[Cobra]

this looks goooooood....

[Black Wolf]

Wow. That kicks arse. Nice work on the shells too BTW - good compromise between smoothed and angular. Can blender do smoothgroups for areas like that?

[vyper]

What the fudge? Holy fudge!

[Ulala]

[DaBrain]

Originally posted by Trivial Psychic
I suggest you use 16-bit TGA for the glowmaps.  Lightspeed was using 8-bit pcx for his glowmaps, but its well known that 8-bit pcx is loaded into memory as though it was 16-bit.  So, we could get better quality with no performance loss if the glowmap is 16-bit tga.  Main map and shine-env maps should be 32-bit DDS though.

I'd use DDS for the glowmap too. It's still four times smaller than 16 Bit TGA and the quality should be very good at this high res.

[Vasudan Admiral]

Wow, i really wasn't expecting anything near this level of response - thanks a million all.  Very much appreciated.

Originally posted by Black Wolf
Can blender do smoothgroups for areas like that?

It can do the smoothgroups - but they'd get lost in the Blender-Truespace conversion. But i can pretty easily do them in TS once the textures are complete.

Texture formats: So far i've been following Lightspeeds lead with using dds for the main map and shine map, and 8bit full size pcx's for the glowmaps - mainly due to the tiny filesize:quality ratio i saw when testing formats.

Basically, there was so little in it:
- 8bit pcx gave me great quality at 172kb {2048 res glowmap too!}
- 16bit tga came in at 10kb bigger same quality
- While dds came in at a whole 5.24 megs bigger with much worse quality (tho i think that could be the settings i use :\ - any advice here would be much appreciated)

that i decided to go with LS' pre-established format.
Does anyone know of a more efficient setup for textures?

Oh, and here are two more Aeolus pics with something that probably hasn't been well spotted yet. (ok maybe the second pic is a little too obvious, but meh - they're not great shots anyway. )

[Swamp_Thing]

What´s the most "hi-polytised" Orion out there? We need a good Orion for the cutscenes. With a new texture would be even better, since the canon textures are fugly...
We will also need a hi-poly Lucifer and the Iceni. That Lucy looks mighty fine...

[c914]

Do thosse peapole have to look at windows  ( in model texture )  it sily and look aful:ick:

[WMCoolmon]

Originally posted by Swamp_Thing
What´s the most "hi-polytised" Orion out there? We need a good Orion for the cutscenes. With a new texture would be even better, since the canon textures are fugly...
We will also need a hi-poly Lucifer and the Iceni. That Lucy looks mighty fine...

3.6.6 mv_models. I think GalEmp also made a reskin version, but I'm not sure if that's the one in mv_models or if it's just the high-poly Orion with the old textures.

[Pnakotus]

I can see an 'old fleet meets new fleet' Pride Of Terra splash image in our future... an Orion/Fenris/Apollo group being superseded by the Deimos/Aeolus/Perseus group...  With lots of lighting.  

And yes, I left the Hecate out.  It looks like arse.

OT, is it possible to randomly choose the splash from a pile of availible images?  Cycling through T/V/S ship comparisons (even cutscene-style wireframe comparisons) and glory shots and dynamic close shots would be better than the current method, where at least 50% of everyone hates whatever gets chosen

[Vasudan Admiral]

Originally posted by c914
Do thosse peapole have to look at windows  ( in model texture )  it sily and look aful:ick:

They're the right scale, the windows are there, crew are aboard, it gives the ship some 'life' rather than just bright windows with nothing visible inside, and they're only visible if you fly up to them - what's wrong with that?

[DaBrain]

Originally posted by Vasudan Admiral

Basically, there was so little in it:
- 8bit pcx gave me great quality at 172kb {2048 res glowmap too!}
- 16bit tga came in at 10kb bigger same quality
- While dds came in at a whole 5.24 megs bigger with much worse quality (tho i think that could be the settings i use :\ - any advice here would be much appreciated)
 

Don't look at the filesize of PCX files. It doesn't reflect the ammount of memory used when loaded into ram. (TGA may also use a lossless compression, which won't work in-game!)

No matter what, each DXT format takes up less memory than a PCX at the same res.

I'd suggest to use S3 DXT1. Which looks better for effects than Nvidias DXT1.

The quality will be lower than the PCX one though. But I think that doesn't matter much for this high res.

A 2048² DXT1 DDS takes up exactly 2 MB in-game.
An uncompressed TGA takes up 12 MB in-game.
A 16-bit TGA and a PCX need both 8 MB in-game.

[Taristin]

Save it as DXT5     ARGB     (Interpolated Alpha)
That's usually good for fighter maps.

[DaBrain]

Meh, you won't need an alpha channel for the main map. (Unless it has to be partly transparent...)

Unsing DXT5 is usually a waste of memory. S3 DXT looks almost exactly as DXT5. (A bit different, but not worse...)
While Nvidia's DXT1 looks a lot worse than DXT5...

I can take care of conversion stuff for you. I'm quite used to texture compression by now.

[WMCoolmon]

Originally posted by Vasudan Admiral
They're the right scale, the windows are there, crew are aboard, it gives the ship some 'life' rather than just bright windows with nothing visible inside, and they're only visible if you fly up to them - what's wrong with that?

They don't look like three-dimensional people standing inside. They look like black shapes in the shape of people painted on the window.

[Cobra]

yeah, i think they could use some work, too.

but it's a good start.

[Taristin]

Actually, that's pretty cool... You gotta make one animated, though, where he gets up, walks around a bit, and sits back down

[Flipside]

I want the Iceni complete with man in silly hat

[Taristin]

I'll have to second that.

Welcome to moderatorship, Flip.

[Anaz]

Cool. I kinda like the people. Gives a real sense of scale that wasn't there before.