[KARMA]

well I don't think it'd be suitable for a non-pro product, but it's interesting:

"Most of our characters are built from two meshes: a realtime mesh with thousands of triangles, and a detail mesh with millions of triangles. We provide a distributed-computing application which raytraces the detail mesh and, from its high-polygon geometry, generates a normal map that is applied to the realtime mesh when rendering.  The result is in-game objects with all of the lighting detail of the high poly mesh, but that are still easily rendered in real time."

ingame model
http://www.unrealtechnology.com/screens/character_creation2.jpg
high poly model
http://www.unrealtechnology.com/screens/character_creation1.jpg
ingame result
http://www.unrealtechnology.com/screens/character_creation3.jpg

http://www.unrealtechnology.com/html/technology/ue30.shtml

[Fineus]

Gotta respect those guys abilities with coding... Very impressive use of technology.

[Lightspeed]

Gotta mention that they simply use normal mapping and did NOT develop it.

[Fineus]

Whatever, it's good use of the tech.

[Taristin]

Wow. That's of polies. Good result. Love the armor on the mesh too.

[ChronoReverse]

Originally posted by Lightspeed
Gotta mention that they simply use normal mapping and did NOT develop it.

And normal mapping is exactly one of the features I think FS2 could benefit from >.>

[phreak]

yea i know, but if you keep requesting features, then 3.7 isn't getting released until this time in 2005

[ChronoReverse]

Let me correct what I said.  I meant that it was something I put into the "dream-on features thread".

[Flipside]

LOL Well, I'm thinking Phreak means you may have to wait a while for that one

And, on our defence, if we hadn't asked for features, you wouldn't have bothered going to 3.1

[IceFire]

Normal maping is a really cool idea....it makes very high detail stuff fairly easy to do and very realistic to look at.

Very impressive.

[Lightspeed]

I dont think we have to go overboard with features. We'd rather start completely using what we have until adding 1000 new features

What i'd REALLY like to see is a better star system (*poke poke RT*)

[WMCoolmon]

HOLY ****!!

Now we just need to find someone to do the coding/modding work for FS.

[adwight]

That monster thing is the most kickass monster model i've ever seen.

[Flipside]

It is bloody good, but it seems to me that it didn't need to take up 2 million pixels in the high res model, particularly on the arms Nonetheless, great stuff!

[Bobboau]

we have people looking into this, thogh more exitement is in the area of real time shadows and over exposure

[Setekh]

Awesome. Like Kal says, it's great use of the tech - I'm always more impressed by this sort of thing than a raw increase in de tail and the like. This is real advancement.

[KARMA]

btw I don't see this stuff as optimized for a modding community
I think that nobody of use will ever do for each single model an uber high poly model of milions of triangles just to calculate the normal map.
Oh I'm sure that venom or mikhael or others could do that, but for every ship they make?????doubt so.

[ChronoReverse]

Well, I always see people making models that are too high poly to be used in the game.  Then they have to cut it down.  I suppose they can get the normal-map from the hi-poly original and then apply it the cut-down version (which incidentally, is how it's supposed to work).