Hmmm. I really like that design and the skin's great- it's addicting, ain't it? I only wish that I wasn't mainly a coder at this point- I'd just crank out new ships by the dozen. I think that on the bubble area and the rims of the side-tube-engine areas, I think it could've had a bit higher polycount for a smoother look without going over 2000. But it's a little late in the game to nit-pick a successfully-implemented and skinned design.

Other than that... all I've gotta say is that if you start cranking out themed ships like previous pack, I have ... um... a LOT of room in Toolkit for ships that come in Faction sets, and I'd be very happy to put them into the mod... it's great to see that you've really picked this up- the skins are really making the designs come to life, and look very professional- a huge leap in the feel of your work, which was nicely modeled and now is well-painted

Well to be honest with you the last two were quickly done just for the learning experience. The first one had a lot of large flat areas while the second was an excercise in uv-mapping rounded meshes. Your right, I could have mapped the second better but like I was saying I just threw together a quick model for the practice. I was basically using the two models along with your totorial on skinning to do this model. I made this one a while back when we were first talking about my models having too high of a poly count. This one has about the same polys as the black widdow but looks much more complicated. I just couldnt skin it right because it was a combo of large flat areas and rounded ones. I still didn't map the UV right but it turned out better than I expected none the less, thanks to the outstanding tutorial and the two practice models. I plan on making this one into a series like the others I did before. I'll end up going over the older ones also with the same technique. You're of course free to have any one (or series) you want, just let me know. Well here is the result of study and practice.



Edited by - jsncalif11 on 10/10/2005 12:44:49 PM

Here is another one. Very low poly / high textured.


Edited by - jsncalif11 on 10/15/2005 5:30:36 AM

Sweet

Gonna have to put up some screenies of one of the things I'm doing for the Toolkit soon, to demonstrate glowmaps

Let's see what you got. I was really impressed with the bandit which got me into glowmaps big time. I got some cool ideas but would love to see what you got cooking. This thread is for showing off you in progress work so give us a taste

Edited by - jsncalif11 on 10/15/2005 8:54:37 AM

Glowmaps. Useful, simple, and when you add it all up, not really worse on performance than a bunch of Lights.







Subtle or in-your-face, Glows can add a lot... even to some very old stuff. Gotta say that figuring out how to get Glowmaps properly applied to all of these ships has been rather... challenging... and has involved a lot've work with FLModel Cloner and UTF Edit to get all of the MAT references un-snarled. It's a pity that just to do something like put a different texture for engine grills, you've gotta redo just about every ship-related MAT in the game, but them's the breaks.

You two make really nice ships.

I wish i could make ships but i don't have the funds to buy the stuff needed

keep up the nice and pretty looking ships

EDIT1 spelling

Edited by - 5i1 on 10/15/2005 6:33:20 PM

SWEET! Those glowmaps really make a big difference. Even though it's a subtle change, it really warms up the game.

Hey, these glowmaps are great!!!

Argh, will these models with the glowmaps enabled be in the next version of the Toolkit?
Or can you release them just as a "glowmap shippack", if you don't want them in the Toolkit?

Because I could really use them in my mod.

Ah, and one more question: What do I have to do to change lets say the green glowmaps on the Rheinland Valkyrie to Pink ones (Nomad like)? Is it difficult to do this?

Again, great work!

@Black Eagle:

1. Yes, they will be released as part of Toolkit.
2. It wouldn't make sense to release them seperate of Toolkit, for reasons which I'm not going into right this minute.
3. Once the MAT references, both in the INI, the MAT itself and the CMPs have been changed, then it's not terribly hard to do this. You'd essentially be talking about having Rheinland ships (they'd need different DLLs for Names and Infocards though) that were really (from the FL engine's point of view) two different ships altogether, but to players they'd appear to be Valkries or whatever with different glowmaps. It's really not a complicated procedure, but it's rather time-consuming, and it must be done 100% perfectly. Just like most of the other things that are kind've neat

@Argh. I've been going over some of my old ships to clean them up a bit. I started with the Outlaw from my smugler series. It was a no brainer to start there since you've already done the Bandit. It looks like the Outlaw is gonna end up somewhere just over 1000 polys. Since the Bandit Freighter is basically a Bandit with a few faces streched out and the Outlaw Mini is the Outlaw with the engines shortened and the back end squished down, the set is almost complete. It would be cool if you included them in the next update to your mod Here's a pic of the Outlaw before and after. Ooh by the way, you were right, this is addicting



Before



After


Edited by - jsncalif11 on 10/16/2005 3:25:46 AM

Edited by - jsncalif11 on 10/16/2005 3:26:42 AM

Well here it is. It's been about 15 hours but it's finally done, and pretty low poly too. I still can't seem to get those glowmaps to get as bright as Argh does but that's ok.

