I'm afraid he can't answer your question, cause math hasn't come up with such big numbers yet. But after this precedent it probably should. And they could name it "iskatulion". But maybe it won't, cause it may have not invented that number intentionally, to avoid exploding.
Most of the Xy`Kranasha ships are under 15k quad, most Anahn (with the turrets) are around 20-25k quad. So, very low poly still. The engine they were made for had a low limit of 50k tri so I had to keep them barebones.
As the general topic of this thread has thus far been revolved around the Retribution project, I am going to post the video I created as a finalle to that project's developer series. It is called The Unsung Legacy, and encapsulates a portion of the project's visual aspects to depict the immense amount of work that was lost when the project died. The elements displayed are not terribly graceful, as Sins of a Solar Empire is a truly wretched game to make projects in, but it may give an idea of what I was working on in the years after I did my initial wol beta experiments and went dark on the sc2 side.
There's no point giving feedback on anything in this video because the project's dead and all related elements are dead.
As for sc2 stuff, we're waiting on a functional and up to date M3 importer to be completed to move forward. I have a tremendous list of things I need to fix in Starcraft 2, and I'm not going to be redoing so much work through data loss from NiN's importer on top of it. Someone I know is learning substance painter, so maybe we'll be able to recalibrate all of sc2's textures like I had hoped after all. I also need to learn the data editor.
Failing that, I am considering moving on to Unreal 4. Virtually everything I have in sc2 currently can be easily transitioned to that engine, it would just be a matter of me learning programming to an extent and blueprints. Which, so far, seems much less trouble than data editing. But, only time will tell.
Just remember marines only have 3k polygons and a map can only support 3k odd units using a model of that quality. Anyhow just saying a lot of your models wont be able to be used for spammable units.
Blender has some good addons for SC2, can that load M3 format stuff?
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Contribute to the wiki (Wiki button at top of page) Considered easy altering of the unit textures?
Blender's interface was unusable for me. I used the XML script for simpler stuff but I'll definitely need to do anything more in max.
Yeah, the models are a bit big if I was looking for 3k units. As the video shows, they were intended for a more controlled, cinematic environment. I did a few stress tests of sc2 on weaker hardware back when it came out, and it could handle a few million polies without worry. However, most of my polies will probably be in the environment, where it's easy to control load through distance culling, while most units will probably be <5k except for heroes and bosses. I doubt most of the mechanical Protoss stuff I'll model will even be that high, since you can put a ton of Protoss detail into textures.
I'm more curious how Sc2 handles particles in performance. I haven't been able to test that, yet.
here have a gander at some trash I was working on, including some ports
Some basic walls. Smoothing groups will rough out those hard edges. I have not made symmetry variants for the top segments yet. I also don't know how to make ceilings yet. I referenced some photos for these but I can't really model off of references, so my variants look way different. I need a few more dozen types of walls, but this is enough for starters.
Some pillars and some braziers, along with a bunch of floor chunks. The pillars are from the Armageddon Onslaught 2 project in 2010 that never got anywhere. I didn't know how to remake them, so I used these as a basis. Obviously, the braziers are based on those meshes, too, since I didn't remember how I made those exotic designs. The chains were exceedingly difficult to get looking proper.
Some generic large pipes and pipe bracing objects. Having a basis to start off here is pretty important. I'll need a couple hundred pipe models for this project. I don't actually know what details I'd like to add for the possibility of one day learning how to UV and bake normals, so I've left them bare for now. Maybe they won't need any. It greatly depends on what textures they eventually get and the mood the scenes will have. Sometimes less is more.
^ This is a mesh I edited to remove a weird looking scarf that did not look good in modern standards. I also had to edit the texture to hide baked lighting from that object. I also had to create specular and normals, which I did with Mindtex. I used mindtex exclusively for all similar operations. In my experience it produces far better results than nDo, and is much faster to use.
I planned to give her physics hair and isolate the specular more realistically. I also planned to record and implement probably around 100-200 foley sounds for the attacks and movements of those attacks. I was delegating if I wanted to try to simplify some of the fur details for sc2 or not, but generally I am against removing details unless it causes serious moire issues. That wasn't a problem with this mesh.
