Quote:
Originally Posted by Rosomaha
I welcome @gap. I read about AO. Yes, you're right, the textures of AO, however, like everything else, are very old and were made for SH4. I am an alien for SH5), I used to dig mainly with units in SH4. There are no dynamic shadows there, so a “shadow prerender” was needed, more “bold” and there was a slightly different ship equipment. It was all more harmonious and to the point:
In SH5 now, some parts have too much black-out shading on the deck if you mean it (?). But adding the three main Cargo in its place and adding platforms that will also change commensurate boxes in these places, I hope will improve the overall picture. Maybe, can still lighten the spots. I will not redo the UV-sweep and re-render, this is rebuilding GR2 again, this is labor costs comparable to assembling a new unit. |
Hi Rosomaha,
you have made some good points, yet there is another point that you should consider: if you are planning to make external cargo nodes configurable as suggested by kapuhy, your ship is going to carry a variety cargo types of different sizes and shapes or, in some cases, no cargo at all. In most cases the pre-rendered ao shadows mapped on deck would be inappropriate to the cargo actually carried, so it would be preferable making those shadows very subtle or not having them at all.
If, as I suppose, the secondary (ambient occlusion) UV map of your units is non-overlapping, you don't need redo it, nor you need to re-import the 3D model. All is needed is re-baking the ao map based on model's geometry. As suggested by Jeff, devs used Autodesk Softimage for this task. I have always used the
free version of that program and with excellent results. If you decide to give it a try I can explain to you how to calculate the ao map using the rendermap tool or, if you prefer, I can do that for you
