The good news, I finally got my iMac back. One new LCD, PCU, and logic board later, I'm back in business, and are we ever in business. Over the past several days I've been putting the finishing touches on textures, animations, and have started building the framework for the exterior lighting system. Dhruv and I are confident that spare a few texture details (to the tune of some dirt on the underside of the tank), and normal / spec maps, the exterior model is 100%. Our focus can turn to getting the 3d cockpit up to speed and integration of the plugin features that Sven is working on.
So here's the laundry list of what is new.
•New high resolution textures for the fuselage taking advantage of every last pixel that the 2048 square has to offer.
•Ram Air Turbine texturing minus the fan animation done.
•Exterior lighting textures and lighting framework. We're holding out for a while yet before we do the landing light splashes on the fuselage for a couple of reasons, so don't look for those yet.
•Final refinements to the exterior model including 3D vents, proper APU scoop, new antenna meshes, some fresh UVing to take advantage of normal mapping without artifacts, and a thorough once over of the model to make sure that nothing has been left to chance.
There have been a couple other optimizations, remodels etc to make this generation of the model the most accurate and complete that we've had to date.
And with that, I'm tired of writing. Pictures do a better job anyway.
Enjoy
Some overviews
Night with everything turned on. The logo lights can be turned off. There are numerous other lighting goodies that I won't touch on here just yet.
Gotta love the rat.
Comparison of the old vs new fuselage textures.
For those of you wondering, this was the big announcement that we had planned when Dhruv was here in Wyoming a couple weekends ago. Better late than never!
Cheers
Alex
