3DRealtime Star Wars Ships (will include expanded universe)

xiaorobear · January 2020

I'm hoping to do some realtime Star Wars ships to improve my texturing and lighting– planning to go into some Expanded Universe stuff, like one of my favorites, the Hapan Battle Dragon. For now, here is a low-poly (~8000 tris) T-70 X-wing that I am texturing in Substance Painter. Still have to add lots of greeblies between the wings and behind the cockpit, but hoping to be able to do them purely on the textures.

I also really admire Ben Jewer's Eevee Star Wars projects' lighting and materials- hoping to achieve more realism than what I have here!

Guerrilla · January 2020

The T-70 always looks a little wrong and too skinny to me, but that's probably just because I'm so used to the old ones. Nice start. Are you going to do the greebling in Painter per model, or planning on some procedural material trickery in Designer?

evil_genius_180 · January 2020

That looks really cool.

xiaorobear · January 2020

Thanks!

For greebles, I am trying out a new quick technique... I downloaded some free textures from textures.com mostly of circuitboards and machinery, clumsily cobbled them together, and ran them through Lets Enhance to AI-upscale them. Then used normal map online to generate some quick maps. Then I add these in as a layer in my Substance Painter stack, and I get this:

Which I can mask away to just the desired areas (apologies for the low res textures, I can export from substance painter at higher resolution than this preview, and some dirt/bump is too high here):

And then if I don't like the greebles, I can always offset slide them around to try new ones, which is kind of fun.

I would need some different greeble sheets for different-sized ships, like this same one wouldn't look accurate for a larger Imperial ship. I'm hoping to do a carrack cruiser soon. But maybe this one will work for fighters.

evil_genius_180 · January 2020

That's a cool method of adding details. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the people working in the industry use similar techniques.

xiaorobear · January 2020

I fear it's probably more low-tech, but I bet if I took these tools back to say, game dev in 2005, my skills would probably be in demand.

The main weakness of it is that it's limited by the UV density / overall texture resolution, vs modern games use a 'decal' method where any details or insets/panel lines or labels are overlaid from a separate texture sheet of just high res details, so they can appear to be extremely sharp, while the overall surface uses tiling materials. Though Battlefront 2 and such look to still just use regular texture atlases for the whole ship.

Some more material updates, and a screenshot in sketchfab looking much better than Painter. Just a couple more details and the x-wing is done. I'll need a TIE fighter as well to put on the rack of the carrack cruiser, so that may be next.

komaro · January 2020

I used that technique of greeble in 3dsmax (an older version). With mix success. It went well on small areas, but Max at the time, had a lot of trouble managing the layers. I was quite frustrated in the end. That was with my Star Trek Voyager.

I found myself trying to do decals again and I might have to resolve to this technique again. I wish they implement a real solution, like a decals projector.

Love your ship by the way.

MadKoiFish · January 2020

In max might mix this with a mask in composite to do the same thing. I sorta do this with a few ships to add decals (red and yellow markings) across the hull in a different UVW pattern to the main hull. BUT that is for traditional renders not realtime engines. MAX sucks in that you have little feedback short of rendering to see what the layers are doing. Preview or in viewport is quite meh.

I can see this for dirtmaps and stuff to make one model work for a multiple fighter scene. Just alter the dirt maps and differentiate the instanced geo.

xiaorobear · February 2020

No fancy new textures to show yet, but I should be able to start on the TIE this week. Model is mostly there.

evil_genius_180 · February 2020

Nice start on the TIE.

xiaorobear · February 2020

Slight delay, but the TIE model is done, hopefully can start texturing tomorrow. As with the X-wing, I'm going to try to add the greebles around the wing panels in the textures.

xiaorobear · February 2020

It begins!

evil_genius_180 · February 2020

That looks awesome so far.

xiaorobear · February 2020

More progress!

Edit: Does anyone else feel like the designs for the Lancer Frigate and the Carrack Cruiser might have been accidentally switched, back in the '90s (Essential Guide to Vehicles and Vessels)? The Lancer Frigate has more small blister pods and very narrow bridge windows, while the Carrack has larger details and a much larger, chunkier bridge window... Looking at those two pictures, you'd never guess that the Carrack is the larger ship (350m long vs 250m long). On my carrack I will probably re-interpret that 'cockpit'-looking area to be dark paneling around much smaller windows.

xiaorobear · February 2020

I'm not done with the TIE textures yet, but I moved into Blender to start testing out some space lighting. I think what I have now is not bad for the Star Wars look, but sadly it's a bit less interesting than the HDRI lighting above, where there were move varied lights and colors to reflect. This is also with some motion blur and denoising, and a couple compositor tweaks.

Higher res html5 link, and low res lower frame rate embeddable gif:

And the frame with the lasers (funny to see them reflected in the cockpit glass, which of course never happens in the original trilogy):

I'll post some Carrack modeling soon.

evil_genius_180 · February 2020

That looks great. I like how it kind of has a painted look.

