Retexturing PU's Refinery

Just a shot of the work in progress...
This is NOT the texturing. It is NOT a render, either.
What is it?

Well, it's a screenshot off of Blender's edit window, first of all.
For most of the station, I've loaded the ambient occlusion bake as a texture, just for
visual inspection. The concourse at the top, rather than its ambient occlusion, has the
the top light radiosity bake loaded. Its ambient occlusion exists, but it's not shown here.
So, this is a confusing and mixed up sample, but I just thought people might like to get
a snapshot of the dirty work.

I'll probably commit the final thing to PU tonight or tomorrow.

(Well... "final" in a very relative sense; this mesh is awful; I'm going to remodel it from
scratch; but this is an urgent fix for its ultra-awful, original texturing.)

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PU (Privateer: Parallel Universe's Home)
WCpedia --The Wing Commander Encyclopedia

More progress...

Fear not. The lights are baked at high intensity for the sake of better utilizing the
texture's 8-bit per channel color precision; they will be dimmed down during
final mixing.

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PU (Privateer: Parallel Universe's Home)
WCpedia --The Wing Commander Encyclopedia

Update:

The textures for the main section are finally mixed. Well, not *finally*; that'll take in-game testing; I just mean they are done for now.

Diffuse:

Specular:

Glow:

Naturally, the trusses and the columnar sections and the top concourse and the outer nozzles are not done yet.

Thinking about rusty iron for the trusses, smooth grey for the columns, and gold for the nozzles. For the concourse I have a snazzy idea... long story.

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PU (Privateer: Parallel Universe's Home)
WCpedia --The Wing Commander Encyclopedia

Here's a debatable update. The blue lights are not canonical, but I think they'll be extremely beneficial to the visual realism.
Why?
Because probably the biggest graphical problem with the Vegastrike engine right now is the lack of dynamic shadows.
Missing shadows are most noticeable with complex, non-convex structures such as this.
Baking a bit of ambient occlusion into the diffuse helps a bit, psychologically, to forget that real shadows are missing, but not much.
Having lights inside otherwise shady areas, on the other hand, really distracts the mind away from the lack of shadows, tho.
So, I say heck...

EDIT:
Some of the PU guys argued for placing smaller blue lights, closer to the structures, instead; and I have to agree. However, this is just a temporary job. My intention is to remodel the refinery from scratch, so for now I'll leave the blue lights where they are. It was a ton of work to put them in, do the hours long bakings, fix the bakings using radial blurs, bumpmap modulating, padding and remixing... to do it all over again? Nah; when I get around to remodeling it will really rock, though; and it will be a lot more canonical, to boot. This is just meant to be temporary crap merely better than the current crap.

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PU (Privateer: Parallel Universe's Home)
WCpedia --The Wing Commander Encyclopedia

New concourse with ambient occlusion loaded as texture:

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PU (Privateer: Parallel Universe's Home)
WCpedia --The Wing Commander Encyclopedia

Alright, more progress:

The concourse light and ao bakings took a ridiculous amount of time, but they are finally done.
There's no materials there yet ("no texture" you might say); --i.e. mostly everything is white; but just a test to see the
color trick I was talking about earlier:

This is the IN-doors lights' bake. It is using an overal 0.72, 0.8, 1.0 blue modulation (yellow lights are 0.72, 0.8, 0.0):

Here's ambient light coming from outside the bubble (AO), with 0.5, 0.64, 1.0 blue bias:

And here's what happens when the two are combined:

Once the glass bubble is in place, you'll see that it really looks as if the lighting inside is white but the bluish tint comes from the glass.
Why?
Because (0.5, 0.64, 1.0) is the square of (0.72, 0.8, 1.0); which is exactly what happens having a blue tint glass bubble...
Indoor lighting only passes through the glass once to reach an outside observer; but light from the outside passes through
the glass once on its way in, and a second time on its way out.
Next is texturing. First the bumpmap, then modulating the lights by the bumpmap, and then the diffuse and specular colors.

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PU (Privateer: Parallel Universe's Home)
WCpedia --The Wing Commander Encyclopedia

Alright, here's a first test of the concourse textures...

