FreeOrion

Hi! my name is Cuinn. I am currently involved with the Xonotic project (fork of Nexuiz) http://www.xonotic.org/

I was wondering if anyone could direct me it ways I can help. There seems to be many good artists involved, so I hope I can add to that.

Some work of mine:
http://s89.photobucket.com/albums/k208/ ... 000026.jpg
http://s89.photobucket.com/albums/k208/ ... 000026.jpg
http://s89.photobucket.com/albums/k208/ ... 000052.jpg
http://s89.photobucket.com/albums/k208/ ... 000065.jpg
http://s89.photobucket.com/albums/k208/ ... 0005-1.jpg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb4zk-31sVU

I can make very high res skyboxs and space scenes, and do various other graphical tasks. Are space backgrounds/ rendered planets needed?

Hi and welcome. There are actually not very many people involved and actively contributing here, but I like to think that those that do are quite capable. Any help is appreciated. It's interesting you mention sky boxes, because we do need some. I haven't spend much time on the current one we are using and it's basically a placeholder until something better is there. I had trouble in the past with making tiny stars work well, even when using skybox textures with 2048x2048 on each side, the texture to screen pixel ratio was not 1:1(meaning, a pixel in the texture was larger than 1 pixel on screen). What resolution are you usually using, in the youtube video for example?

What we need are backgrounds with nebulae and/or a huge galaxy. Add tiny stars if you can. There shouldn't be planets in the background and no bigger stars either. I'm quite open to what else could potentially be shown though.

If you like to work on planet textures, we need those as well. Basically all planetary textures need to be scaled up and reworked/refined.

We don't need rendered planets at this point and the foreseeable future.

Have a look for some more available work here.

The in youtube video the skybox is 2048x2048x6. I use terragen 2 to render my images. As far as starts I can get images like this.


But I still have to figure out how to make good nebulae and galaxies :S

Please keep in mind this software have huge potential which these video demo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KwxVO6V ... re=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSTEo5QK9vk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0kgwE-y ... re=related

Yes, I'm aware of terragen and it's potential, haven't really used version 2 though. I prefer to paint these days. Anyway, there's not really a need for planetary scenes, even from high orbit.

I can see it beeing used for various cinematics, but that's extremely low priority polishing work, which doesn't become a focus until 0.9.

edit: Something else just occurred to me. Could you perhaps render images similar to satellite photos? Terrain images from top down?

Here are some reference images, ask if you need more. It's important, that the light source direction is not obvious. It has to look flat, as if the light is right behind the satellite and not to the right or left. Also, no clouds please, we need them on a separate layer. Would be great if terragen could render these as well.

yes that shouldn't be to hard. I'll just put the light source behind the camera. What format do you want the images as? .png 2048x2048? Also do they need to able to wrap around a sphere seamlessly or will you do that?

As for clouds I think they can be rendered by themselves, although I'm not sure how to get them on a transparent background? Any ideas. If I render them in blank space, I think they will be on a black background. Will That work for you?

Great, sounds good!



Yes, 1024x1024 would probably be sufficient as well. What I have in mind is to use those renderings as a base and source for patterns/texture.


I can do that, no problem.


Yes, black background is fine as well. I can easily mask everything out by putting the grayscale cloud image in an alpha channel and use this as a mask.

Here's a quick render.


We can obviously do better than this, but its a start. I presume you need a lot of random detail, like snow peeks, rivers and craters. i'll see what I can come up with in the coming week.

Yes, I'm looking for different patterns/textures, a nice play of different shades etc. Snowy mountains have a place, but they are not obligatory. The very first(top, left) image of my references show how interesting a desert/rock landscape can look.

Maybe try to zoom in a little more?