[Nuke]

i frankensteined a few nasa lunar, martain, and asteroid photos together in photoshop and used the displace modigier in max to generate theese, which i intend to use for a pirate installation im thinkiing about making. theese rocks are about 2200 polies each. i made them really high poly to get the most detail out of displace. i will optimise and hopefully max will retain the harder features of the rocks while getting them down to about 800 polies each. i could probibly make them look better if i could get some higher res photos to work off of.  im not used to working under max but id like to make the whole installatation in it. one thing i dont know how to do in max is make single mesh models, any pointers would help .

[Goober5000]

ROFL at the thread title

[Nuke]

type-o, my bad

[WMCoolmon]

at the asteroids.

at the title.

[Nuke]

ok really i got the idea from gwar's "we kill everything"

[Galemp]

Ugh, spherical mapping. Please try to do something about those pinched textures at the top. It's hard, I know, but it would look so much better.

[Nuke]

the uv and displacement is applied simultaniously. mind you theese are generated from a bitmap not actually modeled.  however i think it can be smoothed out simply by decreasing the contrast at the top and bottom of the texture making a more grey area which will apear smooth.

does anyone know if max has the ability to combine multiple textures and uv maps into a single texture? cause i havent a clue how to do single submodel meshes in max. part of the reason i never learned max is cause im so damn good with truespace

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Nuke
the uv and displacement is applied simultaniously. mind you theese are generated from a bitmap not actually modeled.  however i think it can be smoothed out simply by decreasing the contrast at the top and bottom of the texture making a more grey area which will apear smooth.

does anyone know if max has the ability to combine multiple textures and uv maps into a single texture? cause i havent a clue how to do single submodel meshes in max. part of the reason i never learned max is cause im so damn good with truespace

Just use box-modelling in max (or create as objects and weld the vertices together).  Newer versions of max can bake maps IIRC, my preference is to UV-then-template-then map it (and then almost inevitably have to re-uv bits).

[NGTM-1R]

Originally posted by Nuke
i could probibly make them look better if i could get some higher res photos to work off of.

It's not that the photos are low-res, though they probably are, so much as the fact that like the surface of the moon most asteroids are covered in a layer of dust from a few inches to a foot or more thick, which hides features pretty well and gives them that low-res look.

[redmenace]

Don't forget LODS. I know it is a pain in the ass, but if you intend for these to replace the Retail astroids, they need to have LODs to reduce slow downs.

[aldo_14]

IMO, you should build a very basic asteroid model (very low poly) that would be ok for LOd1 or 2, and meshsmooth it for the highest LOD/s.  Because IIRC most asteroids are actually fairly smooth anyways.

[Nuke]

technically it would be very easy to replace retail asteroids in this manor. im using an extreemly high res geosphere with the displace modifyer with a mutires on top of that. by tweaking the multires values  i can generate asteroids of different polycounts thus creating lods. its really quite simple. the major problem, as galemp pointed our, is the pinching at the top and bottom of the uv map, which can probibly be fixt by using some gausian blur in the top and botom parts of the texture in photoshop. notice how the effect is more profound on the asteroid (the big one) with the less smoth texture. an easy little fix really.

i intended theese rocks to be used as part of an asteroid base im working on, i just thought id share the technique in case somone wanted to use it to create beter space rocks

[aldo_14]

Why not just re-UV it anyways?

[Nuke]

the uv mapping is as good as it can be. theres just no perfect way to uv map a sphere. ideally every face should be the same size on the uv map. the problem is that twards the top and bottom of the uv map you have a sawtooth edge that doesnt tile well. however if you assign that area of the texture a drab, flat look, you will hardly notice the artifacts it creates. essentially you dont want any big details in that part of the texture. its really an easy fix to a complex problem.

[aldo_14]

Well, try using a per-face map and an indinstinct but grained texture area; avoids the overt blurriness but prevents UV errors (because you're not using a map area with distinct texture changes which would cause problems).

[Nuke]

so in other words break the uv space up into 4 quadrants and grain the texture around the edges of  the uv map. then displace using the existing map. yea that stands to work better.

[FireCrack]

Polar coordinates filter in photoshop.

And to make multiple meshes into one you go to the tools menu on the big right pane (click the hammer) then use the button labled attatch or somthing.

[Nuke]

sence this is for an instllation il hit the easy button and put a turret over the twisted parts

[FireCrack]

+1

[StratComm]

Or for that matter, part of the base.  There's nothing that says the twisted part needs to be at the top/bottom.