[Official] Behind the scenes

[BigBANGtheory]

Art Lino has a bit free time to write something new. What do you want to see/learn about?

I'd like to see some texturing work, your workflow in Photoshop etc..

Bump/normal maps especially.

[linolafett]

Will write the post tomorrow, pictures are taken Little work in PS actually, but you will see.

[linolafett]

How do we create our textures?

Usually not in Photoshop, we model them in our 3D tools.
Here is my example of a interior Texture i created some time ago:

[ external image ]

This is a screenshot of Blender with the finished model of the texture in it. The top ortographic view shows, how the texture will look like in 2D. From this perspective it will be rendered.

In the upper right corner you can see some scribbles of mine, where i thought about how i want to make the texture look like, which elements can be useful.
Our lead artist Alex got some ideas using these scribbles and refined them to a nice 2D concept of the texture. This is the blueprint i used for modeling.

[ external image ]

In the lower right corner (of the Blender screenshot) you can see how the 3D model is set up. Instead of cutting every small hole into the mesh, i just model the hole and let it hover over the geometry. As i render the texture in a 2D image, the depth is not important for me. The normalmap, which fakes a depth feeling is just using the face orientation, thats why this setup works. Saves a lot of time
Modeling the texture is still a very time consuming part, you can spend with ease 2 weeks on a single texture.


Here is the rough workflow after modeling the texture:

[ external image ]

Figure 1: This is the rendered ambient occlusion from Blender. I overlayed a neutral grey (128/128/128; 50%) over it to create a nice basis which i can work with.

Figure 2: We now add a bit of brightness variation into our texture, just to get some variation into the smaller parts, we can not really do that with vertexcolours later in the 3D meshes.

Figure 3: In the end we add some dirt/scratches and other smaller details to the texture. As this is a pretty clean interior texture, we do not have a lot of dirt on it. This is our finished diffuse texture, ready for ingame use.

Figure 4: This is the normalmap rendered from Blender, this is used for the illusion of depth in the renderengine.

We also have a specularmap, in this case it looks almost identical to the finished diffuse texture, so i didnt include it here.

The texture was largely used for the Omicron interiors, you will spot the parts of the textures pretty easyly here.

[ external image ]

[BigBANGtheory]

Thanks for that. Now you may disagree with me here, or I may end up explaining this badly given I'm no expert in texturing...

If you look at the brightness map, it adds a lot of darkness to areas and edges highlighted in the normal map which then in the rendered scene seem to my eyes at least wash out the depth of the normal map i.e. it 'looks' like a 2D flat surface with back as opposed to a 3D surface with dark crevices.

I wonder what would the scene look like if the brightness map didn't darken the edges quite so much? Would we see more of the surface depth?

[wwdragon]

Thanks for posting that; interesting to check out what you guys are doin.

[florianlt]

Hi all,

Bit of a different Behind the Scenes article today, as my usual work involves pages and pages of lua script, so I'm not going to talk directly about that. Rather, this topic was inspired by a horrible-looking bug in the Start Menu of the Teladi DLC, which normally looks like this:

[ external image ]

I didn't take a screenshot of the bug (sorry), but basically the outer ring of the Teladi station had 2/3 missing and was z-fighting with itself. The actual problem doesn't matter so much for this article though, other than Lino somehow ending up saying: “But it's rotating too slow to produce any substantial artificial gravity anyway.” (In German of course, so he may not have actually used these fancy words ). And I said: “Huh, I'm not sure. Let's do the math.” (In German of course, so no idea what fancy words I used). I was thinking about Culture Oribtals (yes, that's two capital letters) taking roughly a day for one rotation, and vastly underestimating their size.

We want to find out how big the centripetal force on the inner side of the ring is. More precisely I just want the centripetal acceleration to compare it to earth's gravitational one of about 10 m/s². The ring has a radius of 7 km and needs 600 s for one rotation.

[ external image ]

Excuse the horrible LibreOffice composition, but I didn't feel like installing a working LaTeX environment for this. The centripetal acceleration is the ring’s angular velocity squared, multiplied by the radius. We can get the angular velocity from the cycle period. Basically Lino was right in the first place; it only has about half the acceleration of the moon surface. To get to something like earth-standard gravity it would need to rotate almost four times faster.

