Space - procedural asteroids

[Starbase1]

Originally Posted by Meurig

Use a tesselated sphere instead?

Well, yes.

But the nice thing about the other approach is that I can have things like a different number of display polygons to render polygons. And I find that I can render this way to tens of millions of polygons, way beyond the point at which modeller grinds to a halt.

So I was hoping I could use nurbbs and UV maps together.

[Starbase1]

Latest asteroid experiments.

One big and one small, recent radar observations show that even small 1km sized near Earth asteroids often have even smaller companions in close orbit.

This image includes a Convair nuclear interplanetary vehicle I built a while back.

I like the asteroids, but they are currently VERY high polygon, and when I try running reduce polygons, the UV map disappeear, and I lose the baked textures...

Anyone know of a polygon reduction method that keeps the UV maps intact?

Nick

[Starbase1]

Problem solved.

QEMLOSS 3 preserves UV maps (albeit at the cost of preserving all polys along the map edge). And it seems to do a very good job of seriously reducing polygon counts without obvious artefacts (to my eye).

I attach two asteroids used in the last image. I'm not done yet, this is very much a step along the path, but I think these ones look pretty good at shallow lighting angles.

I'll upload final versions to resources when I've finished.

Please share any tests or tweaks you do with the files!

Cheers,
Nick

[Starbase1]

Get qemloss 3 here:

http://amber.rc.arizona.edu/lw/qemloss3.html

[JimCrafton]

Originally Posted by Starbase1

Latest asteroid experiments.
Anyone know of a polygon reduction method that keeps the UV maps intact?

Nick

Yeah I think ZB's DecimationMaster plugin will do this.

[JimCrafton]

It would be interesting to use Houdini to build this for you procedurally.

[bobakabob]

These look fantastic, thanks for sharing. The craters look especially realistic.

[Starbase1]

Originally Posted by bobakabob

These look fantastic, thanks for sharing. The craters look especially realistic.

Not yet! I need to raise the crater rims a bit...

[Amras]

Very nice, but I would say your shader looks a bit too much like a fractal.

I did try that a while ago with c4d shaders (+ displacement):

The Asteroid Ida: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:243_ida.jpg