Starfighter project

Bumpmap test

I've been working on a mesh of the Starfighter from the old Buck Rogers TV show.

It's a nice, unusual design of ship and I'd been meaning to build a model of it for a while now.  I was originally going for a high-detail beauty model but while I was doing preliminary work, I realised it would make a very nice ship for a game (mainly because it looks great from underneath).

So, I set about creating a mesh with a very low poly count -- I got it down to about 1000 tris eventually -- but wanted to keep as much detail as possible.

I thought I'd experiment with trying to find an optimum balance of using texture and bump-mapping to bring out the detail rather than increasing the poly count.

You can see the initial results are not too bad.  The engines need finishing off, but I thought I'd try some test renders anyway.

I thought I'd try to be clever and get the most from the UV map by flipping the starboard side nacelle & wings and superimposing them on the port side ones.  Worked great for the textures.

However, this attempt at being clever has led to a schoolboy error...

...because, with the UV flipped, the bump map has also flipped, which has inverted the starboard bump, making it rise instead of sink.  Bugger!
Oh well, that's the way you learn.

Still, I'm pretty pleased with the bits that have worked.  The close-up of the bumping shows that the main cockpit and body panels look OK (for a first attempt, anyway).

The quick white-and-blue lit render works well and brings out the detail.

Next step is to fix the symmetry problem.

After that, I'll be importing it into Unity to see how well the bump map performs as a Unity normal map.

To be continued...