Ferion Advanced Ore Refinery

Hi All,

Been working on a new Ferion project: The Advanced Ore Refinery. (Or is it mining station? Hehe I needta chat with Johan about it.)

Here's the concept drawing I made:



And here's a current work-in progress of one of the domes at the base of the station:



Enjoy!

[General Phoenix]

I love this stuff, man. Do you have links to the project that these models are for?

Hi All,

I have a couple of small updates to show you. I've finished building and mapping the dome. Here you can see the top of the dome, plus a sample texture was applied. Please don't beat me up too much about it, I just wanted to see what it looked like.

Not the final textures!


Also, I've generated a looped animation if you'd care to see:

http://www.reflectionsoldiers.com/re...re_study_b.avi

You'll need this codec in order to view it. It's XVid. I apologize for not using a more standardized codec, but DivX's quantizer kept destroying the texture data. Sadly, it's that texture's interaction with light that I was testing with that video, so I had to use a more obscure codec that preserved the detail. (You might as well install it, there's a strong possibility that future videos I do will use this codec unless I can figure out how to make DivX sing...)


I'm going to level with you all. Though I'm rather competant with Photoshop, and I know my way around Lightwave's surfaces, I'm not quite sure how to go about texturing this thing. I need help. If any of you has suggestions about how to a.) Find/Generate the Imagery and b.) apply it in Lightwave, I am all ears. I've got some ideas I'm pursuing, but I'd really like to hear from those of you who've worked on something sorta like this.

Enjoy!

P.S. Yes I willl revise the structure to be a little more sound. I hope nobody feels I blew them off, just wasn't focused on that part yet.

@General Phoenix: Well the answer is yes and no. There is a link I could probably scrounge up (I'd have to recall my bookmarks from an archive...) that shows the Ferion tech tree. Unfortunately, those images are around 200pixels wide as theyr'e for the game. I'm working in higher resolution because my compensation for this work is entries into my portfolio. With that said, though, I can give you a couple of links to browse through:

http://www.reflectionsoldiers.com/ferion/

http://www.reflectionsoldiers.com/refsol/artwork/

The first is my original ferion folder. It was for when I started the character project. The second is a root folder leading to some of my various pieces. (You'll find some work from other artists there occasionally too...)

I've got a third link here, sorry it's to SFM:

http://gallery.scifi-meshes.com/show...00&ppuser=2941

I uploaded a bunch of my work there.

If ya got comments, I'd luvta hear them!

[General Phoenix]

Ah - I hadn't realized it was for a game - with the detail and time you're putting into this, I'd have thought it was for a film. You had me very excited.

I'm still interested in the game, though.

I'll check out that animation once I manage to find the actual compiled and ready-to-install codec on that site. I'm not too good at finding my way around project-in-progress sites like that one - guess I'm getting too old.

Oh.. did you try the first link? (You have Windows, right?) The first link was to a file I uploaded to my server space, the second was to give credit where it's due. Didn't mean to make that confusing. A friend of mine downloaded a related codec and you were only allowed to view once with it. heh.

You really thought it was for film?

[General Phoenix]

*sigh*

I'm also going blind in my old age, it seems. I clicked on the second link, not noticing the first.

Yeah, I figured it was for a CG-animated film, what with all the detail you'd shown in the various models. BTW, I love the animation of the finished Ferion alien - any chance of seeing more movements from him? I can think of a lot of scenes to put him in.

The Ferion Alien's been shelved for the moment. I was in over my head with that project, and it was taking too long, so I back-burnered it. One day I plan to re-approach it with the new stuff I've learned. So sadly, no. Hehhe

I appreciate the comment of it looking like it's for a CG film. That's not far off. The detail's there for my demo reel. I'm hopefully on the right track so long as it leaves a good impression.

Hi All,

Well Thursday night was a bust. Started to build a piece of it, and just blew it. I think I exhausted myself a bit. And Friday Night, well I just needed it off.

Tonight I have something to show, though. As I mentioned before I got stuck on the model. (No biggie, just, got a little worried about how things will hook up together. I think I have it solved now.) So tonight, instead, I worked on the Layout Construction and the lighting of the beast. One thing I intended was for this facility to be visible even when it's pitch black outside. This is a likely scenario for this palce, so I imagine they'd build it with a lot of lights.