Heh, yeah, no reflections or light falloff in the original trilogy. Ah, rotoscoping.

xiaorobear · February 2020

Here is my start on blocking out the Carrack cruiser. Turns out a lot of others online have also noticed how comically small the design looks vs its actual size, so that has inspired me to slightly redesign it as I go along. It's actually longer than a Nebulon-B frigate, which I think no one would guess based on official art like this. So I am trying thinner plating, details like that radar dish half the size of the official art, etc.

Where the external TIE racks will go. In the reference (from the Essential Guide to Vehicles and Vessels), the bridge window is big enough for a TIE fighter to comfortably fit through, so that's also going to go.

evil_genius_180 · February 2020

Looking good. It's a good thing you're going to fix that window's size, as that's the biggest thing killing the sense of scale with the original design.

xiaorobear · February 2020

It's been a weird week, and because I am a glutton for overcomplicating projects by adding organic stuff, I started sculpting a trandoshan pilot, for one of those quick, classic Star Wars shots showing a pilot as their ship is blown up. Just eyeballing a couple pictures of Bossk. I want to make him look similar enough that people recognize it as a Star Wars alien, but I'll give him a very different space suit so people don't think I meant to have Bossk flying a fighter in my animation.

I was (probably clearly) very inspired by Howard Day in the idea of having alien pilots at all. But the hard, unmoving scales will make it much easier than if I wanted to have some other kind of realistic-looking character. (I also thought of a Bothan as an expanded universe thing to show, but would almost certainly not be able to make realistic fur).

evil_genius_180 · February 2020

That looks good. I could tell right away that it was a Trandoshan. Having pilots for your cockpits is a good thing, it allows you to have transparent cockpit canopies.

xiaorobear · February 2020

Very true- I think to make an initial video with a quick turnaround, I will stick to opaque cockpits for the starfighter I plan to have the trandoshan in, and only make him and a little interior look good from just the head-on angle. Similarly, for this model right now, I also just modeled his mouth closed, and won't worry about mouth interiors and lip rigging or anything at this time. But further in the future that cockpit interior continuity is one of the big advantages of 3D, that I'd definitely want to take advantage of.

I started texturing the trandoshan, here is a WIP. I started out by just tiling a scale pattern over the whole thing– you can especially see this on the areas leading up to the horns and the sides of the head, where it is extremely repetitive and doesn't look right. So I will then continue painting over those repetitive parts with hand-placed larger scales based on the type Bossk has. Right now it also looks very videogamey, probably due to the lack of gloss variation. But the hand-drawn scales will be a guide for where that should get broken up.

https://media.giphy.com/media/hWFh3HRBWxltsUiuzA/giphy.gif

edit again: more variation in progress, looks much better! Replaced the last gif with one showing it basically done. Next will be to add some hints of a flight suit. I only intend on this being a bust, just for showing that exploding cockpit view.

xiaorobear · March 2020

Unfortunately, due to the usual life stuff, I temporarily have to scale back my ambitions for this a bit. I'll have to return to the stuff like the Carrack launching TIEs a bit later. I do still want to get several space battle shots out as a proof of concept though. Originally I wanted to model a Muurian transport from the game TIE Fighter, but to speed things up and have a mid-size ship, I have instead kitbashed together a quick ship from some StarCraft models I have lying around from my other thread.

Seems Star Warsy enough, and flying quickly with motion blur and new textures, hopefully no one will recognize any recognizable bits sticking out.

xiaorobear · March 2020

Quick shitty kitbashed textures, good enough for being shown with motion blur!

xiaorobear · March 2020

Test with my space lighting and motion blur. I think it still needs a bit more complexity around the engines, and maybe more than 2 engines. Looks a little eye-like. Otherwise I am happy though.

(full pic with badly motion-blurred TIE here)

evil_genius_180 · March 2020

That looks really nice so far.

xiaorobear · April 2020

Still working on this, hopefully have some cooler stuff to post soon. I experimented for a bit with doing 3d particle explosion stuff, with sub-par results, so I am going to try with stock footage with an emission shader. This is just a test, but even though the fire is all on a 2D plane, I feel like the light and reflections make it feel decently well integrated.

japetus · April 2020

This is so awesome...what real time engine will you be using? I too love Substance Painter and Designer, the tie fighter looks fantastic! Especially blowing up. Interesting normal map process for the greebles there...

japetus · April 2020

Also looking forward to that Hapan Battle Dragon....hell maybe I'll have to make one again... I made a totally terrible one back in '99 or '01 in Lightwave...its a cool design.

xiaorobear · April 2020

Originally I was going for Blender Eevee, but for now I am actually back to rendering these in Blender Cycles for the better motion blur and bounce lighting... So, realtime-ready models, but not actually rending in realtime.

Coincidentally someone just posted a Blender Star Wars space battle tutorial on youtube where he also switched to Cycles because it was just as fast as his motion blur workaround for Eevee anyway, so I feel a little reaffirmed. If you want to see the TIE in realtime, here is a Sketchfab link though.

edit: updated the video clip. Looking pretty good!

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3DRealtime Star Wars Ships (will include expanded universe)

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3DRealtime Star Wars Ships (will include expanded universe)

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