[Colonol Dekker]

HLP:\ Approving_nod.exe -raised_eyebrows

[Nightmare]

More like -jaw_drop

[Colonol Dekker]

My jaw is solid.  It takes a fair bit to drop it.  But I approve your command line choices 😊👍

[Mobius]

The Perseus Adv is an iconic Inferno asset and it finally got the revamp it deserved. 

[mr.WHO]

Perseus Adv and Alves are my favorite Inferno designs.
I wish for something as good looking on EA side.

[Mobius]

EA combat spacecraft have been completely changed, at least most of them. While you can still recognize their silhouettes, their designs have been improved a lot. Many warships have undergone a similar improvement, too.

[Nyctaeus]

Hercules Mk. 3 has been completely reimagined :]

[General Battuta]

I think there is WAY too much going on in these greebles. It looks moldy! It's like a flying coral extrusion! Or some kind of chunk snapped off a Gothic cathedral.

If I put my eye on a random point on that ship it has NO idea where to go. It follows a panel line around in loops, or grabs a circuit board or radiator shape and just follows the lines out into space.

I literally — this is not hyperbole, I swear — I cannot focus on any particular part of the model. My eye fastens to a greeble within that part, gets exhausted trying to pick it out, and falls off the image.

In my strong opinion you want the details and greebles on a model to echo and reinforce the larger shapes, to lead the eye smoothly around the model so you see it all and come away with an image of one coherent, clear, intentional design. For example:



Here's the good ol Millenium Falcon, a ship so greebled it's described as a piece of junk.

But check out how the greebles are carefully thought out and arranged.

The panel lines on the cockpit access tube are semicircular and echo the shape of the tube.

The circuit/pipe details on the hull all lead inward to the center, like spokes radiating from a hub.

The tiny greebles along the sides of the front prongs run WITH the length of the prong, not ACROSS it, so your eye follows the general shape.

The long pipes on the central-forward panel, leading down to the prong cutout, all run WITH the length of that panel to echo and reinforce its shape.

The engine area is detailed with round black "outlets" or whatever they are, but they are grouped carefully into a wedge-shape which ALSO points inward to the center of the ship.

The overall shape is very clear: a disc with a pointy front and a T-shape embedded in it. Every smaller detail echoes and reinforces these larger shapes!

By contrast look at the wings of the Herc 3 model. There are all these lines firing my eye off into space. There are curves taking big 90 degree angles and blocking my eye from moving further down the wing. There are like 5 different colors I can see — green, grey, yellow, blue and red. It's too much. Maybe I have a smooth visual cortex but I just cannot figure out what the **** is going on. I can't imagine a maintenance guy replacing one of these components, or armor protecting any of them. There's little fins sticking out of the bottom, which pulls my eyes down, then sideways lines ON the fins to shoot my eyes off to the side! Everything is covered in EVERYTHING.

Technically, it's flawless. But I strongly feel the panel and greeble design needs to be structured better. There's no intermediate structure, no organizing principle between "the ship's outline" and "tiny detail noise."

[General Battuta]

All that said it's your model.

[General Battuta]

To expand on my commentary, take this chunk:



There's a lot going on here. Lotta panels. The big lines up top sweep my eye up and to the right, suggesting something swept back (or swept forward). In fact, the lines go nowhere, there's nothing to see—they point to the edge of the wing, out into space.

The 4 small crosshatches slightly down and to the right lead my eye down to a set of small irregular panels. But the four crosshatches don't meet any lines there; there's no relation between them and the tiny panel details in the recess below.

There's a couple cylinders in the bottom right, kind of like a 9V battery, which I like. I like the structure aorund them too. But they're silver and red, surrounded by green, with some yellow right behind them, plus some silver panel lines. So many colors!

Between them and the wing above is this kind of oblong beige cross-hatched thing. It's there. My eye zigs back and forth along the little crosshatches but doesn't know where to go.

Center left is a triangle with a circle in it, echoed by another triangle right above it turned upside down, which is bitten on the left by three lines pointing off to the left. The top triangle has little echoes which kind of lead into the big lines I mentioned first.

There's more **** going on here but already I've spotted so much! My eye is EXHAUSTED just from this little chunk of the ship! And I'm feeling like I've missed details, like there are things I didn't notice!

Whereas if all the details kind of interlock and suggest a larger shape, I can grasp that larger shape and see how things fit into it.

[General Battuta]

In a sense I guess this is all about information efficiency. If all the details in an area kind of work together (like a bunch of pipe greebles all heading up towards the center of the Falcon), you don't have to check every single one with your eyes to feel like you See the detail — because you've grasped the overall pattern. Whereas if all the greebles are going all over the place everywhere, you have to check every single inch to really understand what's going on; there's no visual 'summary' or underlying pattern to extract.