A few of things occured to me while rigging these lights.

1.) I'd need to be able to clone them, so heirarchy needed to be organized. (Note: Clone All Items LW plugin is VERY well done.)

2.) Shadow mapping = faster rendering, plus the shadows can be cached.

3.) The end result of this project could reach 2 million polygons. In that situation, radiosity is probably not an option. So the lights have to 'bounce' manually.

4.) Real lights are rarely a perfect solid color, so texturing them should be considered.

So, I added a bunch of lights to this scene. Made them easy to clone, textured them, and set them to 'cache shadows'. The result worked, I cut the render time of the second frame by half. Woo! I then added ''bounce lights' in order to simulate the effect of light reflecting off the edges of its target. To my surprised, it worked pretty darn well. Take a look:



This image is the same as the first, only I got rid of the 'bounce lights' so you can see the difference.



Render time? 1:09 at 1280 by 1024 enhanced low after the shadows were cached. Pretty cool, eh?

Got questions? Fire them off to me.

I think it's really cool - but those last few pics have too many colour lights, it looks like a christmas tree

[General Phoenix]

I think it's perfect myself. I prefer the second pic, though - I only see a difference on the dome just above the front entry, but I think it's much more natural.

[skyhawk223]

Great lighting. It really makes the scene.

S'happenin dudes? Well, I spent most of the week working on this. I think it's ready to show now. I hope you all like the modifications I made to the base, it should address some of the comments I recieved on it.




There'll probably be more mesh updates by Monday evening.

[General Phoenix]

Wow - that's just incredible. I can't wait to see you model that part of it.

Greetings all. I've taken another stab at texturing. Whatcha all think?

I like it!

[skyhawk223]

It looks great. Don't change a thing.

[General Phoenix]

Perfect. It looks more "used" than it did before.

Greets all,

I've come farther along on my dome texturing project. I still have one more chunk to do, but I thought you all would like to see the progress.



This is darn near complete, but I still have to do the doorway part, it's a seperate map.

I've done a rotation animation of it so you can see how the surfaces interact with light. There are two versions. One is at 1024 by 768 (I recommend at least 1.6 ghz for it...) the other is at 640 by 480. The codec is DivX 5.05, you can download it here.

Here is the 1024 by 768 version (4 megs):
http://www.reflectionsoldiers.com/re..._test_1024.avi

And here is the 640 by 480 version (2.5 megs):

http://www.reflectionsoldiers.com/re...e_test_640.avi

Enjoy!

Originally posted by skyhawk223
It looks great. Don't change a thing.

Oops... sorry...

[General Phoenix]

I can't say I see a difference between the last two images - but thanks for the animation!

[General Phoenix]

BTW, I can totally see this installation as a setting in my S/F story...

GP: The last two images are the same... check the URL :P

Oops, I overwrote the previous image with the new one. The previous one didn't have the tiles in the roof, for example. Sorry about that. :/

figured

Hi All,

Well I'm sorry, I thought I'd have something by Saturday. Sadly, I've run into trouble. I'm trying to make an environment for the dome. It's tough. It's really tough. I've put together a texture for the ground, but getting the ground to look 3 dimensional on it has been challenging. Tried starting simple:



I like it on some levels, it's not so great in others. Part of it is that I need a higher resolution texture, but that's not what's bugging me so much. It's the relatively easy part to fix. It's that the ground's so... flat. No interesting shadows being cast.

So, I looked at the texture, and I thought "What if I build some geometry for that". Well I did that.



It looks better, a heck of a lot better. (Please forgive the blurriness of the textures, I haven't finished tweaking them.) I think I've got a direction to go here. Unfortunately, I haven't done a big enough land area for this to be effective yet. (Believe me, the test renders with the dome are comic.) So yeah, I'm still plucking away at it.

I'm open to ideas and suggestions. Terrain's a new ... pardon the expression.. frontier for me.

Enjoy!

The modelled terrain is looking really nice, but believe me I feel your pain - getting realistic-looking terrain without a hell of a lot of manual tweak stuff is pretty tough.