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Ship shading experiment

Posted: Tue Jan 03, 2012 9:43 pm
by ShadyKnight
Hello,

I've been experimenting with shading ships by using depth maps and "light rays and shadows". For now the shader simply uses the colors of the ship as the depth (maximum of red/green/blue).

I think the ships/shading effect would look better with real depth maps. Unfortunately these are missing from current sprites as far as I know.

There could be three solutions to add depth information to sprites: Either the alpha channel is used (which is usually used for transparency) or a new picture format could be created with more channels, or a seperate picture could function as depth map. For now perhaps it's easiest to create a seperate picture. But perhaps in future I'll make new picture format with more channels.

An "emission" channel would also be nice, then these "emission" pixels could cast light for future functionality. So a new pixel format seems best solution.

I would be interested in working together with some sprite/pixel artists to see if we can work together to create some nice depth maps/sprites and tools to try and shade ships better. I could create special tools for you guys and then you guys and gals draw the sprites/depth maps and such...

I saw this nice ship on this forum and wondered how it would look like with the custom shading so here are the results. (Shader still under development).

To give you a sense what is going on there are three pictures: The depth map, the color map, and the final result/output map.

On the output map there are circles which represent the lights which were used, the brightness of the color is the light power, the size of the light is the depth (bigger is further away from ship/closer to viewer).

Here are the 3 pictures:

Depth map:
DepthMap.png
Color map (simply collection of sprites rendered by shipmaker I guess):
ColorMap.png
Pixel/output/shaded map (with randomly generated lights):
PixelMap.png
The depth map actually contains a lot of detail, pretty amazing, but it's just the r,g,b maxed. The question is:

Could you artists create a more realistic/better depth map ?

Also if you are interested in creating a new ship with a new depth map I would also be interested in that... then I can stick it into my shading engine and sees what pops out of it... ofcourse I will sent you back the results.

Bye for now,
ShadyKnight :)

Re: Ship shading experiment

Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2012 5:06 am
by shamrocksoldier
I have NO idea what you are talking about with all this. but I must say, FANTASTIC work with that ships depthing. Simply great. This isn't in game is it?

Re: Ship shading experiment

Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2012 7:14 am
by Doogie12
^He took our old chainship image and did some program magic to it. He's wondering whether or not the same thing can be applied to sections to give it that same feel.

Re: Ship shading experiment

Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2012 9:53 am
by shamrocksoldier
I see. If you guys need any help, i'm not exactly a vet on the forum, but I am willing to learn and do what I can.

Re: Ship shading experiment

Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2012 11:41 am
by jwa8402
Oo nice work man. Can't wait to see what comes of this.
I wish shipmaker could handle vectors cuz then we could scale sections without distorting them.

Re: Ship shading experiment

Posted: Wed May 02, 2012 12:19 am
by M123
jwa8402 wrote:I wish shipmaker could handle vectors cuz then we could scale sections without distorting them.
Now that would be a good upgrade for a future BSF game - maybe it could include a basic vector drawing application and/or support importing various vector and raster image types?
After playing Captain Forever I think that performance might not be such an issue in Flash (or other vector-based systems) after all.