[waylon]

I made this.






It's for a video game (check out http://www.guildsoftware.com - don't mind the fact that the page hasn't been updated in aeons.) It's about 13,000 polygons in highest-detail mode (all the lights are beveled, plus the fuel tanks have pretty smooth geometry.) We've got some progressive mesh and mip-mesh code in the game though, so it should theoretically be able to get down to ~1500 polygons - though it won't look very good up close.

It also has four 512x512 textures and four 1024x1024 textures, though once again, those can be scaled down for slower computers.

The eight pieces that make up this station are modular, so many different station configurations can be built out of a few basic parts (though I'll need to model a few more pieces if there's going to be any real variety between individual stations.) Oh, and the big round part spins, which looks really neato.

It took a very, very long time to model and texture, but I learned a hell of a lot doing it.

So. Any crits would be greatly appreciated, since this is going to be a big part of what we show to potential publishers in a few months, and of course, we want it to look as snazzy as possible.

[ May 12, 2001: Message edited by: waylon ]

[shahar2k]

that's actually really cool, not as gritty as some games out there,
reminds me of the art for "startopia"
what is this renderd in? (or is it real time right now?)

[Poprocksz]

It's got that Wing Commander look......
totally awesome.....

[Psionic]

Very nicely modelled and textured, slick stuff!!!!!

[waylon]

shahar2k: This is an in-game screenshot. It was modeled in 3DS Max 3 and 4 (mostly 4), and textured in photoshop.

poprocksz: Well, it's for a space sim, so I'll take that as a compliment.

impaler: The big round part spins. It's a cheap way to generate gravity. (And yes, I'm such a geek that I figured out how fast it needs to be spinning to create earth-like gravity. On the outside level, at least.)

psionic: Thanks!

[NextGen]

hehe... spins kinda like ship on the movie "Mission to Mars" pretty coo.. oh just to let you know your images won't show up on here... you need to post links to your images cause your host does not allow images to be shown outside of your site.

image 1
image 2
image 3
image 4

[waylon]

NextGen: They're not showing up? Hmm, that's strange. The server they're hosted on is one of the computers here at work. I'll look into it...

[Staff Sarge]

Looking at this, some voice whispers 'Unreal Tournament' within my head... time to take my pills I guess.

Anyway, I think it could have a lot more techy detail on the textures. Like the stuff they have on the surfaces of Millennium Falcon, Deathstar and all the other spaceships in Star Wars. (blatant 1:1 texture rip off is not recommended though)

However, it's still a model that I could do after about two or three years of practice.

[Leo]

one of the game models problems - blurry textures. Little spacecraft usually looks ok but big ships... awful. In Babylon-5 TV show vfx guys used custom-painted maps for large visible areas and simple generic panels for small. But custom maps takes a lot of memory (it's a realtime game right?), so one of the solutions - use mulitexturing (same method have been used in Black&White for the ground). Also if your game engine allows diffusion and specular maps... the resulting surface will be very impressive.

i found some Babylon-5 techniques very useful (modelling/texturing tips)... but i never seen them applied to real-time rendering yet.

-leo

[waylon]

staff sarge: Yeah, I'm going to add some more details over time... but this is a pretty huge project, and I just didn't have the energy to do an uber-texture job on every square inch of the station.

Leo: I was bugging our programmers to add multitexturing to the game, but there are a few problems which are very difficult to overcome when you're talking about doing multitexturing on a 3D model (as opposed to a generated surface, like the ground in B&W). The main problem is that you need two sets of mapping coordinates, one for the main texture, one for the "detail" texture, and there's no really good way to go about that. At least, not within the constraints of OUR game engine.

I also considered adding a specular map to the station, but the problem with THAT is that it doesn't work very well on flat surfaces. We'll see though. It may make it into the final version. The other thing I had played with was adding bump maps, but unfortunately, DirectX EMBM only really works right in an environment where there's a definite up and down (like a first person shooter.) That would have been a great way to add more detail, but unfortunately, it looked stupid.

But yeah, you guys are right. It needs more detail. I'll post an update when I have a more interesting version. (It may be a while... I've got a lot of other stuff to work on.)

[Impaler]

Is it the big round thing that's spinning, or is it the rest of the space station that's rotating and the big round thing is staying still?