[General Battuta]

Was going to post "I think I'm a model poster" before I realized it was a horrible pun

[Nyctaeus]

tldr: I know you like clean ships. I don't. I don't like Millenium Falcon-style greebles, as it's just noise of random boxes and **** covered by random metal. Aka the bare shape covered with lazy noise, kinda like all SW big ships. It's not my style.

FYI I've been through half of this, and it looks like even too detailed feedback. This is not a complaint, but majority of the issues you mentioned comes from the normalmap, that I'm also not satisfied with. I gotta rebake it with different settings, but not a priority at this point.

...And argh, what's wrong with you? Stop multiposting.

[General Battuta]

But...I just showed how it's not random boxes and noise covered by random metal. I took a picture and walked you through, specifically, how it is not random, how it's all very deliberately laid out so that smaller shapes reinforce big ones.

What do you think about my suggestion of using smaller shapes to reinforce big ones and guide the eye?

[Nyctaeus]

But...I just showed how it's not random boxes and noise covered by random metal. I took a picture and walked you through, specifically, how it is not random, how it's all very deliberately laid out so that smaller shapes reinforce big ones.

It's just probably so called auto-greebler as it looks like typical auto-greebler. A scripts to generate such geometry exists from years, and SW uses it a lot. Especially for assets from new trilogy. Tons of tons of tiny bits on Mandator IV looks like typical job of procedural geometry generator. Some stuff from MF render you posted also looks like that. Not everything, as I see a lot of handmade geometry here. Auto-greebler kinda established part of key visuals of new SW assets.

Still majority of details here would be are invisible for the eye and fade away being all the same color, of little variety and quite generic. It's mostly quick effect to enhance bare look of the surfaces. Can't say it's overally a bad technique as I often use it myself in high-poly assets for renders, but it's mostly technique for static renders or slow camera sequences, when eye has time to catch all the small nuances you're talking about.

In mobile environments, I need something else. A stuff dynamically reacting to shifting lighting conditions, and still look rich and detailed enough. FS fighters and bombers just does not need tons of small bits for the reasons stated above, and more...

What do you think about my suggestion of using smaller shapes to reinforce big ones and guide the eye?

I can't say I disagree. The general problem is the technical aspect of FS models, as FSO hates large number of individual materials. Especially on fighters and bombers, everything needs to be very tightly packed usually on single UV to keep everyting within single bitmap.

Cramped nature of UV maps of HTL FS models makes me unable to include large amounts of small bits, as there is just not enough pixels on the bitmap. Small details appears mostly blurry, especially on low-res textures required to keep reasonable framerate.

Notice how different things looks like on render using 4096*2 maps.


So...
1. Comparing game-ready assets to render ones is pointless, as the pipeline and environment are completely different.
2. Ingame assets have lots of limits and depending on the engine they were prepared for, the limits vary. You gotta see one day how sitty even 4k maps look like on Unity.
3. The only thing that can be changed here is the normalmap, as current one is doing quite too much.

[JSRNerdo]

Was going to post "I think I'm a model poster" before I realized it was a horrible pun

^{i wonder when my postcount will exceed my iq}

 

[General Battuta]

But...I just showed how it's not random boxes and noise covered by random metal. I took a picture and walked you through, specifically, how it is not random, how it's all very deliberately laid out so that smaller shapes reinforce big ones.

It's just probably so called auto-greebler as it looks like typical auto-greebler.

They didn't have CGI in 1977. What a ridiculous thing to say.

In mobile environments, I need something else. A stuff dynamically reacting to shifting lighting conditions, and still look rich and detailed enough. FS fighters and bombers just does not need tons of small bits for the reasons stated above, and more...

Then why are you covering this model in tiny bits?! The things you're saying make no sense! They're from opposite planet!

Cramped nature of UV maps of HTL FS models makes me unable to include large amounts of small bits

But - I'm telling you to use FEWER small bits, organized more coherently!

Are you reading my posts from opposite planet? Did I phrase everything catastrophically wrong?

[General Battuta]

Here's the pre-CGI model if for some reason you don't believe me.

[The E]

Yes, Nyctaeus, the pic of the Falcon Batts posted earlier was of the new-Trilogy, CG Falcon -- but the thing is, that model has had its greebles copied from scans of the original shooting miniature, these are details that were painstakingly copied from the original shooting miniature pictured above. These models are, if not completely identical in every aspect, definitely identical in artistic intent and use the same methods to accentuate and reinforce shapes.

[Colonol Dekker]

Like bat's said, it's your model do it how you want, but I tend to agree with the business of the panelling.
Although strictly speaking, there aren't that many panels.  Just spaghetti shapes.

It's your model dude, have at it as you see fit 😉👍