Clavius rEVisited

There's a 3.3.3 (public beta) here.

This post has been edited by pac : 17 February 2007 - 06:36 AM

I have to say that new Atomos render is pretty impressive. I'm not sure it feels quite right yet, but maybe it just needs some texturing. It looks like you applied a glowmap to it and colored certain parts, but no real texturing to the mesh, maybe?

@captjosh, on Feb 17 2007, 06:45 AM, said in Clavius rEVisited:

I have to say that new Atomos render is pretty impressive. I'm not sure it feels quite right yet, but maybe it just needs some texturing. It looks like you applied a glowmap to it and colored certain parts, but no real texturing to the mesh, maybe?

What I have right now is basically colors applied to the mesh. It's not finished yet by any means. I don't have a glowmap, but some of the textured areas do have emitting textures (that'd be the green stripes, the nacelle fins, and the red bits behind the turbine blades). I've been soliciting advice in the Just Graphics forum too; once I finish reading all the tutorials I got linked, I can make it better than ever.

Cool

Well, here's a sample spin, or shan, or whatever you call them these days:

Naturally that's a bit big to be used directly; I just rendered at 320x240 and hacked together a script to assemble the results into a grid for me. There's also a redundant frame, as you can see in this GIF:

Simply removing the extra frame won't do, as then I'd have a 35-frame rotation, which seems silly (besides, I can up the number of frames more or less arbitrarily, so I can get smoother animations). This was rendered with the camera at 60°, with a slightly yellow light above, behind, and to the right of the camera. My goal was to give you an idea of what the ship could look like in-game.

Oh, and no glows, etc. done yet.

It's a groovy ship, but I think you gotta look at the rEV graphics a bit more -- have you tried loading rEV up and playing it? CaptJosh is looking for graphics that will look like they fit alongside those. Here are what I see as the most important defining characteristics:

• Sprite viewing angle only a few degrees off from a straight top-down view.
• Pretty harsh light from top left, generating deep shadows (in which detail is still visible).
• A certain characteristic degree of metallic shininess.
• Schematic-style target pics.

I expect that some of these are things you just haven't gotten to yet, but spinning the sprite with the camera at 60° suggests you're getting off onto the wrong track!

Also, it's too big. The Atomos is a heavy fighter, not corvette sized or frigate sized vessel.

All that aside, I see this as an impressive showcase of your talent, sir. Do not stop your efforts. Please take what we're saying the constructive criticism it is and improve rather than giving up.

This post has been edited by CaptJosh : 21 February 2007 - 08:18 AM

Thanks for the feedback. I actually can't play ReVisited right now, because EVN is unbearably slow on my Intel Mac. I'm hoping that a workaround is found (I don't think we'll be seeing EVN 1.11 just to fix that) so I can play without resorting to emulation or booting up my old computer, but in the meantime, I'm working from memory. Here's the new spin:

And gif:

I reduced the ambient light that the ship receives, moved the light source and camera, fixed the spin rate so that there's no redundant frame, made the ship turn in the right direction (!), and did precisely nothing to the ship size, since that's easy enough to change later. How big should the Atomos be, anyway? The size of the original was always a little on the small size, I felt; the Atomos is easily the heaviest fighter the player can get access to for most of the game (and the heavier ones are too dark to be playable in), and thus should be larger than a Rapier at the very least. Plus, make it too small, and all that detail on the ship's body will be unintelligible.

Oh, and for lighting - there's pretty much no way you can get interesting shadows on the ship without plunging the ship body into darkness half the time. I don't really see a good way to deal with that without completely changing the model's basic structure.

(This page is quickly growing beyond the point that dialup users will be able to load it...oops)

Edit: GIFs are not PNGs. Oops again.

Edit 2: Since the board software is scaling everything down anyway, I cut the size of the images by half.

Edit 3: Here it is with the engine glows turned off:

This post has been edited by Derakon : 21 February 2007 - 08:01 PM

Shadows look great in this one

Actually, EVN is only known to have speed issues on the MacBook Pro. Most likely that's your problem. There is one thing you COULD do though. If you have space, just set up your system to dual boot Windows and run Nova that way. I'm sure ASW would gladly update your license for a Windows version.

Now, getting back to your work there, that sprite is still to big. This is a heavy fighter. That's of a size with the corvette even using the large ships plug-ins for rEVisited. Here let me show you...

And for comparison, a rEVisited Manta, with frames for banking as it turns, no less...
(108 frames! Yipe!)

