Military Venturestar "Drop ship"

[Zordey]

Still tweaking the layer opacity's etc and experimenting with different layer merging techniques to see what they do...

I didn't know about the "r" button... but yes. the colours change when I press r or change the sliders manually. As far as i can see my pattern is solid Black / white with no antialiasing but I dont know how Pioneer processes it, It could be adding antialiasing in the background because of the contrast.

I notice your pattern files use grey's so Ill have a go at that.

[nozmajner]

The artefact is not present on the current patterns of the Venturestar. I think the black shouldn't cause problems if there's no antialiasing. It might be because there's a bit of it, but too sublte, but it's the gray of the other pattern color on the texture, but I'm not sure how the pattern system gets the areas (the wiki page is a bit vague about how the system interprets the different grays.) What happens if you shift the value of one gray area?
I've checked, and there's a bit of antialiasing on the Pumpkinseed, but it doesn't cause any artefacts.

[Zordey]

I changed the pattern to black and a reasonably dark gray and the artefact's do not seem to appear now. Good to know...

I assume that something is happening with the png when Pioneer resizes the texture internally when there is a huge difference in contrast.

Ill do some more experiments and then maybe raise it as a bug.

[Marcel]

The hull texture is getting better, but I don't think the yellow window looks very good, especially on a military vessel. Perhaps red?

[jpab]

As far as i can see my pattern is solid Black / white with no antialiasing but I dont know how Pioneer processes it, It could be adding antialiasing in the background because of the contrast.

It is adding antialiasing. Perhaps easiest to explain by example: Open your pattern map image in photoshop or the gimp, and transform it somehow (eg, rotate it). There should be a way to select the filtering method (it might be called sampling or interpolation), and you probably have options for nearest or "none", linear, cubic and perhaps one or two others. If you apply the transform with no filtering (aka nearest neighbour filtering) then you see that the output still contains only black and white. But if you select linear filtering, then the output will have grey pixels along the edge. The same thing happens when applying a texture to a 3D model: it's being warped and needs to be filtered.

For most textures, this does what you want, but for pattern textures it can lead to the effect you've seen here. The easiest way to avoid it is to pick adjacent pattern colours. There are four pattern colours: white/transparent, and the three editable colours. Pattern values 0 to 63 map to white/transparent, 64 to 127 map to the first pattern colour, 128 to 191 map to the second pattern colour, and 192 to 255 map to the third pattern colour. So if you only want to use a single pattern colour, it's best to use the first pattern colour (e.g., value=95 or 37%) so that you don't get any pattern colour fringing.

[Zordey]

Thanks for the clarification jpab. That is what I assumed was happening.

It may be worth adding those ranges into the Wiki (if it isnt there already, I havent looked in ages)

[Zordey]

The hull texture is getting better, but I don't think the yellow window looks very good, especially on a military vessel. Perhaps red?

I hate that front window myself, if you notice in most of the screenshots I try not to have it visible. When I am happy with the rest of the texture I will have to do something with it.

Ill probably go for small black windows with possibly a slight red glow from them to try and convey light coming from the inside.

[nozmajner]

It isn't in the wiki, but it's good to know. (I was guessing/eyeballing it usually, not that it's hard to calculate, but it worked for me eyeballing, so I didn't really bothered.) I'm adding it.

[Zordey]

Quick update... Actually got spending an hour working on the textures today again.

Grrrrrr, my shark impression


And a really nasty attempt at doing a camouflage pattern


@nozmajner I seem to be having an odd issue with the rotation thrusters you added to the mesh. In the model viewer they look inside out (like the normals are reversed) but when I turn on normals in Blender all the lines point outward, any ideas?

[Nyankosensei]

More than shark seems a crocodille :), and i like more this hull spec than the old one