Impressive, very impressive!

Which handles better, the battleship or the church?

Does the church go God Speed?

Does the church go God Speed?

I'm going to avoid corny jokes about the church. Didn't realize this was going to be a religious game though?

Very impressive, though it will be even more so when the textures are done. The battleship looks kind of like a blimp. Is this the same model that was the base in the prototype?

Does the lancet go YYYEEEEAAaaaagggghhhhh as it flies by?

Quote:Original post by lightbringer
I'm going to avoid corny jokes about the church.

Thanks god.. err.. no way i said that..

Quote:Original post by lightbringer
Very impressive, though it will be even more so when the textures are done. The battleship looks kind of like a blimp. Is this the same model that was the base in the prototype?

Yeah it's the one in the prototype. As for texturing, small ships should be quite easy, but large ships like the 3-4 top ones will be a problem. A single 2048x2048 will never be enough for those beasts, especially since in a small ship, you can go close to them a few meters near the hull only. Avoiding it to turn into a blurry pixel mess is going to be tough. So far the plan is to use multiple 2048x2048 textures, but how much exactly is undefined.. we need to experiment. Another solution would be to use tiled textures but it's then becoming pretty hard to add non-generic details to it. And i'm not sure if an hybrid solution (some triangles skinned, some triangles tiled) is possible..

Looking impressive as always [grin]

Quote:Original post by MustEatYemen
Does the church go God Speed?

[lol][lol]

Quote:Original post by Ysaneya
So far the plan is to use multiple 2048x2048 textures, but how much exactly is undefined.. we need to experiment. Another solution would be to use tiled textures but it's then becoming pretty hard to add non-generic details to it. And i'm not sure if an hybrid solution (some triangles skinned, some triangles tiled) is possible..

Maybe you should look into the terrain texturing algorithms (I'm sure you know enough about these [smile]) - there are lots of techniques around for "detail textures" and so on...

One that comes to mind is to have a 2048x2048 texture for the overall/general colour of the ship, but have a detail texture blended in. The detailed texture could just be a simple set of general metal panels / joints / seams (or whatever spaceships are made with!!). Blend in the detail texture when you get close and it shouldn't look too bad.

Remember that you've got a very useful advantage in that this is a close-range effect - tiling won't be so obvious. You can probably get away with some quite aggressive repeat/tile effects and not have it be too obvious for the player.

hth
Jack

Quote:Original post by Ysaneya
Another solution would be to use tiled textures but it's then becoming pretty hard to add non-generic details to it. And i'm not sure if an hybrid solution (some triangles skinned, some triangles tiled) is possible..

Would an approach where you tile one texture over all triangles and then skin all triangles with another be feasible? I imagine most of the battleship's hull is something like sheets of metal (armor plating), with the occasional access hatch and welding (and glass and hangar doors, but those are probably separate objects?).

Quote:Original post by jollyjeffersOne that comes to mind is to have a 2048x2048 texture for the overall/general colour of the ship, but have a detail texture blended in. The detailed texture could just be a simple set of general metal panels / joints / seams (or whatever spaceships are made with!!). Blend in the detail texture when you get close and it shouldn't look too bad.

Yeah, i was thinking to that but it assumes that the same detail texture will be used everywhere on the ship. In addition, it would also need to affect the normal map, meaning a way to "merge" the "global" normal map with the normal map derived from the details..

Quote:Original post by alexmoura
Does the lancet go YYYEEEEAAaaaagggghhhhh as it flies by?

Jokes come first, then the tech talk. This way of positioning a joke looks kinda odd.... it reads funny if you've read all the content above first if you catch my drift ;).
"You are out of line soldier!"





What I meant to say was "ha.......ha", but I don't want to flame it right away.

On with the tech talk =)

I think detail textures are a must. With scales like these, even multiple 2048x2048 textures will end up detailing about 5 meters with just a single pixel. (Numbers off the top of my head of course.)

What about if you use less of these "main" textures, saving space for another "material map"? Basically it would tell which detail texture would be used in each area. Metal panels pretty much cover most of the hull, so you'd only need a smooth surface for everything else (tubes, exhausts, thrusters...). The color is defined by the main texture. Maybe a couple different materials would be needed for these things, or different kinds of standard hull detail textures, but, IMHO, it seems to cover all of the artists' needs in a elegant way.

Quote:Original post by Jotaf
I think detail textures are a must. With scales like these, even multiple 2048x2048 textures will end up detailing about 5 meters with just a single pixel. (Numbers off the top of my head of course.)

It's not that bad either, assuming a 2 km long ship, a single 2048x2048 would be enough to get a 1 meter per texel resolution. Of course, a couple of 2048x2048 maps (no big deal for a ship of this size) would reduce that to a few tens of centimers.

Quote:Original post by JotafWhat about if you use less of these "main" textures, saving space for another "material map"? Basically it would tell which detail texture would be used in each area. Metal panels pretty much cover most of the hull, so you'd only need a smooth surface for everything else (tubes, exhausts, thrusters...). The color is defined by the main texture. Maybe a couple different materials would be needed for these things, or different kinds of standard hull detail textures, but, IMHO, it seems to cover all of the artists' needs in a elegant way.

I can imagine two ways to implement this: one is not cpu friendly, the second one is not fillrate friendly.

The first way would be to split the ship into chunks of triangles (since you cannot render a batch of triangles with different textures), each chunk of triangle using a combination texture/detail. So, if i had a single object for my ship with one single material before, and i have 5 different detail textures, i have to split my ship in 5 objects. This has some serious cpu overhead.

The second way is to assign a weight to each detail texture and to store them per-pixel in a "material" texture (i think that was more your original idea?). Each texture weight can be stored per texel inside a color channel, meaning with a RGBA format i can have up to 4 detail textures. In a pixel shader, i'd have to sample the diffuse texture, the material texture, and all 4 detail textures, and combine all of these together with the detail weights. Of course, that doesn't take normal, specular and self-illumination maps into account yet, meaning the pixel shader ends up being.. very heavy. Not GPU friendly.

Quote:Original post by Ysaneya
The first way would be to split the ship into chunks of triangles (since you cannot render a batch of triangles with different textures), each chunk of triangle using a combination texture/detail. So, if i had a single object for my ship with one single material before, and i have 5 different detail textures, i have to split my ship in 5 objects. This has some serious cpu overhead.

A couple things I thought of:

- you can use texture atlases
- use multitexturing and only reference which sampler you want in the shader
- texture clipmaps a.k.a. "megatexture"

Thanks for your response :P

You're right, I can't think of another way to do it and these are not exactly optimal. Best one probably would be the first one, but with only 2 (max. 3?) detail textures -- metal plates and generic/smooth material. It probably wouldn't be that much of an overhead, since this is limited to large scale ships and you're not likely to have a lot of them on screen at any given time.

Still, it does have some overhead, and means more work for you and for the artists as well. I hope the way you're doing it turns out to be good enough :)