[[Concept]] Ships for Species: Chato'matou'Gormoshk

[MareviQ]

mareviQ: just as Kharagh said that my rendition of his creature was just as he imagined, so is your modeling the same thing of what I had in mind.

That mean's you did a great job at visualizing it

I was wondering, would you be willing to throw me the .blend file?

It's already aviable - it's in the .zip archive attached to my last post.

well, AO might have its place, I'm not certain. Light in space comes from all direction, so having a rendering trick that simulates light as though the environment is surrounded by a hemisphere wouldn't be too inaccurate, I think. However, I'd say that if used, this AO would be so slight that we might as well not use it all.

I'd say it's very helpful, as the spaceship designs will usually be quite elaborate, and AO greatly improves the feeling of realism for anything that has greeble or anything like that, and baking it to a texture gives us little to none overhead during the gameplay (that is unless the video card doesn't support multitexturing).

[MareviQ]

A typical lit space scene, consist of a single sharp light source. The many distant stars all around don't have a vivible effect. There is some heavy bounced light involved if you are near a planet.

Yes, that is true, but what we percieve as real/natural is what we see in everyday life. And we see objects lit from every direction (some directions may be better lit than others, but there are none that are completely black). Thus what should be done is having an ambient light in the scene (not too bright of course), one omnidirectional lamp for the sun (so we have the better/worse lit faces), and AO baked in a texture that is overlayed with multiply (an THEN perhaps another texture overlayed with addition for light sources on the ship). I believe we should compromise physical correctnes for what is percieved as correct.

[pd]

This statement was just made as an answer to shrinkshooters statement, that light in space comes from all directions. I mentioned already, that I'm willing to ignore reality for stylistic reasons. Once Ogre is completely integrated and the import goes fluent, we'll do some heavy testing to find a visual style for freeOrion's space combat. This includes testing all kinds of different light setups, environment maps(probably hdr nebulae) and prop textures.

[shrinkshooter]

Thus what should be done is having an ambient light in the scene (not too bright of course), one omnidirectional lamp for the sun (so we have the better/worse lit faces)...

I agree with everything you said save for the sun part. The sun should be a directional light source only. The sun is so far away that the light coming from it may as well be coming from a single direction; using an omnidirectional lamp would be a hassle. You'd have to make it strong enough and then move it very far away, because if you don't it's a bright light source that acts as though it's only 10 feet away from the ship. Because it is. If the ships are very close to a sun, then you would use multiple lamps (omnidirectional or directional, i don't think it matters) aligned on the same Z axis with the same X,Y coordinates to show light coming from about 120 degrees or something, but at that distance the ships should be melted blobs anyway (or burned husks, etc). In what situation would a sun ever be an omnidirectional light source? Keep in mind we're speaking strictly in terms of how a single ship looks when you render it from a program like Blender, not that the sun actually IS omnidirectional.

[pd]

We are creating entire solar systems, where you can actualy move around the sun and where the viewer is not fixed on a single position relative to the sun's position. Therefore a directional light won't work for us. An Omni is the way to go, because we need the light to spread in all directions.

[shrinkshooter]

Oh, wait. We're showing the entire solar system in battles? I thought perhaps it would be solar system-wide localized battles. If we show the entire system in confrontations, that makes a lot more sense. So the ratio of size between the sun and the ships is going to be skewed? Also, as it was mentioned, you'll have ambient light from atmopheric reflection if a ship is near a planet. If the light moves in real time then yeah, that's much more understandable. Sorry if I sounded like an idiot.

[pd]

So the ratio of size between the sun and the ships is going to be skewed?

Unfortunately yes. From a game play point of view, it makes total sense, though. I hope we can find a good balance, so that planets are still considerable larger than ships and distances between planets are still big.

Also, as it was mentioned, you'll have ambient light from atmopheric reflection if a ship is near a planet.

Sorry, for the confusion. I was just speaking of how things are done generally in 3D. I didn't actually mean to recreate this phenomena in freeOrion. That said putting a dull omni with attenuation in the center of each planet is worth a test.

Sorry if I sounded like an idiot.

You don't. Just like an enthusiastic and involved beginner