Honestly, the Atomos should probably be of a length with the Confed Gunboat at most, I think...

This post has been edited by CaptJosh : 21 February 2007 - 08:00 PM

Josh, in both of his posts he already stated that he knows it's too big and that a final version won't be that size. This is still a work-in-progress, remember? The pics are just demonstrations so you can see the detail of it.
Win Nova runs great in Parallels too, if you have that.

Oops. Oh well. At least I have size references up now. Sorry, Derakon. Not trying to run you off at all. Just got in a hurry. I'm seriously wowed by your work so far. Stick with me on this project please. I'll make sure you're in the credits. Which reminds me, that's one dësc I don't think I've redone at all and I need to.

Also, if anyone recalls how the original Clavius and Beyond menu screen looked, if something similar could be done with the new Neutronic Kestrel being added to the rEVisited menu screen, say flying sort of over the word "Clavius" added at the top, that would be good. If something could be done with the loading screen to add an updated version of that silhouette of a lady like is in the original Clavius Revisited Loading screen, that would be cool, along with adding the word Clavius to it coordinated with the way the name rEVisited looks, that would be good. I can provide reference pics of the original screens if need be.

This post has been edited by CaptJosh : 21 February 2007 - 08:10 PM

Heh. No worries, Josh; at least now we're on the third page, so dialup users can breathe a sigh of relief. And the size references will be handy, yes. The stuff I've been posting here has mainly been to get feedback, so I've been rendering at quality levels that are convenient for me and allow people to see what's going on. That being said, if you have any thoughts on what remains to be done for that model, I'll need to hear them. Otherwise I'm going to move on to a different model.

I'm afraid I don't have the 2D skills needed to modify the menu pagee, though; you should've seen me struggling to get the paneling texture looking halfway decent for the Atomos.

Edit: I don't have a Windows license, so dual-boot/Parallels solutions are off. I'm not entirely certain I want a Windows license, for that matter, though if push comes to shove, it is the simplest solution here. Bah. Why can't EVN just work right?

Edit 2: It may be just the menu system and my capslock key that aren't working properly...I'll mess around a bit, see if the game's playable.

Edit 3: Well, it runs (and I figured out that my capslock didn't work because I'd turned it into a Control key; go figure). And it claims to get anywhere from 20 to 40 FPS. However, the actual FPS from one second to the next is wildly variable. So it's playable, kinda, but not exactly pleasant.

This post has been edited by Derakon : 21 February 2007 - 11:18 PM

I should find out who specifically did the loading and Menu screens for rEVisited and see if I can get a little help from them. Maybe it's time to get in touch with KMQ.

A note about engine glows in Nova. They require their own rlëD resource. You'll need to figure out how to put just the glow into a sprite grid. We'll also want some sort of exhaust from the engines, which, again, takes its own rlëD.

This post has been edited by CaptJosh : 22 February 2007 - 11:20 AM

I've never done my own ships for EVN before, so I should probably dig through the Bible a bit to see what's actually needed.

In any event, I'm not convinced that Neutronic ships should have exhaust glows. I think it'd be neat if they didn't, actually, and instead just glowed in various ways (kinda like the Polaris in EVN). Certainly the Atomos model I did doesn't have any exhaust ports! Is it not enough for the stripes and fins to glow?

The Neutronic Kestrel has exhaust. It uses the exhaust and running light sprites from the standard Atinoda Kestrel. As for no exhaust ports, well, there should be. Clavius tech isn't THAT advanced compared to the rest of the galaxy. They're not like the Polaris in the stock Nova scenario. They have better weapons, ships that are harder to kill, but nothing that advanced.

This post has been edited by CaptJosh : 22 February 2007 - 10:02 PM

Any progress with ship models. Like maybe with revising the Atomos? I'm kinda stalled here right now without more material to work with.

Funny you should ask. I was gone all weekend, hence why I didn't get anything done, but here's a modified Atomos model:

That doesn't show it very well, but I basically stuck an engine exhaust pod on the end of each of the nacelles. Here's a spin animation:

And yes, I did attempt to copy the Starbridge's engine glow, at least to some extent. Why do you ask?

Nice™

I didn't know what you had done. Wow! A modded Starbridge engine glow is fine. I like the green. Can you make that engine glow its own sprite grid to match with the Atomos now? Running lights would be nice too, but I don't want to push you too hard.

Zacha, thanks for the encouragement. It's nice to see this is attracting some attention. Makes me feel better about my chances of getting it all done.