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[WIP] New textures for the ships in CoAS

Lol.
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Soon me hearties.
 
Are you able to also edit the geometry?

I'd like to fix the geometry on some of them myself, but unfortunately I only use 3D Studio Max and none of the plugins work for that. Trying to get a hold of Inez's tool but so far all the links are broken.

Anyhow, several ships suffer from geometry flow errors near the stern. It's apparent the most on ships that have running lines and stripes along the hull like the Boussole and the Colonial Frigate

Notice the hull near the stern how it ripples in a very ugly way. Thats because the triangulation isn't flowing correctly. In the picture below I drew some lines showing how the edge flow of the polygons should flow.

boussole_error.jpg


I'd gladly do all the fixes myself, but unfortunately there is no plugin for 3D Studio Max and I don't know Maya at all.
 
So I went in and checked what was under hood. I used the OBJ exporter in GM Viewer and then imported into 3DS Max. I can do that for some ships but not all of them (couldn't for the Bousolle1, but I could for the Colonial Frigate1).

Sure enough there are triangulation anomalies near the stern as well as the bow.

stern_err.jpg


On the left the orginal mesh faceted, no smoothing (so I can see how the polys flow). On the right after correcting the polys, notice how it straightened out as well as it shades better.

stern_err_02.jpg


Top half shows the geometry fixed so that the edge flows correct (I didn't fix the whole thing just enough so you can see the difference). Bottom shows original edge flow.

Now you might think, it's not a big deal. At certain angles particularly when looking through the spyglass at a ship in the distance, it can look really bad :(

Sadly I have no way to export the model from Max. Otherwise I'd correct all ships and optimize them (a lot of them are very inefficiently optimized).
 
helldiver said:
So I went in and checked what was under hood. I used the OBJ exporter in GM Viewer and then imported into 3DS Max. I can do that for some ships but not all of them (couldn't for the Bousolle1, but I could for the Colonial Frigate1).

Sure enough there are triangulation anomalies near the stern as well as the bow.

stern_err.jpg


On the left the orginal mesh faceted, no smoothing (so I can see how the polys flow). On the right after correcting the polys, notice how it straightened out as well as it shades better.

stern_err_02.jpg


Top half shows the geometry fixed so that the edge flows correct (I didn't fix the whole thing just enough so you can see the difference). Bottom shows original edge flow.

Now you might think, it's not a big deal. At certain angles particularly when looking through the spyglass at a ship in the distance, it can look really bad :(

Sadly I have no way to export the model from Max. Otherwise I'd correct all ships and optimize them (a lot of them are very inefficiently optimized).
Click to expand...

Yes Yes, please Helldiver, we would love your help and could use a good modeler. Are you interested in fixing and/or porting ship models into the CoAS game? I will give you the tools and hopefully we can work together. Let me know.
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Yes Yes, please Helldiver, we would love your help and could use a good modeler. Are you interested in fixing and/or porting ship models into the CoAS game? I will give you the tools and hopefully we can work together. Let me know.
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Click to expand...

YES...Yes I'd like that!

Like I said, I can only do 3D Studio Max. If you have a method where I can repair the 3D Mesh, then export to OBJ or some other format, and you can import, we can work together really well. I don't own or have Maya, and the methods for mesh repair in Maya would be foreign to me.

Anyhow as I've played the game and find ships I like I've been retexturing them slightly and adding the missing textures for Hulls 1, 2, 3. I dunno if the hulls will show up randomly at the shipyard or when I discover NPC ships. I'm hoping they do :D. So far I've only updated the Bouselle and the Colonial Frigate since they're the ones I'd been using the most. I'll probably update other ones that are missing alternate textures as I go. I also change the wood colors and so on so it looks more realistic and not too saturated.

Bouselle
bousle_01.jpg


Alternate hull color schemes for hulls 1, 2, and 3.
bousle_02.jpg


Colonial Frigate
c_frig_01.jpg


c_frig_02.jpg


I changed the crew texture somewhat by making it slightly higher res and alternated the colors of the coats and such so that it's a bit more random and so that everyone isn't wearing just blue.
c_frig_03.jpg
 
Wow, awesome helldiver! ****ing awesome work mate! So glad you are part of the team, your work is awesome! I'm glad you made the crew Hi-Res and changed their colours to randomize them, that has always bugged me. Looking forward to seeing more of your work :onya
 
The other change I did recently was I changed the ratlines to be darker. On smaller vessels like sloops and such they are still normal rope color, so there is some variety.

other_chng_01.jpg



Darker ratlines
other_chng_02.jpg


Again if I can figure out a way to export from 3D Studio Max 8, then I can repair ship geometry. You can see in the first pic the distortion of the mesh near the stern, makes me sad since that is one of my favorite ships. :(
 
Something looks wrong with the above pic ... second last cannon, near cabin, shadow to the right or is that from the mast? Nice work on the ratlines
 
Helldiver, very nice job bud!
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In the new GoF Mod all the ship textures have 3 hulls. That is one of the major jobs I have been working on for the new Mod. I like your textures though and would like it if you could send me your changes with the file structure intact and I will talk to the guys and show them your work to see if we want them in the new mod. Does that sound good?

I will PM you the files (including Maya) for the conversion and you can find tutorials on how to convert obj files to import or export to Maya or Studio Max, they are in the forum and all you need is to do a forum search because I forget where they are.

Nice work mate!
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Something looks wrong with the above pic ... second last cannon, near cabin, shadow to the right or is that from the mast?
Click to expand...
That is not on the texture. It's a shadow created by something, I think it's the geometry.

I PMed you Craiggo. Problem is I found out these files are like 90MB after rar so I don't have a place to upload. Was thinking Megaupload. PM me if you have as solution.

The problem with OBJ is that it is not a good format. It typically loses smoothing group information, normal information (some normals will be flipped), or will sometimes break up the geometry in strange ways. I'm going to look at the tools you sent me and see.

If you can find a GM plugin for 3D Studio Max 8, it's would be even better.
 
Used the VRML method to export one of the ships models (the Bousolle in this case) and imported into 3D Studio Max. I reconstructed the hull.

Posting pics here so that ship builders can see how the edge flow goes for the stern. Ideally I would have prefered that the edge loops continue all the way to the gun decks. But I didn't want to have to reconstruct the whole hull from scratch.

Top model is my reconstructed mesh built untop of the original mesh I extracted of the Boussolle
hull_01.jpg


Plan view.
hull_02.jpg


The ship plans can really only be used to create templates. If you build the 3D model straight from the plans (using splines or some other method) it simply will not flow correctly and you will end up with geometry anomalies :(

Original hull; 1600 polys, new hull 1100 polys.
 
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