Landing


Docked


Side


Back


Bottom

Edited by - jsncalif11 on 10/16/2005 12:34:52 PM

@jsncaliff:

Hey, looks good. What specific problems are you having with the glowmaps? It's pretty simple to get them working, but you have to edit the MAT in UTF Edit. When you export the Material from MS3D, it'll have a structure kind've like this:

Argh_Glow_Glass
Dc
Oc
Type (string, DcDtOc)

When you get done editing, it should look like this:

Argh_Glow_Glass
Dt_name (string, "WhateverTheNameOfYourTGAis" )
Dt_flags (integer, 64, 0)
Type (string, DcDtEcEt)
Et_name (string, "WhateverTheNameOfYourTGAis" )
Et_flags (integer, 64, 0)
Ec (0.800000, 0.000000)

Where I've put a comma, that indicates a new line.

Now, with the Glowmaps, I've done things a little differently. Instead of defining an Ec (that's "Emissive Channel" btw) I've just defined an Et ("Emissive Texture" ), which is a seperate DDS DXT1 texture which is black, except for the areas that glow. Basically, the FL engine looks at the levels of white/black in the picture data for this texture and uses them as the Alpha Channel, which is why, in the pictures above, my Glowmaps have soft, radiant light- I just airbrushed a little of the "light" in little smudges around the "light bulbs". Here's the structure:

Argh_Glow_Glass
Dt_name (string, "WhateverTheNameOfYourTGAis" )
Dt_flags (integer, 64, 0)
Type (string, DcDtEt)
Et_name (string, "WhateverTheNameOfYourGlowmapIs" )
Et_flags (integer, 64, 0)

As you can (hopefully) see, this is a different approach. Glowmaps defined this way should work very well for large things that need very complex glowing areas, or for very small textures that are being re-used a lot, like a large tilemap for example.

Anyhow, I hope that clears things up- basically, you can do glowmaps with two different methods... one uses Ec to create the "light", and you're basically just faking the lighting through clever work in your graphics editor... and the other uses the Et to creat the "light", and you're using a seperate texture to both define the areas lit... and how much they're going to be lit. The second approach is both more computationally taxing (i.e., it's not a good idea to have lots of large maps with it- use one large map or several small ones) but more subtle- the areas that have Glows on them in those FL ships I'm showing off will actually have areas that are being affected differently, at render time, than the pixels of each polygon being rendered next to them. This approach can give you some spectacular results... but DO NOT FORGET... in the end, we're trying to build fully-functional content for a game... not pretty renders. So don't go overboard

Edited by - Argh on 10/16/2005 11:46:51 PM

Well I still haven't found the problem. I completely rebuilt the MAT from scratch. The other models are working fine. I think it may have to do with how I exported the model. I noticed that I have the glass group first in Milkshape. This should not be a problem since I am not using the default glass material or the default name "Glass" but who knows.
I found a cool side effect before when I made my "Gyro", theres a screenshot on page four of this thread. I wasn't paying attention when I made it and wound up having the group "glass" show up first when I exported it. Since it was exported as 1 group it was named Glass in the CMP. The freelancer engine will only load the MAT once for all the same type ships on the screen. Anyway when I would fly around everything looked pretty much normal but when I set up a server and had two computers on it I noticed that the Gyro would mimick the other players ship but only on the other players screen.
I'm guessing that it's because on the othe players computer has already loaded a MAT file that had "glass" defined (his/her ship), so it used the same information to load the new ship entering his/her space. It's a pretty cool side effect and I thought of exploiting this as a new ship/technology. There's just one problem. It seems to not only appear as the other ship but also have the same hardpoint data. So if I have 5 guns mounted but the other players ship holds only 4 then on the server it will give an error that the 5th gun is non equipable. It doesnt crash the server but It puts a pretty nasty skip on the client side computer every time the ship is first rendered.
I haven't touched the CMP or the MAT so if anyone wants to pull them apart and figure it out just let me know.