Julhelm

You have a pretty nasty smoothing error on the intake, probably caused by the wing intersection. The rudder also seems to have some wierd shading, like both sides share the same smoothing group. I'd really like to see an AO bake on that thing, though. It'd really make it stand out even better than it does now.

Do an AO bake as well so it doesn't look so flat where pieces intersect. Otherwise it looks good.

Here's what I have so far in dx10. There's lower ambient lighting and more directional light from the sun so as to give it more contrast. No luck in getting the greenish tint, though. Also I've tweaked the postprocess shader to increase the bloom effect. This drowns out the horizon but can be counteracted somewhat I think by tweaking the horizoncolor values. At any rate it only becomes a problem during dawn/dusk when all of a sudden it looks as if a nuke went off. Play around with it and see where you end up. Juls_Envtweaks.rar

I honestly think his sales would improve if he tried more to improve the visuals. The stock lighting in these games is atrociously bad, and it's not all that difficult to fix, either. The main problem with SF2 is that while you can improve the contrast a bit by tweaking environmentsystem, there's no way at all to do any kind of color correction like in WoP. So no matter how you tweak the values you end up with the same bland all-white lightmodel. Maybe you should go post these before-after screenies at his forum. If we had this kind of vivid lighting + dx10 normalmapping and tweaked bloom it wouldn't look so dated anymore.

We should just petition TK to add the color correction palette to the SF2 titles. He could code that in a day if he wanted to.

Looking good! Too bad we can't do the same in SF2. I'd really like the ability to use a custom palette for each terrain to do color correction.

Dude, I'm talking about exporting it with normalmaps to bring some added surface detail, not remodelling anything.

Hey XRay, are you planning on doing any normalmaps for the Blackbird? The real thing has some interesting deformations on panels as well as the distinctive ribbing which would really stand out if you ramp up the specular a bit.

Hey Dave, try lowering the gloss value and ramping up reflection a bit on that cat and see how it looks.

Oh, it's BPAO's model? I thought it was Flying Toasters.

The Cat looks good but I think the metal parts like the nozzles and leading edges should have more specular and reflection on them. It's easy to do in max by assigning a new material to those parts.

Would this work? It's an F-22 derivative, after all.

As far as air combat movies go, the best ones are all from the 1950's. The Hunters, Flying Leathernecks, Bridges of Toko-Ri... Definitely prefer Flight of the Intruder to Top Gun. As far as Iron Eagle goes, I actually find the third movie to be the most watchable of the bunch. It's got both warbirds and the ARES in it, for crying out loud. If you want a really good action movie about flying, check out Deadly Encounter.

What's so good about Top Gun again other than it has tons of well-oiled men in towels? There's what, two fights in the entire movie - one of which is in the beginning and the other in the end. The rest of it consists of training. Sure the footage is cool but as an action film it's an absolute bore. It's like watching a Rambo movie where Rambo spends the entire movie at the range.

Iron Eagle > Top Gun

#3009

Oh and we can't have a chemtrail conspiracy thread without some lunacy courtesy of Alex Jones:

Squid, don't trust these military men. Being part of the government they're obviously in on the conspiracy and are trying to feed you disinformation. Especially that Fastcargo guy. You can bet he's laughing all the way back to Area 51. Right?

What really killed the concept of the SST was noise regulations over populated areas.

Are you only doing the Afghanistan scenario or will you do a Fulda Gap-style scenario too?

Well try making it look more like my layout and you'll be good to go as long as you leave space for things like cockpit and gear wells. Speaking of gear wells, since they're the same on each side, you can tile them on the same piece of map with no problem. Just move the mirrored UV shell out from 0-1 space.

Looking good. Is that DOF on the horizon?

Dude, that is horribly inefficient mapping there. You want to use as much of the map as possible, as everything else is just wasted memory. On those maps you're perhaps using 15% of the space available, tops. That means 85% is just wasted memory lowering performance. You should really go back and do a proper job mapping it. It isn't difficult to do and it pays off because you can use max's texture baking to help create your textures. That is, if you unwrap it properly. Furthermore there are plenty of tools in max to help you unwrap properly like shell stitch and various automatic unwrappers like cylindrical/box/pelt unwrappers you can use to speed up workflow. Even using the "pack uv's" command would make that map much more efficient.

To expand on my last post: I recently modelled this F-1 for an RTS we were making, and while it is obviously low poly I just want to show how I've used the texture space available to me, which was a single 1024x1024 map: Hell if you want to, I could texture it provided the maps are good.

Maybe you could also add some stuff from the WW2 range like the factories since those are fun for nuking and if you want to you can add my cargoship.