Misc Artwork for the Flight Demo

To be perfectly honest, I haven't been paying the greatest attention to this mod, but I had to comment on how beautiful the ships look in-engine. The Valiant in particular; thought she was a Gilgamesh until I looked closer :) The brightness in the thumbnails seems about right to me.

As for the pirate ship, it bears a slight resemblance to a Star Wars fan ship I saw some time ago. I'll see if I can dig it up.
 
Yeah, Howard, these ships are absolutely stunning. If I had no clue they had been made, I would mistake them for pictures of real ships in space. Keep up the excellent work.
 
LOAF: Yeah, that'd be pretty cool. Best parts of the idea: Art is easy - chrome shader applied to everything! And you wouldn't need to hire good voice actors, either - the bad acting could be part of the package. I like it. This is of course assuming you were thinking more along the lines of the old 1950s B&W sci-fi films. If not, apologies.
Maj Striker: The basic process is this: Create mesh, roughly uv unwrap the mesh, bring that rough un-wrap into photoshop, paint various lines and details onto the un-wrap, save out several version of that new texture - bump, decal, glow, apply those maps to the mesh in 3dsMAX using various texture mixes, overlays, and masks, make an automatically unwraped version ( to pack the uv resolution) and bake the textures out into 5 elements. Base color, Ambient occlusion (also known as a dirt map), Normal map (bump map), Glow map (engines and the like) and Specularity Map (Shine map). REfine and repeat as necessary.
Bob McDob: Hey, don't worry about it - we're hardly the most important thing going on in WC. Also, for clarity, all these shots are internal Max renders. However, before you yell "FAKE!" at the top of your lungs, I'm not doing anything in the render that won't be done in-engine. Most of these preview renders have one omni light (shadow casting) and one ambient light (general in-shadow color...in most cases a darkish gray-blue). This is something our engine can very easily handle.
Cam: I'll stick up the render sometime tonight, or late tomorrow evening...soonest, hopefully.
 
If you want to make the camel look bigger, make that cockpit smaller. It's absolutely *huge* compared to the fighter cockpit, and the cockpit really serves as a point of reference for size. I suppose if the ship is big enough you could also add some windows... now that would make it look bigger.
 
Holy cow, wanted to say all of the contributions i've seen look absolutely fantastic! Seriously, to everyone who posted and all the ideas, to include the space lozenge pattern...sweet stuff.

Brad
 
Howard: correction, Pioneer is the single most important thing happening in WC right now :) of course Standoff, SAGA and Gemini Gold are, too... in their respective forums :) here, Pio is.
anyway, I wonder... will the game engine be capable of self-shadows? of course they add an unprecedented degree of realism to the max shots, but real time realization requires a lot of horsepower and an expensive card, or so I am told. can we really expect the same quality of rendering in-game? maybe even in the flight demo? :)
 
I'd say the most important thing going on right now is the release of EA Replay. We're a distant 145th. As for the self shadows: Yes, they will be supported. And they shouldn't take an insane card. as far as I know, they will work fine with any card equal or past ShaderModel 2.0.
I'm pretty sure you could find a card capable of that for 40-100 bucks. Joel could give you a more exacting technical answer.
 
Yeah, something with SM2.0 support or greater will have support for it, but it does have a hit to performance. There are options, though, so that you can decrease quality in other areas (like visibility range or texture detail) so that the gamer can decide what areas they find most important. At the moment, I'm trying to put as many options as possible, so that the user has a lot of control. Once we get more testing in of other cards, we'll post the minimum specs if you want certain features, but right now, it's hard to say definitively. Hope that helps. :)

~Joel
 
Howard Day said:
LOAF: Yeah, that'd be pretty cool. Best parts of the idea: Art is easy - chrome shader applied to everything! And you wouldn't need to hire good voice actors, either - the bad acting could be part of the package. I like it. This is of course assuming you were thinking more along the lines of the old 1950s B&W sci-fi films. If not, apologies.
Maj Striker: The basic process is this: Create mesh, roughly uv unwrap the mesh, bring that rough un-wrap into photoshop, paint various lines and details onto the un-wrap, save out several version of that new texture - bump, decal, glow, apply those maps to the mesh in 3dsMAX using various texture mixes, overlays, and masks, make an automatically unwraped version ( to pack the uv resolution) and bake the textures out into 5 elements. Base color, Ambient occlusion (also known as a dirt map), Normal map (bump map), Glow map (engines and the like) and Specularity Map (Shine map). REfine and repeat as necessary.
Click to expand...

Thanks! I appreciate you explaining it but I was talking more about how to create the basic texture in photoshop or paintshop. What do you do to create weathering and panel lines etc?
 
Oh, okay - no problem. Here's a PSD (zip file, 7MB). It's the tilable texture that's being used on the Capships - just the color channel, but the bump and spec are derived it.. Decidely simple. You can see the layer effects and layer setups that I use. It should be self-explainatory, although unfortunately none of the layers are named...sorry.
http://www.hedfiles.net/Capship.zip
Learning purposes only, etc....

In other news....new MFD images. These are more along the lines of WC1 MFDs, not the pokey Privateeer imitations I posted earlier. I like these more - they've got the right "feel", I think.
 

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Howard Day said:
I'd say the most important thing going on right now is the release of EA Replay. We're a distant 145th.
Click to expand...

I think wcnews itself is and has been the most important thing going on for Wing Commander. Pioneer, assuming it eventually gets finished, is probably second. I can't talk for anyone else, but I'd rather play a finished Pioneer than EA replay, Saga, GG, or Standoff.
 
Howard Day said:
Oh, okay - no problem. Here's a PSD (zip file, 7MB). It's the tilable texture that's being used on the Capships - just the color channel, but the bump and spec are derived it.. Decidely simple. You can see the layer effects and layer setups that I use. It should be self-explainatory, although unfortunately none of the layers are named...sorry.
http://www.hedfiles.net/Capship.zip
Learning purposes only, etc....

In other news....new MFD images. These are more along the lines of WC1 MFDs, not the pokey Privateeer imitations I posted earlier. I like these more - they've got the right "feel", I think.
Click to expand...

The MFDs look absolutely fantastic, they look very "right" to me. However the zip file you posted is damaged or incomplete? When I download and try to unzip it gives an error message saying it is damaged or an unknown format?
 
Hurleybird: Whateva. The guns won't change - they're really a bit of a minor detail.
Maj Striker: TRy http://www.hedfiles.net/capship.zip
Delance: Me too. I spent a lovely evening staring at the original wingcommander and taking screen shots.
I've made more!
 

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Yes, I do. Unfortunately the parts that are absent from ships2 are also important to the overall feel of the thing. The shields, how they look when damaged, that sort of thing. Believe it or not, I did use the ship2 index as a starting point, but I still wanted to directly observe the real thing. Any excuse to power up WC1, I suppose. :D BTW - just got EA Replay - I'm waiting for the system update to finish as we speak (well, gotta charge the battery first) I can't wait.
 
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