curved models are good - and not unfitting. - however... when displayed ...
- please display them without any shaders other than "bloom", "fullscreen AA", "global ambient lights" - cause the FL engine doesn t do more sophisticated stuff either - and displaying a render with self shadows, drop shadows, highlights, reflections, normal maps etc. falsifies the model severely. ( in other words - i can make the oldest homeworld ships look awesome when i apply 2.2 shaders - and they ll still look crap in freelancer )
- use a bright light so that details can be seen. - many a ships look good when being placed in half darkness against a black background - but do they still look good against a bright background? ( like o-49, tau-37 etc. )
' Wrote:curved models are good - and not unfitting. - however... when displayed ...
- please display them without any shaders other than "bloom", "fullscreen AA", "global ambient lights" - cause the FL engine doesn t do more sophisticated stuff either - and displaying a render with self shadows, drop shadows, highlights, reflections, normal maps etc. falsifies the model severely. ( in other words - i can make the oldest homeworld ships look awesome when i apply 2.2 shaders - and they ll still look crap in freelancer )
- use a bright light so that details can be seen. - many a ships look good when being placed in half darkness against a black background - but do they still look good against a bright background? ( like o-49, tau-37 etc. )
Fun thing is the only postprocessing used was bloom. About the normal maps, I'll agree. I can bake the textures to get some detail in without scalping it completely. As for stuff looking crap in freelancer...It's freelancer. That's not to say a ship can't look good or bad ingame, but nobody's buying it for the graphics.
Now as per your request, I've rendered the fighter against a light background with no specular. I've also made a second pair of images with no bloom. (They're in 1024x1024. Forgive me low bandwidth gods.)
nice - one gets a much better idea of how it looks like that. - and well.. i said bloom, but its just enbseries bloom - which is a full screen after effect - while the bloom you used appears to be more focussed on real lightsources.
the spinning youtube render also made use of shadows and dynamic lightning - something freelancer doesn t have, which gives a model a HUGE quality boast. it also made use of spectacular highlights ( while freelancer only uses ambient lights and static vertex lightning )
either way - the model looks good - and not too sophisticated. - the skinning might be a bit boring without all those posteffects.