Topic: Bluepoint Station WIP

Tolwyn

Tolwyn

Vice Admiral
No sight is as welcome as a star base after a long battle. Offering a restock of foodstuffs and fresh water the star bases serve their purpose very well, and offer a some degree of protection against occasional pirate intruder. The base has no chance against a medium sized strike force since it has minimal defensive capabilities and does not ordinarily carry enough fighter squadrons for extended self defence.

lol :D

stationmk3_1.jpg


stationmk3_2.jpg
 
the problem is: I have to keep it low poly, as the Freespace 2 engine can not handle a lot of them... still I'll add a radar array and dome other little nifty details...
do you have any ideas or suggestions?
 
Looks cool.

You can up the poly count by splitting the model into two or more subobjects. The Freespace engine can handle about 850 polys per suboject, but there's no limit on the number of subojects. The station consists of three main parts connected with struts. You could make each part a subojbect, rising the polycount to max. 2400-2500. You could also make the radardish and the other details subojects. Maybe that helps.
 
Weren't those side thingies connected to the main section by flat rectangular surfaces rather than by a series of pipes? That would certainly help reduce the poly count.

It does look quite good, though.
 
IMO, the smartest way to limit poly counts is to adopt a unit system and stick to it while working on the model. For instance, whenever I start working on a fighter, I decide to not model any polygons smaller than, say, 20cm. This way I go over the pieces of detail which can be made with textures. Of course, for a station, I'd probably choose a limit around 2 meters or so.

So unless those pipes are really large, you could reduce the polycount by working on them a bit. A six-sided tube and an eight-sided tube won't look too different if their radius is only a meter or so.

--Eder
 
Originally posted by Quarto
Weren't those side thingies connected to the main section by flat rectangular surfaces rather than by a series of pipes?
Click to expand...
wc4starbase.jpg


It's a bit hard to see, but it seems to be a flat section, or at least chunky square blocks, rather than small pipes. Still, the new starbase looks nice.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Originally posted by Quarto
Weren't those side thingies connected to the main section by flat rectangular surfaces rather than by a series of pipes? That would certainly help reduce the poly count.

It does look quite good, though.
Click to expand...

if you remeber the movie clip, where Maniac and Blair fly with the shuttle to Confed HQ you will notice that 'those side thingies' are connected with tubes to the station's body... and not with the flat rectangular surfaces . Besides, it looks cooler this way :D

oh, and btw, yes, that'S right. Freespace can handle many subobjects... A good example would be TCS Concordia... LOD0 has 10k polys :D

and yes, I'll add some smaller details, like radar array and such...

^Tolwyn
 
Did you triangulate the model? In Freespace, thats often unnecessary, because the engine supprts faces with up to 4 vertices each. Its more work if you stabilize the model with adding faces and edges by hand, but the polycount in the end is much lower.
 
No... I haven't done that yet. As the matter of fact someone else will make the conversion.

Which brings me to the subject at hand: as I see you have certain FS2 modding experience. Would you like to lend us a hand? We could use everyone in the project's development...
 
I'd be happy to help.

I can edit tbls, I also can do mission programming, 3d models and textures(as it is, I'm doing a WC model that I want to import to FS2 :) ). However, when it comes to model conversion, thats another story. I still haven't figured out how to add turrets or LODs to ships.

In about two weeks, when my exams are over, I have a lot of time to kill. So why not help a WC fan project? ;)
 
Tolwyn, if you're doing artistic images with the mesh, I suggest selecting a proper shader and good specular settings for your materials. It looks as if there is no sun in your image because there is no shine to the metallic surfaces.

Hope it helps. :)
 
Got any specific hints, Cam? I can never get my pre-rendered scenes in TS5 to look any good due to my lack of knowledge when it comes to materials. :(

(My planets end up looking like marbles and my ships end up looking like LEGO stuff :D)

--Eder
 
Well I'm not all that experienced myself at materials. Sometimes at professional studios they get specific guys to do the texturing apart from modeling.

My suggestion would be to look at real-life and identify where highlights are etc. High specular (not sure what it's called in TS5) values produce strong shines, which you want for metal. In fact, true unpainted metal is all shine and reflection I believe, with no diffused colour. In the program you'd want to set your specular settings quite high for good reflections, plus you want to choose the best shader that represents metal (cook-torrance is the most realistic one to date I believe). I'm not sure if TS uses shaders and if it has the cook-torrance one, you can try anistropic if you have it--that gives you control to simulate elongated highlights which fakes imperfect surfaces.
 
TS has a metal shader, which I can't get to look like metal, and a bunch of different ansiotropic shaders, which are what I use, but they don't look quite right yet. Shininess and diffuse and reflectance settings are just too much for me, I guess :p

--Eder
 
Ah, I can't just go for such an easy way out, though ;) Thanks for the tips, I'll try them later on.

--Eder
 
Originally posted by Cam
Tolwyn, if you're doing artistic images with the mesh, I suggest selecting a proper shader and good specular settings for your materials. It looks as if there is no sun in your image because there is no shine to the metallic surfaces.

Hope it helps. :)
Click to expand...

I know... but this is the mesh for the game, so there is no purpose to make better materials. If I en making a high res mesh, then of course I'll take care of metallic materials
 
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