^ I color corrected Gna's carrier, made proper glow animations for it, and gave it team-playered glow like I did all protoss units and buildings (like alpha sc2). Engine particles were not polished. I needed to see them ingame as a functional unit to make my judgement. I didn't get that far before I stopped with sc2. Maybe if the editor is updated to have reasonable responsiveness to render my work not monstrously frustrating I will reconsider that decision.
^ Player color protoss units and buildings were created using the XML script. Most of my screenshots are taken in default lighting, so it makes their specular/emissive look really overblown. That said, I did plan to do some rebalancing of their colors and brightness in the future. The pylon in particular was a nuisance to get looking at all like I intended.
Zeratul's mesh has a huge host of problems, including unweighted vertexes, clipping, and spaghetti arms. I was able to fix all but the latter in about a minute tops. I did plan to fix the spaghetti arms once I learned more about organic modeling. I intended to do a more fine-tuned emissive pass on him eventually. Also, his animations are abhorrent. I intended to remake all of his attack animations by keyframing individual bones if I had to. They are disgusting.
I forgot the PC immortal in this image. And a bunch of other units, apparently, including the Nullifier.
^ Some games I ported from I would need to do some filters to their normals to get the appropriate appearance in sc2's glossy rendering.
^ Units like this needed cubemapping to really look proper in sc2. I intended to try to arrange that sometime, but it was low priority.
^ This one turned out pretty good.
^ Sreg, when he was still alive, was helping me create emissives and color correct some of these. This one needed a little bit more tuning on the normal map, and a cubemap for his metal parts.
I'm afraid I probably won't have any more stuff related to sc2 to post. But if you want, I can keep you somewhat posted on my Unreal 4 work once I start doing more serious work with it (took me 3 days to figure out how to get cloth physics to work at all).
I've been doing things blizzard considers illegal for like 15 years.
It's a good thing I never once used any of their services to distribute any of my content and would have continued to have avoided doing so should that project have been finished.
Not that b.ent would handle a project of my scale, anyways.
Hey, IskatuMesk, how'd you manage to make the specular and emissive look overblown? I've been looking to restore the golden metallic hue in the Protoss textures, to make them look majestic, like they did in the SC2 alpha, when the game was first announced. I'm guessing that would require playing with the specular textures.
You do know that ports from other games is illegal and forbidden by Blizzard's rules, right ?
Only custom created and Blizzard's own models are allowed.
T.
Where does it state that? I'm pretty sure I've seen models from other games. Some Russians used models from many other games like Earth 2160 and some turn-based sci-fi strategy game for their custom maps.
Anything on Battle.net is hosted on Blizzard's servers, so they legally become responsible for anything on them (hence the aggressive censorship). While a "don't know don't care" policy clearly exists, they are legally obligated to remove anything that might give them trouble.
Many companies don't care about if you use their assets, though (predictably non-American ones, such as the Tera devs).
I didn't actually edit the spec for the protoss there. That's one of the lighting settings (I believe Auir, but I may be wrong). Alternatively, turning up the specular multiplier on the material should have a similar effect. In alpha I think their lighting settings were more intense in general, which is effectively what that one set is probably derived from.
Looks like I never posted this stuff. Seems like imgur finally decided its image view limit was absurdly stupid, so now I can see the images again. Now you can, too. Joy!
Very early experiments into the UDK and scene modeling from way back. My very first such effort.
This is very recent. Not my models, but I did make the particle and put the scene together. Still in the "learning what buttons do what" phase.
Epic released the first portion of their Kite demo assets.
They look pretty decent.
My master material that takes texture/normal information and builds dynamic detail masking out of them works really well, even with these high-res assets.
Not much I can really show for all the work yet, but some day. :3
I'm not sure about the texture, but for UV's you could probably just explode the whole thing into a thousand chunks if there was a way to keep the resolution consistent. For all I know there's a way to generate dynamic plating based on some input other than UV's. The current texture is the only one I have with minimal surface detail that isn't like a mirror at the moment.
