OTOY Forums

You know Greebles ... the sci fi surface complications to simulate that "something important is there" on your spaceship hull etc ... blocks, cylinders, cables, tubes .. all kinds of thingies to give the impression of size and reality to detailed objects. On Spaceships, that means all kinds of structures on the outside hull of nondescript nature.

Most tools to create this in blender seem to use displacement. But a) displacement doesn't exist in octane and b) displacement uses high poly meshes to crate the shapes. For gaming models, I want lower poly, accurate greebles.

Is there any cool way to efficiently create interesting surfaces with real structure for spaceships? I.e. no feeble bump mapping etc, but lots of "stuff" to have fun with ... other than just creating it and cut and paste it everywhere?

the best thing to do is create it all as real geometry and then bake it into a normal onto your lower poly object.

Depending on the resolution of the image texture used for the Normal map, Geometry uses sometimes less memory space than textures. Geometry stores vertex coordinates for any size of the model... Textures store at least 24 bits per pixel depending on the size of the image...
And if you use instances, you can save a lot of memory using geometry.

Still newbie questions:

1. Normalmaps only allow for for some sort of surface unevenness, no? I'm thinking cobblestones etc. It can not generate real greebles standing out as gemoetry, like displacement does, working on subsurfaced mesh?

2. Is there a way to automate creation of interesting geometry in blender for octane? Like: I mark an Ngon surface and it automatically subsurfaces it, extrudes bits here and there, creating somewhat intelligently done classical "space greebles"? Does anyone know any such scripts? Because all I can find with blender were displacement ideas.

3. How do you reuse something with instancing?

You dont need to extrude greebles.
just create new objects on top of your main object.

Some scripts existed for Blender 2.49b, but I don't know any for 2.6x. Maybe you could find something on Blender.org library.

You could also try to adapt from the script "blender Cities" from Littleneo :

http://jerome.le.chat.free.fr/index.php ... nload.html

Or the script that inspired Blender Cities :

http://cgchan.com/suicidator/

Good luck !