User SCREENSHOTS

[the_soupdragon]

Very nice mate Looks great.
Rummy any chance you could put together a quick and dirty "how to start making skins with shaders" tutorial mate? Osram just sent me the pack but I would like a starting point or a sort of newbie guide to shaders
No rush though as I will have a play around with it tommorrow and see what I can see.


SD

[Bader]

Looking better

I have been comparing per vertex and per pixel lighting and actually preferring the former, but I'm sure it just needs tweaking. A good test is the Hurricane in the default settings for squadron take off. Just take a look at the right hand side of the fuselage Of course there are model issues on the ailerons fron internal cockpit too.. so that will need fixing before this makes a release version.

[Osram]

Well I think to some degree we are both correct about the fabric. It does reflect less but it still highlights. The spits in the back falloff around the same area as well which leads me to say that the angle is differnt from the tapering of the fuseloge.

Yeah, I saw, that's what I meant with the setup in the picture picture is just a few degrees off from what we need :/

Though I must admit I do not know if that portion on the spit is wood?

No, it's metal.

If you look at the earlier shots I posted you can see that the exhaust does achieve knocking out some of the highlights but, there is always a but it has to be all or nothing. In other words to keep that area from producing a highlight it must be black or a darker gray. This in turn colors, not hides it (think in alpha terms) and as a result the area is black or gray. I think however that I can live with this.

Um ? After a bit of adrenalin I just had I am probably not able to think straight. I understand only little.

With exhaust you mean the exhaust stacks or the soot on the fuselage sides?
"knock out"?
Why is it all or nothing ?
"to keep that area from producing a highlight it must be black or a darker gray" -> in the spec map or the diffuse map? if in the spec map, why does it affect the colour? You do use pure greyscale spec and gloss maps, don't you?

[Osram]

Soupy, there is some newbie / quickstart docs included. Also, with that version you won't be able to create all the map types.

[Osram]

Paul, yes, it has not been tweaked yet at all (or, to be more exact, Killdevil has slightly tweaked the values but you don't have them yet as I only got them a short while ago )

[Rummy]

Osram dds does not support grayscale and a pcx version is about 4mb. Ignore the exhaust comment as it is tough to explain but deals more with residue not the manifold. I'm probably seeing artifacts from my crappy spec map.

One quick question, can the exe pick up a shader on a multi skin file?hmm have not tried that. If so then folks can ship a custom shader with their skin.

SD, Read Osram's stuff. Most of my understanding comes from these and what little I have found on the web. I started to type a long response about my method but I will add a quick link. Examples at the bottom of this post. http://home.earthlink.net/~cswindell/im ... torial.txt

PPPPPleeeeease note it is just a trial and I have not gotten far with this at all. I have added noise (maybe too much), when normals are working this will help highlight the undulations you might see in paint. I can convert this map into a normal with ease. Understand that each model is differnt and will require lots of time to find the balance. There are some issues that I can't quite fix so I don't know if it is me or the model. There are lots of ways to achieve the same thing. You can make a light colored spec map and lower the specular exponent in the .fx file or you can have a darker shader and raise the exponent. Best to find what works for you.


Dump these in the cockpm16 folder. SORRY READERS THIS ONLY WORKS IF YOU HAVE THE SKINNERS PACK!


http://home.earthlink.net/~cswindell/images/hurri.fx

http://home.earthlink.net/~cswindell/im ... pecMap.dds


Also here is a quick one for the Spit. Again WIP and a quickie!

http://home.earthlink.net/~cswindell/images/spit.fx

http://home.earthlink.net/~cswindell/im ... pecMap.dds

[Osram]

Osram dds does not support grayscale and a pcx version is about 4mb.

Ok - grayscale may have been a wrong word, but make sure r and g and b values are equal.

One quick question, can the exe pick up a shader on a multi skin file?

I am not sure, but it might well work.

I fear I will have to take you up on your bob-ma offer :-/.
More tomorrow.

[Rummy]

Gloss maps? Don't think I have those but I would love to!

As to BDG, We can shape it back up. I have and run a few of these sites myself, though not Nuke.

[HurricaneHicken]

It will shortly be landscape update time again. This time around, PV and myself have been adding some satellite height data to Kent, from Hawkinge and east of there, and to France, from Coquelles to just South of Boulogne. I've taken a quick trip around Dover and Folkestone using BOB 1, to show you guys what I'm looking at. I've used BOB 1 as the brighter terrain shows up better with stills, but BOB II looks very nice in motion.


Over Dover looking West toward folkestone


Looking North from the same spot.


Flying further North, up the valley.


One valley feeds naturally into another. Look at the tree in this and the next shot, they follow the contours and their blocky outline is reduced by some height variation.


Just headed up the second valley and are now heading towards Hawkinge.


Further West.



The valley is getting shallower, but there are still plenty of features to look at.


Getting towards the end now just in time for....


Hawkinge, looking back at where you came from.



And South down towards Folkestone. The hills PV mapped are still there but they're not alone. Even Folkestone is not totally level.


Just North of Folkestone is the Saxon shore line. Basically this is the South end of the North Downs, so the hills show up well. This is looking East, toward Dover.


And the reverse view, looking West.


Flying back toward Dover, you can see all the valleys from the first shot.


The feeling of speed is heightened when you can look up at trees.


Again, see the way the forest block is broken up. And we're almost back to Dover.

Hope you enjoyed this preview. Please note this will still look flat from 10000 feet, but down low it will be much nicer. There will be some other things in here, as well as the height data.

Thank you for flying Hurricane Airlines.

[Rummy]

Sweet.

[bushbaby]

That is very good Hurricane!

Will it be an enormous task to do this for the whole map?

[pmsmith]

HH

Looking really good!

I thought I'd offer up a couple of wee movies to give a feel for what it might be like like:

Movie
Movie2

A bit jerky (limitations of my system I suspect) and unfortunately FRAPS and Windows Movie Maker don't keep colour vibrancy very well, so sense of depth gets a bit lost. I also occasionally get sea texture showing through in the bottom corners of my screen.

[HurricaneHicken]

That is very good Hurricane!

Will it be an enormous task to do this for the whole map?

Well it wouldn't be, but some of the existing landscape tiles won't pull out of the landscape map. So to work on areas with them in, they are going to have to be rebuilt from scratch. PV already did this with a tile at Dover, and this is the reason I've stopped at Hawkinge, as another tile to the West won't pull out. And there are tiles like that scattered through the landscape.

Any help would be useful though if you fancy it. But no writing rude messages in the landscape.

At the moment there are just 2 of us doing it, so the more help the better it will look.

[Osram]

Wow - that really is extremely hilly!

[HurricaneHicken]

Wow - that really is extremely hilly!

I have put some ups in the Downs

This new data is probably better than Rowan had. To show the hills off though, I had to do a bit more than just paste in the new data though. As you said Osram, more control points are useful, and computers have moved on since 2001. This may slow down some computers though, but I feel it's worth it. And I will leave the previous terrain up for a while.

I put extra points up the valley sections, and where I could see a large change in height on the contour map. This is probably the best bit to show it off, as some areas are basically flat, even the ones that are fairly high. Even the flatter areas do show more variation.

I may have some more detail to put in yet, but it should be out in less than a week. I can't wait to see how it's made a difference to France, as the data there was very sparse. However, France is in the safe hands of Pete. And I've got to wait too