At a distance it isn't so bad.
I have no idea how I would ever do turrets. Even after a few months of working with the editor I still have no idea. I am not sure if I can even do bone-level manipulation in Matinee.
Well, I'd probably have to do that some way. But there's a few ways you can attach models in unreal. The idea way would probably be via blueprint component through sockets, if they stay synced with extremely fast moving units at least. Then you could hand each AI a turret. The turrets would probably have to be broken down further than that, though, to handle all the different variations (turrets with 16+ cannons, turrets with PD, etc). I also don't know how turrets work in the first place in the game. The AI part wouldn't probably be that bad, though. As long as Unreal can handle extremely high acquisition distances.
It's a consideration, but I'd still need to figure out how I'd handle the character models. I can rip stuff, sure... but... most of what I need doesn't exist in games.
I still don't think turrets will be manageable, so I won't really be pursuing this idea.
The lighting is rather dark. I should have modified the directional light a bit, or added a skylight, before finishing up.
I think you could get away with dependency on tiled textures if you A.) modelled a lot of detail and split the meshes for different materials, and B.) used a lot of effects to help cover stuff (smoke, steam, fire, movement of other ships, lighting, etc.)
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Dare I ask the number of polygons on those things?
Contribute to the wiki (Wiki button at top of page) Considered easy altering of the unit textures?
https://www.sc2mapster.com/forums/resources/tutorials/179654-data-actor-events-message-texture-select-by-id
https://media.forgecdn.net/attachments/187/40/Screenshot2011-04-17_09_16_21.jpg
@DrSuperEvil: Go
I'm afraid he can't answer your question, cause math hasn't come up with such big numbers yet. But after this precedent it probably should. And they could name it "iskatulion". But maybe it won't, cause it may have not invented that number intentionally, to avoid exploding.
@DrSuperEvil: Go
Most of the Xy`Kranasha ships are under 15k quad, most Anahn (with the turrets) are around 20-25k quad. So, very low poly still. The engine they were made for had a low limit of 50k tri so I had to keep them barebones.
As the general topic of this thread has thus far been revolved around the Retribution project, I am going to post the video I created as a finalle to that project's developer series. It is called The Unsung Legacy, and encapsulates a portion of the project's visual aspects to depict the immense amount of work that was lost when the project died. The elements displayed are not terribly graceful, as Sins of a Solar Empire is a truly wretched game to make projects in, but it may give an idea of what I was working on in the years after I did my initial wol beta experiments and went dark on the sc2 side.
http://www.gameproc.com/meskstuff/LP/HMesk_BlackSunTheUnsungLegacy.mkv
There's no point giving feedback on anything in this video because the project's dead and all related elements are dead.
As for sc2 stuff, we're waiting on a functional and up to date M3 importer to be completed to move forward. I have a tremendous list of things I need to fix in Starcraft 2, and I'm not going to be redoing so much work through data loss from NiN's importer on top of it. Someone I know is learning substance painter, so maybe we'll be able to recalibrate all of sc2's textures like I had hoped after all. I also need to learn the data editor.
Failing that, I am considering moving on to Unreal 4. Virtually everything I have in sc2 currently can be easily transitioned to that engine, it would just be a matter of me learning programming to an extent and blueprints. Which, so far, seems much less trouble than data editing. But, only time will tell.
@IskatuMesk: Go
Just remember marines only have 3k polygons and a map can only support 3k odd units using a model of that quality. Anyhow just saying a lot of your models wont be able to be used for spammable units.
Blender has some good addons for SC2, can that load M3 format stuff?
Contribute to the wiki (Wiki button at top of page) Considered easy altering of the unit textures?
https://www.sc2mapster.com/forums/resources/tutorials/179654-data-actor-events-message-texture-select-by-id
https://media.forgecdn.net/attachments/187/40/Screenshot2011-04-17_09_16_21.jpg
Blender's interface was unusable for me. I used the XML script for simpler stuff but I'll definitely need to do anything more in max.