Diffuse:

Specular:

Glow map:

Just to clarify one more time, though; this is NOT a model for the base interior as you'd see
when you land on the station; this is a simplified model of what you see if you're flying outside
of the station, above it, and look down through the glass bubble at the top.

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PU (Privateer: Parallel Universe's Home)
WCpedia --The Wing Commander Encyclopedia

Added bluish modulation to diffuse and specular textures, which are going to be receivers of external lighting,
to make the perception of bluish tint of the glass bubble more believable. Plus a few other tweaks...

Diffuse:

Specular:

Glow map:

The glow map (last pic) represents mostly illumination from indoors, artificial lighting, so it doesn't have blue bias...
Not needed, since the glass itself will have a blue hue. But for light from exterior sources, blue bias is needed in the
diff & spec textures, to account for the fact that light from outside is blue-tinted on its way in; not just on its way out.
(The shader cannot tint light going in, so the only way to simulate that is with the texturing.)

Well, gotta go to work now, but tonight I'll probably finish texturing the trusses, central columns and those nozzles
in the periphery, on the tanks; so this baby should be ready to start testing in-game pretty soon.

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PU (Privateer: Parallel Universe's Home)
WCpedia --The Wing Commander Encyclopedia

I'm integrating everything now...

Diffuse:

Specular:

Lightmap:

I'll have to dim down those windows; too bright. And the meshes for all the lights are going to get scaled down a bit; too big.
Then I'll do an in-game test, and if I'm happy, I'll revisit all the textures one more time to add lots of padding, so that the seams
don't show, and then it's mesher'ing and committing time.

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PU (Privateer: Parallel Universe's Home)
WCpedia --The Wing Commander Encyclopedia

First alpha version of the refinery is committed. Revision 379. Profoundly disappointing, I must warn you all. I consider this a pre-alpha release. Too much subtlety doesn't work in-game, it appears. There's no obvious texture to the tanks, some of the features look blurred. Light-bakings are not balanced in intensity; like the columns are too bright purple.
What I do like is the better shading, of course...
For comparison, here's a shot of the old station:

And here's a shot of the new:

Notice the rounded shading of the old stations around edges that should have looked sharp. There were no smooth groups defined in the old.
Another thing that worked well was the adding of detail to the concourse... Here's the old concourse:

Here's the new:

And a few other shots:

So, blue and red bakings are too bright. That's easy to fix.
Texturing needs a lot more contrast to be visible. Should be easy to fix.
Need sharper features on the tanks; straighter sides to the rectangles that connect the trusses. NOT easy to fix, as this is due to the way I unwrapped them which, for some reason, causes all kinds of deformations of the textures. Need to redo the unwrapping of the main section and start again from scratch with its texturing...
Need normalmaps. NOT easy to fix; we need tangents in the engine for normalmapping to work with this model.

And another factor that maybe contributing to its looking like crap, I suspect, is bad lighting in New Caledonia. IIRC, New Cal, in PU, has like 3 or 4 light sources defined in the damned system file which add to more than 1; that is probably why the white walls of the concourse tend to saturate in sunlight. I'll look into it later.

In retrospect, I regret letting myself get rushed into a half-assed attempt and trying to put in a quick job. I kept compromising here and there, and it shows. I expected to do this retexturing in a couple of days. Ended up wasting a couple of weeks, instead.
NO MORE "QUICK JOBS".
Quick jobs are for the birds.

Gotta go to work early, today; but I'll try to fix up a few things tonight.

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PU (Privateer: Parallel Universe's Home)
WCpedia --The Wing Commander Encyclopedia

Well, it's definitely an improvement on the old version, that's for sure. I especially like the detail on the concourse.

You're right about the tanks though. They look a bit too shiny/smooth IMO.

So is the middle section purple, or is it just lighting playing tricks on my eyes?

No tricks; the mid-section IS a disaster. Easy to fix, tho; expect an update tonight.

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PU (Privateer: Parallel Universe's Home)
WCpedia --The Wing Commander Encyclopedia

Refinery textures and fragment shaders updated.

Revision 380.

_________________
PU (Privateer: Parallel Universe's Home)
WCpedia --The Wing Commander Encyclopedia