Cymro

Traced the Galileo text

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__________________
"Let me tell you something about humans, nephew: They're a wonderful, friendly people - as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working.

"But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those friendly, intelligent, wonderful people...will become as nasty and as violent as the most blood-thirsty klingon."

Cymro

If you're wondering what's taking so long, basically I'd done all the text and graphics by modelling them and then stencilling them onto a copy of the model, then cutting the resulting polys out of the model and moving them to a different layer and giving it a 1mm offset. Everything was going great, until I realised that from certain angles, the smoothing effect caused unpredictable results with it and the decals were sort of coming in and out of the hull in places depending on the camera angle. So I've gone back and started UV mapping the whole thing, which TBH I should have done in the first, not just because it's the proper way to do it, but because it's actually a lot easier than I thought and I've basically caught up with two weeks work in a couple of days.

__________________
"Let me tell you something about humans, nephew: They're a wonderful, friendly people - as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working.

"But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those friendly, intelligent, wonderful people...will become as nasty and as violent as the most blood-thirsty klingon."

Brikar

wow... Dude, seriously. Hardcore.

__________________
"A million monkeys typing until the end of time will produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Ten thousand monkeys typing for ten thousand years will write a Hemingway. Ten monkeys typing over Columbus Day weekend will give you a Dan Brown."

http://olympusmans.blogspot.com
http://benforrealz.blogspot.com

Cymro

This is what I mean about the stencils fucking up

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__________________
"Let me tell you something about humans, nephew: They're a wonderful, friendly people - as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working.

"But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those friendly, intelligent, wonderful people...will become as nasty and as violent as the most blood-thirsty klingon."

Brikar

I think I've seen that... It's because the polygons are occupying the same space?

__________________
"A million monkeys typing until the end of time will produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Ten thousand monkeys typing for ten thousand years will write a Hemingway. Ten monkeys typing over Columbus Day weekend will give you a Dan Brown."

http://olympusmans.blogspot.com
http://benforrealz.blogspot.com

Cymro

Indeed, but as I said, I moved the polygons so there was a 1mm gap (or even more), but the Z-buffer, which decides which objects are in front of or behind each other in the render had trouble with it, most likely because of the way the smoothing algorithm works. The only way I could have overcome this problem would have been to either leave the stencils on the mesh, which would have caused all sorts of problems, or move the polygons for the decals about 5mm out, which would leave them noticeably "floating" over the mesh, and as you can see the stencils were blotching out unevenly, so there was something not aligning properly.

And it's actually a lot easier. I'd originally dismissed UV mapping because text and graphics will look distorted on a curved surface, and I don't know of a way to straighten out the curves properly and precisely, which I thought would have meant days of playing with warping options in Photoshop. I ended up just using the bend and rotate tools to try to straighten out the mesh, and I couldn't get it straight but it's close enough, and I can't tell the difference, and really you could never perfectly match the curve using the stencil tool anyway.

And now, if I notice something's off proportionately, I can just fiddle with it in photoshop and it's much faster because I don't have to go through the stencilling process again. To tell the truth, stencilling was a nightmare; it's simple to do in principle, but it takes ages to get it all bent and rotated to the right angle, and then I had to keep closing and re-opening modeler because there's a memory hole and if you do to many booleans operations it says "internal buffers too small". Then I had to worry about offsetting the polys, it was stupid.

And it looks fine:

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__________________
"Let me tell you something about humans, nephew: They're a wonderful, friendly people - as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working.

"But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those friendly, intelligent, wonderful people...will become as nasty and as violent as the most blood-thirsty klingon."

Brikar

i got the old desktop hooked up and everything, but i'm having tons of trouble with it... the system just isn't stable in the slightest. i tossed in the windows cd and i'm going to try and repair it...

__________________
"A million monkeys typing until the end of time will produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Ten thousand monkeys typing for ten thousand years will write a Hemingway. Ten monkeys typing over Columbus Day weekend will give you a Dan Brown."

http://olympusmans.blogspot.com
http://benforrealz.blogspot.com

Brikar

wtf so windows setup says it couldn't detect any hard disks attached to the computer, then it restarted... and it went to the windows desktop??

EDIT
seems ok for now... we'll see. gonna boot up LW and make a couple simple pics, play some games, see how things go from here

__________________
"A million monkeys typing until the end of time will produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Ten thousand monkeys typing for ten thousand years will write a Hemingway. Ten monkeys typing over Columbus Day weekend will give you a Dan Brown."

http://olympusmans.blogspot.com
http://benforrealz.blogspot.com

Cymro

I'd open it up and give it a good clean. Also, if possible, plug the hard drive into another machine and see what Windows makes of it. It sounds like a corrupted hard drive, and it may take a few tries to format it.

And while I'm here, image mapping is complete; note I've done both shuttles, and the lights on the bottom are enveloped so they'll automatically pulse when you put them in an animation.

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__________________
"Let me tell you something about humans, nephew: They're a wonderful, friendly people - as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working.

"But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those friendly, intelligent, wonderful people...will become as nasty and as violent as the most blood-thirsty klingon."

Brikar

holy shit dude, that's awesome. it looks amazing! i opened up the one that you posted earlier and made a couple quick renders and it rendered easily and quickly.

i don't have another machine to plug the drive into. i opened up the case and made sure all the connections were solid and gave it a few blasts of compressed air to clean out the dust. ran a full malware scan, got the virus scanner going right now. i'll probably defrag the drive overnight

__________________
"A million monkeys typing until the end of time will produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Ten thousand monkeys typing for ten thousand years will write a Hemingway. Ten monkeys typing over Columbus Day weekend will give you a Dan Brown."

http://olympusmans.blogspot.com
http://benforrealz.blogspot.com