This post is mostly just for fun, but I do need to get around to making more planet landing pictures in the immediate future. What good is a universe if the planets that populate it aren't believable?

A while back I made this little tan and cyan pressure-cooker sort of world, and simply because it was first in the planets folder, it's the subject of today's little demonstration.

It's nothing much, really. Just a "before and after" study of what I pull from Bryce, and what the (near) final product is after I've ripped it apart in Photoshop.

First is the raw image; the direct output of Bryce 5.5.

Then, it has its colors, saturation, and contrast adjusted several times until it's nearly perfect, followed by spot-selection and sharpening to really bring out details. Suddenly, those dull over-anti-aliased rocks that Bryce creates look like they have crystal-clear edges! The sun is technically in that spot in the sky in the original shot, but the clouds completely obscure it. I hand-added it again in Photoshop and blended it with the sky simply to make it visible when the render couldn't.

This is still far from a final copy, and I'm not even really completely happy with the initial 3D render, so from a production standpoint, this would/will probably get scrapped.

That's all I've got for now. Oh, I did start doing some more sound work, and it seems I still usually end up hating everything I make when I listen to it hours later. I'll forgive this particular sound for now though, because it's a step in the right direction. When it's done, I'll hopefully have a proper sound effect for the ubiquitous Electromag Laser.

Of course then, for humor's sake, we have the NEXT-GEN GRAPHIX VERSION!!!

...which means - yup - brown and LOADED with bloom!

...never again, I promise.

Heh. I like the initial pass quite well, though personally I would use Terragen 2, because even the demo version will generate landscapes suitable for usage in Nova. But your method preserves a method that could be seen in a Nova-esque universe, which should be appreciated.

QUOTE (Delphi @ Jul 23 2010, 04:37 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Scale is being handled on what I can best call a 50% scaling basis. To explain: let's say you have a ship 100m long and another 200m long. If the 100m ship is represented by a 15x15 sprite, then the 200m ship may be represented by a sprite that measures 22x22. As it stands, I'll never make the ships completely to scale, simply because some of the smallest ships wouldn't even measure a mere pixel on the screen compared to some of the gargantuan battleships.

This is another way of saying you're using a logarithmic scale; each 100 m scale upward is 50% larger than the previous on screen.

Actually, this would probably be more closely approximated by a quadratic equation, because the difference between two sprite sizes increases as the length of the ship increases linearly. Meh, I think too much.

QUOTE (JacaByte @ Jul 25 2010, 09:18 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Heh. I like the initial pass quite well, though personally I would use Terragen 2, because even the demo version will generate landscapes suitable for usage in Nova. But your method preserves a method that could be seen in a Nova-esque universe, which should be appreciated.

I tried out TerraGen, but it is a very complicated program that would require I draft up texture maps and tweak countless little details just to produce a mediocre-looking landscape. I read through the TG2 forums and apparently most of the beautiful photorealistic landscapes you see took several hours, if not days to complete. I can whip up a passable procedural landscape in Bryce in less than 20 minutes if I'm quick.

Trust me, I'd love to use TerraGen. Then again, I'd also love to use Lightwave, but even with countless easily-stolen copies out there, I just don't have the time to study the entire program in-depth to the extent that I already understand the tools I'm afforded. TerraGen sure does make some gorgeous landscapes, though. It gets a little weird though when you try to start making alien environments, though. I tried adapting the tutorial to make a Mars-like world and things just got weird.

QUOTE (Delphi @ Jul 25 2010, 01:17 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

... Oh, I did start doing some more sound work, and it seems I still usually end up hating everything I make when I listen to it hours later...

It's the same with me when I put a ship together or alter another's work to change its color or appearance. Even if I like what I did a lot (and I mean a lot ) I tend not to like it very much when I look at it later. This is part of why I switched ships for the Wyvern. I believe it's something every artist (and even those who don't consider themselves artists but still create things) experiences regarding their own work. Seriously, it happens to everyone, whether it be graphics, sound, or paint.

Admittedly, bloom isn't always evil. Sometimes it's good for adding a nice, soft touch to a landscape, like during a completely peaceful afternoon or a glorious morning sunrise on a terraformed planet still undergoing its foliate stage.

Good morning, Oasis Prime!

Pictured is the capital city, Emerseth. Most of the planet's primary trade occurs here, but there are well-developed spaceports across the entire globe.