Yeah, the models are a bit big if I was looking for 3k units. As the video shows, they were intended for a more controlled, cinematic environment. I did a few stress tests of sc2 on weaker hardware back when it came out, and it could handle a few million polies without worry. However, most of my polies will probably be in the environment, where it's easy to control load through distance culling, while most units will probably be <5k except for heroes and bosses. I doubt most of the mechanical Protoss stuff I'll model will even be that high, since you can put a ton of Protoss detail into textures.
I'm more curious how Sc2 handles particles in performance. I haven't been able to test that, yet.
here have a gander at some trash I was working on, including some ports
Some basic walls. Smoothing groups will rough out those hard edges. I have not made symmetry variants for the top segments yet. I also don't know how to make ceilings yet. I referenced some photos for these but I can't really model off of references, so my variants look way different. I need a few more dozen types of walls, but this is enough for starters.
Some pillars and some braziers, along with a bunch of floor chunks. The pillars are from the Armageddon Onslaught 2 project in 2010 that never got anywhere. I didn't know how to remake them, so I used these as a basis. Obviously, the braziers are based on those meshes, too, since I didn't remember how I made those exotic designs. The chains were exceedingly difficult to get looking proper.
Some generic large pipes and pipe bracing objects. Having a basis to start off here is pretty important. I'll need a couple hundred pipe models for this project. I don't actually know what details I'd like to add for the possibility of one day learning how to UV and bake normals, so I've left them bare for now. Maybe they won't need any. It greatly depends on what textures they eventually get and the mood the scenes will have. Sometimes less is more.
^ This is a mesh I edited to remove a weird looking scarf that did not look good in modern standards. I also had to edit the texture to hide baked lighting from that object. I also had to create specular and normals, which I did with Mindtex. I used mindtex exclusively for all similar operations. In my experience it produces far better results than nDo, and is much faster to use.
I planned to give her physics hair and isolate the specular more realistically. I also planned to record and implement probably around 100-200 foley sounds for the attacks and movements of those attacks. I was delegating if I wanted to try to simplify some of the fur details for sc2 or not, but generally I am against removing details unless it causes serious moire issues. That wasn't a problem with this mesh.
^ I color corrected Gna's carrier, made proper glow animations for it, and gave it team-playered glow like I did all protoss units and buildings (like alpha sc2). Engine particles were not polished. I needed to see them ingame as a functional unit to make my judgement. I didn't get that far before I stopped with sc2. Maybe if the editor is updated to have reasonable responsiveness to render my work not monstrously frustrating I will reconsider that decision.
^ Player color protoss units and buildings were created using the XML script. Most of my screenshots are taken in default lighting, so it makes their specular/emissive look really overblown. That said, I did plan to do some rebalancing of their colors and brightness in the future. The pylon in particular was a nuisance to get looking at all like I intended.
Zeratul's mesh has a huge host of problems, including unweighted vertexes, clipping, and spaghetti arms. I was able to fix all but the latter in about a minute tops. I did plan to fix the spaghetti arms once I learned more about organic modeling. I intended to do a more fine-tuned emissive pass on him eventually. Also, his animations are abhorrent. I intended to remake all of his attack animations by keyframing individual bones if I had to. They are disgusting.
I forgot the PC immortal in this image. And a bunch of other units, apparently, including the Nullifier.
^ Some games I ported from I would need to do some filters to their normals to get the appropriate appearance in sc2's glossy rendering.
^ Units like this needed cubemapping to really look proper in sc2. I intended to try to arrange that sometime, but it was low priority.
^ This one turned out pretty good.
^ Sreg, when he was still alive, was helping me create emissives and color correct some of these. This one needed a little bit more tuning on the normal map, and a cubemap for his metal parts.
I'm afraid I probably won't have any more stuff related to sc2 to post. But if you want, I can keep you somewhat posted on my Unreal 4 work once I start doing more serious work with it (took me 3 days to figure out how to get cloth physics to work at all).
