosions they aren't as good, and this is getting added to the exsisting explosion effects, so it can only improve things,
the point of this is to make better looking, ship specific explosion effects

[deep_eyes]

why dont u just make the shockwaves 3d first? using the ani's available?

[Bobboau]

shockwaves are 3d.

[##UnknownPlayer##]

Hmm...I reckon what would make this cool on big ships would be if we could get a ripple effect heading out from the blast points on the hull - matrix helicopter style perhaps? I'm going to look into this.