[Omniscaper]

Whoo hoo!!! Texture seams have been reduced enough for a release worthy model.



Get it here

http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,19747.msg408967.html#msg408967


Try it out and and advise me of what can be improved or fixed for version 2.

[Fractux]

Wow that looks really nice. Great Work!!

[TrashMan]

WOW....AMAZING!

[FreeTerran]

*throws the planet source into the bin*
well.... nice

[Lightspeed]

I dont like the lights.. they don't look like they should. The landscape textures and clouds are pretty nice though. Now if it only had an atmospheric glow...

oh... and didn't they put a higher far clipping zone into the normal SCP builds, too?

[KARMA]

a glowmap for the lights? problem is that it'd look probably wrong on the light side..
btw what was the problem with seams? how you solved it?
the clouds with shadows are on separate objects or on the main one? you could make 2 rotating objects, one for the clouds and one for the shadows.. mmmmm it'd probably give a nice 3d effect...

[Omniscaper]

Actually, the glow maps work pretty well as long sa the brightness isn't too much.

The seam issue is still there, but I went through hell in photoshop and Truespace's tedious materials editor to get some overlapping. I still don't know why texture precision is lousy when it comes to applying on particular polygon faces. BLARG

[Flaser]

It should have a very rough shinemap and IMHO that could solve the lighting problems too - with low ambient especially.

[Taristin]

Is that to scale?

[KARMA]

ehy that's right, low reflective shinemaps to have the mountains looking like if they are beveled. It could work

[Omniscaper]

The shine maps unfortunately causes faceting on a sphere. You start seeing polygon faces where the speculars are.

The model is only 25000 meters.

[Sandwich]

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Omniscaper
The shine maps unfortunately causes faceting on a sphere. You start seeing polygon faces where the speculars are.

The model is only 25000 meters.

You aren't using multiple subobjs perchance, are you?

[diamondgeezer]

Originally posted by Sandwich

And them some. Omni my good man, you've rasied the bar

[Omniscaper]

Do subobjects render incorrectly with speculars? If that is the case, I cannot avoid using subobjects.

I have to use subobjects to have rotating clouds and their shadows. In order to get them to rotate and be transparent, the clouds have to be above the land object in order for the transparencies to render correctly. Since The clouds are rotating, they must be a sub object. So in light of that I made a dummy object, in this case a simpler sphere that is invisible to be the parent object.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Omniscaper
Do subobjects render incorrectly with speculars? If that is the case, I cannot avoid using subobjects.

I have to use subobjects to have rotating clouds and their shadows. In order to get them to rotate and be transparent, the clouds have to be above the land object in order for the transparencies to render correctly. Since The clouds are rotating, they must be a sub object. So in light of that I made a dummy object, in this case a simpler sphere that is invisible to be the parent object.

Subobjects smooth incorrectly... look at the model in modelview (if possible) with no maps and you'll see the effect.  For some reason, only the main object will smooth correctly - I don't know if this is due to the present conversion tools, the cob format itself, the pof format or the engine itself.

[KARMA]

omni, check here: http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,20741.0.html

[Omniscaper]

Ok, after reading that hefty thread, I made the earth landmass the only object, making it the parent object. The auto-facet level was set to 45 for the geosphere type object. That did not solve my specular faceting problem. Perhaps its the geosphere object ? Will experiment with a normal sphere, but I suspect the same issues.

I did try converting using cob2pof, since it uses smoothing. That solved the problem, but my texture alignments were quite OFF. That would entail more texture work and removal of other objects like the cloud layers, since cob2pof has a polygon limit. Modelview gives the same success but same limitations.

I have a feeling that the probelm lies with Autofaceting build of PCS. Is there a PCS that supports smoothing? A sphere model would be great for it.

PS: I REALLY do not want to revisit subobject removal. ALL of the Trek ships REQUIRE it. What are the polygon limits of a parent object anyway? I have a feeling a single mesh with 15k is over limit.

[Sandwich]

Originally posted by Omniscaper
I have a feeling that the probelm lies with Autofaceting build of PCS. Is there a PCS that supports smoothing? A sphere model would be great for it.

IIRC Kazan has said that PCS supports smoothing. You just need to mark the faces as smoothed in TS before conversion. Best ask him specifics, though.

[Vasudan Admiral]

PCS has supported smoothing for ages - just set the material(s) to be smoothed as auto-faceted in TS. setting it to faceted or smoothed in TS will cause it to be faceted when in pof format for some reason.
so just apply an auto-faceted material to the faces to be smoothed in TS, and use PCS 1.1 or 1.3.4 (not the auto-facet build) and it should work fine

edit: oops i mean PCS 1.1 or 1.3.4
fix0red.