[Agent_Koopa]

What exactly is UVmapping?

[colecampbell666]

Basically you just unfold the model, texture the flat sheet, and fold it back up into the model.

[Galemp]

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.

[Agent_Koopa]

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.

[Vasudan Admiral]

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.

[TrashMan]

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.

[Vasudan Admiral]

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.

[TrashMan]

You'd need a VERY big texture is you want it end up looking half decent.

[Vasudan Admiral]

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.

[bkd86]

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?

[Galemp]

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.

[Snail]

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.

[Insomniac34]

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.



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...):




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):

I know its kind of off topic...but where can I get beautiful backgrounds like those that are used in these screenshots??

[ShadowGorrath]

It's Herra's skybox that's released for download on FreeSpaceMods.net

[Insomniac34]

It's Herra's skybox that's released for download on FreeSpaceMods.net

thanks buddy!