Stierlines Betaframe

[Tamarin]

Stierlines Betaframe is a solid ship frame suitable for short inter-solar flights. Not graceful to fly, but well built, the ship is a favorite among contract pilots ferrying equipment and supplies to remote mining outposts.

***image removed***

[zachzab]

  Impressive, the corridor is awesome and everything looks real. Kind of reminds me of a bug or plant.

[Jochen Stier]

Yup, that does look nice. Is that a Blender shot ? Looks like there are a few light sources in this model. BTW, great name ... does that mean I am going to be in the freight business

[Tamarin]

These are Blender GLSL shots, so we should be able to do better in Giest.

Stierline (Industries) is a large space station and ship manufacturing and construction company. They also produce equipment and components used in mining and military operations. One of their chief competitors in ship building is Drudworks.

***image removed***

[Tamarin]

Refining the textures. I'm happy to say that this texture is 100% GIMP.

The engines and rear door are separate objects.

all objects = 2630 triangles

256x256 texture on engine.

1024x1024 texture on ship (of which ~ 1/3 is used)

[Jochen Stier]

That's looking better all the time! I like that you are keeping some components as separate objects. This way we can begin to equip ships with different capabilities. Do you already have an idea about the size of the ship? How many of the shuttle do you think would fit inside?

I am still working on converting the shaders to deferred light, but I got held up again on atmospheric scattering. This is very tricky to get right and I still found lots of problems. This time I am not going to stop until I am happy with them.  I will post some new images this weekend.

[bohemoth]

i was just curious about what the inside of the ship is going to look like if you have any ideas id be happy to sketch them up before you commit to modeling something.

would it even be possible to have customisable interiors, eg a old warship made into a cargo ship or even having luxury holiday ships used as mass troop trasnports in wars/conflicts?

[Jochen Stier]

It just occurred to me that you can use a lot more triangles if you want. This way you can properly round out the curved areas on the ship hull, the engines etc. I would say that 10-20k triangles are no problem. Here is some simple math.

2630 triangles probably equates to around 1500 vertices. On the GPU, every vertex occupies

1500*3(normal, tangent, position)*3(x,yz)*4(bytes per float) = 54k

The 2630 triangles require

2630*3(indices)*2(bytes per index) = 16k


So, all in all, the mesh occupies 70k of GPU memory while the textures take up (2*1024*1024*4) 8388k! The cost of too many triangles is usually reflected in the performance during rendering. Every vertex requires a vertex shader to run. Often more than once, so there is definitely a reason to be conservative with the number of tris. But, I think using a few more triangles on some areas is worth the cost.

[Tamarin]

I didn't specify the size of this ship.



Here are 24 ships+ 24 characters.



~ 125k triangles.

I'll try to put a package together today with all of the new pieces.

i was just curious about what the inside of the ship is going to look like if you have any ideas id be happy to sketch them up before you commit to modeling something.

would it even be possible to have customisable interiors, eg a old warship made into a cargo ship or even having luxury holiday ships used as mass troop trasnports in wars/conflicts?

This is a good idea. I'm thinking more along the lines of a series of ship frames that could be customized for any purpose. Each ship would have a base level of storage, speed, range,scanner etc. which could be modified. I would like it to be like a lego set so there would be 10 different engines that could be fit into this ships engine nacelles. 10 different chairs that could be added or removed to the interior, etc. All I really have to do is build things the same size so the pieces are interchangeable.

So, all in all, the mesh occupies 70k of GPU memory while the textures take up (2*1024*1024*4) 8388k! The cost of too many triangles is usually reflected in the performance during rendering. Every vertex requires a vertex shader to run. Often more than once, so there is definitely a reason to be conservative with the number of tris. But, I think using a few more triangles on some areas is worth the cost.

This is exactly why I am trying to reference each model to the same texture sheet. I would like to see the memory for mesh and texture be a little more equal I realize the mesh is not very dense and somewhat blocky. What I am moving away from is large open areas of texture and towards a fairly evenly spaced mesh and texture. I will probably aim for a mesh density of 12 triangles/game m³ (If that is a measure )

 

[Jochen Stier]

Looking very nice Tamarin! That Borian looks exactly like what you would expect to come walking out of the back of this craft. I have just created another alpha download of the editor which contains the very first betaframe model under deferred lighting in tamarin2.3dm. There are five point light sources, one of which is swinging on a hinge. This model is still quite dark, mainly because there is no ambient lighting at all, but you can change the range and color of each light source via the tree view.

I will probably aim for a mesh density of 12 triangles/game m3. (If that is a measure)

lol, I also wonder if that is a measure. If not it certainly should be one. I think 12 tris / m3 sounds good. Assuming that the Borian is about 2 meters high, he should always be surrounded by enough detail. I will make this the primary LOD for the planet as well. Allthough that would mean more like 2 tris/m2.

[Tamarin]

UNREAL!!!! My jaw is on the floor.

[Jochen Stier]

Yeah, I am still always amazed myself when I play around with deferred lighting. Just imagine flying around the darkside of the planet illuminating the groud with two high powered spot lights...  We'll be able to do that very soon. Plus, the lighting will still get a little better once I have figured out the difference between direct and ambient lighting.

BTW, choose some names for your crafts, because I want to organize the models folder and keep each model in its own directory. It will suck to change the names later.

[Tamarin]

Here is an update with ship, ship door, engine, and landing pad.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/nlmhcwnmtjb/stierline.rar