At the end of last week, I finished the texture baking process for the overhead panels. This involved unwrapping every nut, bolt, washer, and switch toggle, and took ages. Click on the illustration to see the full-resolution image.

As in the real Comet, the overhead area doesn’t get much daylight, but with dynamic lighting, one can start to mix the LIT texture with the daylight texture , tied to a dataref. The effect really brings the overhead panel alive:



And this is the view at night:



Originally, I had tried to achieve maximum text resolution with the smallest texture file. It looked detailed, but not realistic. By unwrapping components, the texture area was very quickly gobbled up, leaving no room for text. The alternative was to create text within the object file itself, each label being like a component, with surfaces. The advantage is extremely crisp detail that scales well, and the text can have its own lighting. The disadvantage is that the poly count goes through the roof. Minimising the polygons for each letter made sure the impact on frame rates was low, but again, it took many, many hours.

Here is an example of polytext on the fire warning panel, over the pilot’s head.



This Quicktime movie is a few seconds to show what’s possible with dynamic lighting:



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GMM-P (10/05/2010)

Tags: Cockpit, Textures