Topic: Space Models

[Captain Adam]

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[d4v1ks]

I like how you solved the problem. very creative.

Hum... just imagine in SFC4 you turning your ship into the direction of one of those galaxies and press the warp button.
Would be an cool way of traveling without acessing the main map. Would not?



Now imagine an universe mapped as shown in this perspective.



Now that's an true hex 3d grid. Very faithful to the SFC's origins.
And imagine an solar system in each of those Hex's.

I can imagine someone modding it...
We could bind one of each of those hex sides (12 in total) to a unique texture and mod the composition of the solar system.
Now imagine someone writing a progressive mission campaign that would lead us to several of those Hex's. We would start on 1 of those, with our 1st mission.
We could add several hexs over time to give more variety (hardcoded campaings) or wrote an generator that would assemble the rest of the unknown hexs with a random sky sphere, solar system, and missions (like they produce the map world in minecraft). And the missions could be choosed taking in account the enviromental context like they do in SFC.
Now that would be cool..

I can even imagine an special tool to produce those galaxies' pictures.
Imagine you, in your ship, in the center of one of those hex.
You turn your camera to one of those 12 sides.
The tool renders all the solar systems in that direction to a limited distance (depending on the detail you would like to give)
The unknowns hexs would be produced with the generator i talked above.
Now you capture the result and save it on a file. Voilá! An instant galaxy picture created with the resources that exist in the game.

[Tus-XC]

Very Nice, I took a different route, using planes 2 poly planes.  Btw, it uses alphas very... funkily.  I once tried to set a star background geosphere on the outside with nebs on the inside... nebs would only show up on the white bits of the star map (aka the stars).  really annoying and shot down my perfectly good idea. 

some examples



Stopped working on it cause it was pretty time intensive to get the image maps right (lots of post editing to make it fade correctly to black)... Wonder if I still have all the original work files...

[Magnum357]

I just want to say, I don't think I've ever seen anything like that.   

[Tus-XC]

I'll take a look for my files, I'm sure I have something

[TAnimaL]

I am a little confused and not sure of what "effect" you're going for or trying to avoid, but I like the top one, simply because it looks "real," like a model in a low budget scifi movie. the bottom one looks nice too, more realistic than what you ee in game, IMHO

[Tus-XC]

Not bad, but your light maps are a bit crazy. remember, on the darkside there will only be albido (earth shine) and artificial light.  The Albido is rather weak,  but just keep in mind this keeps it from being entirely black (really deep navy blue filter).  Secondly, only city lights will be visible.  Look up some earth maps that are available online, you'll get an idea.  Finally, ya need some clouds.  When I was working on mine back a few years back (before I lost 12 planets and hours of work) I used a radiant radial overlay to create the illusion of a hotspot on the planet (takes a lot of tweaking, you won't want it overpowered).  I then duplicated my clouds layer, made it black and fuzzied it slightly and then enlarged it from that bright center so that the cloud shadows looked right.  The key here is subtly, to much and they look fake, to little and you won't be able to see it.  Just keep that in mind when you are working on it.  The last effect you can do was pioneered by mudd, take another sphere, invert the phases and enlarge slightly.  Then apply the shadow map you used to darken the world and invert it (or just make one that looks like it) and play with shades of blues  (or whatever color).  when you do this, you'll get a nice atmosphere effect that makes that planets really pop.

[Tus-XC]

select them all, and use the flip function in max (believe that's right)

[Tus-XC]

I'll take a look at it today... just got in... need sleep lol

[atheorhaven]

I'll take a look for my files, I'm sure I have something

Tus, I'd be interested in these work files as well.. would love to see them if you're ever found them. 

[Tus-XC]

Fairly confident I still have the space BG from my previous work, pm me your e-mail and i'll send them to ya.  I wouldn't mind if someone else finished up the work on them.  As to the planets... those I don't have anymore due to an HD crash(which really really pisses me off) - I do intend though to restart that project as soon as I can get myself fired up to do it - it was alot of work lost.