You do know that ports from other games is illegal and forbidden by Blizzard's rules, right ?
Only custom created and Blizzard's own models are allowed.
T.
My Starcraft II Tutorials Youtube Channel
My Basic Moddeling Tutorials Youtube Channel
My assets here
I've been doing things blizzard considers illegal for like 15 years.
It's a good thing I never once used any of their services to distribute any of my content and would have continued to have avoided doing so should that project have been finished.
Not that b.ent would handle a project of my scale, anyways.
Hey, IskatuMesk, how'd you manage to make the specular and emissive look overblown? I've been looking to restore the golden metallic hue in the Protoss textures, to make them look majestic, like they did in the SC2 alpha, when the game was first announced. I'm guessing that would require playing with the specular textures.
Where does it state that? I'm pretty sure I've seen models from other games. Some Russians used models from many other games like Earth 2160 and some turn-based sci-fi strategy game for their custom maps.
Anything on Battle.net is hosted on Blizzard's servers, so they legally become responsible for anything on them (hence the aggressive censorship). While a "don't know don't care" policy clearly exists, they are legally obligated to remove anything that might give them trouble.
Many companies don't care about if you use their assets, though (predictably non-American ones, such as the Tera devs).
I didn't actually edit the spec for the protoss there. That's one of the lighting settings (I believe Auir, but I may be wrong). Alternatively, turning up the specular multiplier on the material should have a similar effect. In alpha I think their lighting settings were more intense in general, which is effectively what that one set is probably derived from.
/edit
Custom PBR materials.
Looks like I never posted this stuff. Seems like imgur finally decided its image view limit was absurdly stupid, so now I can see the images again. Now you can, too. Joy!
Very early experiments into the UDK and scene modeling from way back. My very first such effort.
This is very recent. Not my models, but I did make the particle and put the scene together. Still in the "learning what buttons do what" phase.
Epic released the first portion of their Kite demo assets.
They look pretty decent.
My master material that takes texture/normal information and builds dynamic detail masking out of them works really well, even with these high-res assets.
Not much I can really show for all the work yet, but some day. :3
Imagine if I was an artist. The things I could do with this. But... I'm not. So a cinematic project is not really worth attempting.
Imageine it's a stone based civilization, so they dont' have any textures, all their stuff is shape based. They fly in space and do stone people.
@IskatuMesk: Go
for what it's worth, I like it :)
T.
My Starcraft II Tutorials Youtube Channel
My Basic Moddeling Tutorials Youtube Channel
My assets here
@Zolden: Go
Space Jihadists?
I'm not sure about the texture, but for UV's you could probably just explode the whole thing into a thousand chunks if there was a way to keep the resolution consistent. For all I know there's a way to generate dynamic plating based on some input other than UV's. The current texture is the only one I have with minimal surface detail that isn't like a mirror at the moment.
At a distance it isn't so bad.
I have no idea how I would ever do turrets. Even after a few months of working with the editor I still have no idea. I am not sure if I can even do bone-level manipulation in Matinee.
Try the attached model
Well, I'd probably have to do that some way. But there's a few ways you can attach models in unreal. The idea way would probably be via blueprint component through sockets, if they stay synced with extremely fast moving units at least. Then you could hand each AI a turret. The turrets would probably have to be broken down further than that, though, to handle all the different variations (turrets with 16+ cannons, turrets with PD, etc). I also don't know how turrets work in the first place in the game. The AI part wouldn't probably be that bad, though. As long as Unreal can handle extremely high acquisition distances.
It's a consideration, but I'd still need to figure out how I'd handle the character models. I can rip stuff, sure... but... most of what I need doesn't exist in games.
A few final pieces from the above experiments.
I still don't think turrets will be manageable, so I won't really be pursuing this idea.
The lighting is rather dark. I should have modified the directional light a bit, or added a skylight, before finishing up.
I think you could get away with dependency on tiled textures if you A.) modelled a lot of detail and split the meshes for different materials, and B.) used a lot of effects to help cover stuff (smoke, steam, fire, movement of other ships, lighting, etc.)