This is amazing. Seriously. I haven't played Nova for almost 5 years, but I can't wait for this to be released.

QUOTE (Evil @ Jul 27 2010, 12:53 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

This is amazing. Seriously. I haven't played Nova for almost 5 years, but I can't wait for this to be released.

Progress has been doggedly slow thus far, but I get the feeling that's just because I have to pace every element carefully against one another to ensure the game doesn't end up with drastically different functioning as the result of old code mixed with new code. As it stands, the plug-in file has remained untouched for a while on my computer, but that's because instead, I've been preparing data sheets and comparing statistics for ships, and of course drafting pretty spaceships. I haven't rendered nearly any of the new ships, but that's solely for the reason that I want to do them all in one pass to ensure complete graphical continuity across the entire TC. I have the very distinct feeling that some day it's all just going to come together suddenly and efficiently, and the entire thing will be produced in less than the space of a month. It's just a matter of preparing all the little details first, and preemptively making sure that everything will fit together.

It's like checking all the pieces separately before building a puzzle. If you do enough head work at the beginning, you can solve the real thing in very little time.

Just wondering, you do back up often, right? 'Cause I'd hate for all these pretty ships to get lost for good, considering how far along you've gotten.

I have three different backup solutions. Don't worry, I wouldn't let my legacy disappear like that.

As a great geek once said: "Information doesn't exist until it exists in two places."

Meanwhile, tonight while wandering into the kitchen, I accidentally stepped into an alternate reality where up is down, black is white, and this plug-in never came to concept. For that matter, EV Nova was never released in the first place. Ambrosia went on to make mediocre MMOs instead. Fortunately, it was also a world in which I had somehow discovered the magic of procedural texturing, and thus I hastily wrote down the formula on the back of my hand and returned by way of the refrigerator to our reality, safe and sound.

Long story short, the alternate me taught me how to use Bryce 5.5 to create surprisingly complex and adaptable procedural textures and materials, which I have now begun experimenting with. The results are promising thus far, so I mocked up this double-size sprite image of the NDC Monolith, with simulated running lights. Once again, the entire hull's surface is a single material. It's just the math that the texture follows that tells it to wrap symmetrically and look so darned good.

Thanks, alternate me.

I know that the different texturing method used on the previous page takes away from some of the surface detail inherent in the bitmap texture I was using before, but it also breaks the hull apart into sections far more nicely because of the color differentiation, even if the effect is randomized. The other ships had so much texture detail that when the sprites were compressed to an appropriate size, the entire hull would just blend into one boring color. The procedural method that I'm using now makes for much better-looking sprites, and should add a lot more visual flavor to the game.

This post has been edited by Delphi : 28 July 2010 - 06:24 AM

Ohhhh! Ahhh! So pretty! I really like the way the running lights look! It is a good looking ship!

That's amazing. I really need one of those alternate reality occurrences and an awesome refrigerator to get me out

See, that's why I've been painting my ships in two color standard schemes, each combination depending on the government/faction/group that made the ship. That way, when they're shrunk to tiny sprites (some not so tiny) they will still look at least decent.

QUOTE (EKHawkman @ Jul 28 2010, 08:53 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Ohhhh! Ahhh! So pretty! I really like the way the running lights look! It is a good looking ship!

Thank you. The running lights are my favorite part as well (beyond the whole texturing epiphany thing, of course). I know that technically running lights are supposed to sit along the very edges of the craft to denote its location in space, but I figure really they're just a handy gimmick when you already have things like radar, and by simply setting a global galactic space vessel rule that says "don't fly your ship within 1 km of a visible light", you get the same anti-collision protection.

I also like the little NDC crest on the top. I put the lights and everything on it, and it somehow still just looked ordinary. Then, I had some thoughts on the terrifying Panzer and Tiger tanks of World War II, and their nazi markings (usually the iron cross). Figured, if the NDC are my "space nazis" they should have craft decorated in such a similar proud way.

I'm rambling. That's all for now. I'm trying the Monolith as a full spin render, and then I'll touch up the sprite sheet in Photoshop later and hopefully produce an actual ship. If I'm as thrilled with it as I've been so far, I'll even release it as a stand-alone, just to showcase my work and prove to you guys that I'm actually creating something and not just showing you pretty pictures.

