As stated in
the other thread, definitely loving this. It looks like a giant hole in the ground with some sort of facility on top.
Need to think of a way to make it look more lively... me thinks a twinkling light of sorts on it somewhere and dust poofs coming from it (all done in real-time via particles and shader effects, no need to come up with animation frames).
That stated, I do like that all of these structures align to a 128x128 grid. Will make it very easy to pack everything together into a single texture or two in the long run (prolly surface structures and subsurface structures).
I think the only real animation that would be needed for structures are spinning doodads (like a radar bar, comm dish, etc.) I imagine those are things that can be done very simply -- they can be added to structures in real-time so they can be generalized. I think I also mentioned the platform on the air shaft -- same deal. If I had just the platform rendered by itself (perhaps with lights in a separate frame?) we could make some interesting animated effects without having to go crazy rendering huge texture atlases.
Hoping any of this makes sense, not sure if I should break the animation into a separate thread or if you're even up for it. I figured the spinning stuff ought to be simple enough -- I hate Blender and was able to figure out how to make spnning planets.
(though I'm considering changing it up to rendering 3D spheres with texture maps on them and going that route... again, different thread).
