Replacing the Big Crappy Station

[DraQ]

Anyway it will be a good test of me thinking forward because my intention is to make the different parts modular, so I can lego a bit with it and create different versions.

I just wanted to ask about that.

Different modules could also be reused if we were to add different kinds of orbital installations (and we should if we want systems to actually feel busy and have some interesting locations to do missions around).

[bszlrd]

Mesh is ready for texturing. There are some places for additional detail, and the UV maps have space to allow then too, so upgrades are certainly possible.
Here's the mod.

[FluffyFreak]

When you've textured it using PNGs convert them to DDS textures using any of the discussed programs - I recommend the AMD Compressonator though, use the 32-bit version if the 64-bit one fails since it has a very picky installer.

Use DXT1 if a texture has nothing in the alpha channel, or DXT5 if it does. I don't see any in the current textures but thought I'd mention it :)
You might be able to keep the diffuse at 4096x4096 but drop the specular or glow resolutions. Try it out anyway.

[bszlrd]

Heh, I can't even imagine how long it will take to texture it. :D
I used a GIMP plugin for the Varada. Is there any difference in output?

[FluffyFreak]

No idea, a lot of them use the same compression system. Often something based on LibSquish.

[impaktor]

Could you texture like one quarter of the ring or similar, and then just copy paste mirror version for the rest of the ring?

[bszlrd]

@impaktor: That's the plan :)
You see that there are some room on this maps, especially on the facades map. I wan't to add a bunch of small details in a next pass, so I didn't bothered packing it overly tight. I tried to reuse as much space as possible.
Facades (4k):

Floors and walkways and related (4k):

Ring and outter hull(4k, might work with 2k though): And the side of the ring is 50 stories tall.

Spokes and internal hull (2k, not much details here, but I'll put on some stuff):

Support struts(512x):

[bszlrd]

A bit strange thing I encountered:



I was thinking about how to put numbers on the pads. I figured that a set of textures with transparency might work (like if they were decals). For a test I just added some transparency (opacity = 99)to the diff of the whole pad material, and set some alpha up in the texture. The areas that have some transparency glitch out as seen on the images. Like if the normals were all over the place, even if the normals are correct. It happens on partially transparent areas. The glitch doesn't appear with fully transparent areas, but it seems to affect opaque parts too. That yellow-is stripe is the glass of the ring, which has transparency too. Other geometry doesn't show up trough those supposedly opaque areas.

I don't know if this even counts as a bug.
Here's the mod file.
The evenly colored areas have transparency, the tiling on the pads is opaque.

[FluffyFreak]

The glitching out of certain faces is probably due to the back-face culling.
That doesn't care about the surface normal, which is used for lighting calculations, it cares about the winding order.

If you want numbers on the pads then we should do that in code.

[FluffyFreak]

Speaking of, there was another post/issue about lighting.

What kind of effect would look good for directing people to their pad?