QUOTE (Delphi @ Jul 28 2010, 08:50 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

If I'm as thrilled with it as I've been so far, I'll even release it as a stand-alone, just to showcase my work and prove to you guys that I'm actually creating something and not just showing you pretty pictures.

Pffftt... This entire thread has been mostly just ravings of a mad man, who is skilled at making us believe we're seeing sketchup models, when in fact, we are looking at nothing more than text oriented to LOOK like sketchup models.

I'm pretty impressed by that procedural texturing, actually. I'd like to know how you did it/where you found instructions on how to do it so that I might apply it to my programs. And I am also looking forward to this actually being released, if only so that I can see how it all came together - there are some really interesting ideas going on here (and I may or may not be actively hijacking many of them to attempt to throw together something to amuse myself with).

Rant: One idea that I was playing with (and had been for many years) was making fighters an entirely different class of ship - capital weapons couldn't track them, you'd need fighter weapons. I tried making the fighters a "planet-type" ship, and making point-defense weapons that were also planet-type, but that didn't work (The PD weapons didn't fire, and the fighters could accelerate but not decelerate - silly planetary-vipers). My current idea/theory is to make PD weapons that go through shielding, and give the vipers very tough shielding and enough mass to not be slowed down by being hit (though possibly not, since them blowing up and taking out your shields might be a pain). But then, have the PD weapon do a reasonable amount of damage to armor and have the fighters have little or no armor, so that if the PD weapon accidentally hits another capital ship, it doesn't wipe it out. The advantage of this way is that weapons that realistically do enough damage over a wide enough area (anti-capital beams, nuclear weapons) can still overwhelm the fighter's shielding and blow it up, but regular capital weapons wouldn't do anything. /Rant

Every once in a while when I'm working on a model, I'll pull a screenshot from Bryce and throw the ship into a different backdrop just to see if it still fits with the general universe model. Because I can't handle the way that Glitterato and LunarCell handle their graphics, I reasonably have to change mine to match whatever output I get from them. Photoshop itself of course allows for infinite color correction, but there's still a certain visual style to follow. As a result, here's just a random angle on the Monolith, cropped from its original black preview render frame and pasted into a quick, five-minute backdrop.

Either way, I'm pretty happy about the look, although the NDC crest on the top is obviously far too large and bright. It's exaggerated on purpose; the final sprite needs the emblem to be large if it's going to show up from such a high angle and view distance. The marker lights have already been completed; I hid them for the screenshot because they too, are oversized for sprite purposes.

QUOTE (Meaker VI @ Jul 28 2010, 02:11 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I'm pretty impressed by that procedural texturing, actually. I'd like to know how you did it/where you found instructions on how to do it so that I might apply it to my programs. And I am also looking forward to this actually being released, if only so that I can see how it all came together - there are some really interesting ideas going on here (and I may or may not be actively hijacking many of them to attempt to throw together something to amuse myself with).

I'm using one of the almost-default procedural bases from Bryce 5.5, but if you're using some other procedural generator it shouldn't be too hard to match.

I know the Bryce procedural editor looks archaic, but the best way to sum up what's going on is with a simple description. The material panel on the left is the base procedural. Because of its contrast and concurrent feasibility as a bump map, I have the color, the alpha, and the bump channels turned on, so that all three contribute toward the final result. The second panel is a black and white version of the first, with an algorithm to increase the contrast to a very high value. As I'm using the second panel as a "conditioner" for the first, only the bump and alpha channels are turned on to contribute toward the final product. When it's all said and done, the color combined with the bump map makes the blue panels stand up, and the grey panels sink down.

Though not pictured, I've also added a second texture channel to provide an additive bump map complementing the primary one. The second texture is just a procedural "sand" texture, with the colors re-mapped to turn it into a black and white bump image. It adds a slight degree of noise to the entire surface, making the hull appear a little more rugged and a bit less like a plastic toy.

I have almost no idea what you are talking about with all this rendering stuff. But, It looks good, and I can appreciate that! And other people do understand!

Ahem.

P.S.: This is so awesome.

I'm not the greatest at ship balancing, so when I finally get all the ships in the game assembled I think I'll quickly code a micro-universe where you can use missions to call in generic ships to fight, and the entire shipyard is open for testing. I'll get your opinions on what works and what doesn't; what ships are overpowered and which ones are made of tin foil.