Florian

[ArtilleryWhore]

Simon is the master for the drone, also he build the drostan. He has now holiday though I cant really substitute him, i guess this requests have to wait then.

i tried to search for him through the member list, but im not use to those functions on this forum.

sense i cant do it via PM directly, will you please tell them i said "Thank You" for the Drostan.

also please notify him that i wish to pay tribute, and make a Xenon offering to the god of the drostan!

[linolafett]

I will redirect the "Thank you" for sure


The last thing for this year from me, a small sneak peek for you guys.

[ external image ]


I whish you all nice holidays and a good start in the next year! See you in January

[Earth Ultimatum IV.]

I will redirect the "Thank you" for sure


The last thing for this year from me, a small sneak peek for you guys.

[ external image ]


I whish you all nice holidays and a good start in the next year! See you in January

Hmm, a Canterran frigate?

[linolafett]

Not a frigate, we miss a miningship in DV so thats what it will be.

[Sparky Sparkycorp]

She looks like a beauty

I love those wingy bits.

[Gizmoh]

Not a frigate, we miss a miningship in DV so thats what it will be.

Insert M Bison*
YES!!!

[NZ-Wanderer]

The last thing for this year from me, a small sneak peek for you guys.
[ external image ]
I whish you all nice holidays and a good start in the next year! See you in January

Ooo, do I spot the Skunk parked up inside that thing? - don't suppose that means we can actually fly it into it tho

[SupraRZ]

I will redirect the "Thank you" for sure


The last thing for this year from me, a small sneak peek for you guys.

[ external image ]


I whish you all nice holidays and a good start in the next year! See you in January

Hope you and the Egosoft team have a drunk Christmas and a prosperous new year ...thanks for all your hard work

[linolafett]

Skunk for size reference

[Nikola515]

Not a frigate, we miss a miningship in DV so thats what it will be.

Is there any plans of adding new stations to Canterans ???

[Aken_Bosch]

I just had an epiphany. Or more probably, I should just sleep a bit more and drink a bit less ...but:

one of the things I always liked the most about Canteran designs, are those "wingy bits" (cit.) on their major capitals...but I always wondered if they were conceived with some kind on "in-lore usefulness", like some kind of heat-sinks or such, or just for aesthetics purpose...but they always reminded me about something I couldn't grasp. Now, after seeing those last images (the one below mostly) I think I grasped it, in my own twisted way at least. Canteran are Terrans, Terrans had the tradition of naming their military ships after nordic deities, Sucellus is also a nordic/celtic mythological figure (but Lepton and Styrvok are not, effectively, still don't know about that new ship though)...and when I see those "wingy bits" from the right angle (as in the lower of the two new images), they now just remind me of the stylized wings usually depicted on the helmets of deities like Odin, Thor and maybe some other mythological nordic figures...

Did you ever happened to have the same thought, or should I check if I'm having some leaks in the sealing between my cabin and my spaceweed cargo?

[Spami]

@Aken_Bosch
You should have not mentioned drugs in your post, now I couldn't help but imagine you (while reading your post) just coming home from a party totally drunk and discover you have forgotten to turn off your computer still with the forum website open.
This added a few extra crazy levels to your post

Still this sounds reasonable, I always thought those are some kind of solar panels as seen in other games though they don't have the texture of one

[Aken_Bosch]

Actually, you are definitely not that far from the truth
Maybe the biggest difference, I didn't find the computer still on, I booted it on purpose ...just after coming home from a dinner to celebrate my girlfriend's graduation (oh, by the way, @Sparky - there's a little bit of "thank you" also for you )...no alcohol, the only thing I could have got drunk on is sushi...had an entire "sushi pie" for the occasion

Now I'll probably dream about boarding a Sucellus, finding Odin aboard and showing him that my inertial hammer is more hurtful than is magic one

On a more serious note aboute those appendages, I still prefer to think of them as some kind of heatsinks (more so for the IHC on the Sucellus)...also, they seem to be hinged for some specific reason...that I'm sure Lino will promptly address

[linolafett]

I always excuse wings as radiators to cool down ships or to protect some stuff below it.
In this case i just looked at the lepton and tried to get a similiar looking ship, so wings are a must!