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Star Wars (Data East 1992)

Pre-toolkit build featuring kingdids' Octane/C4D rendering pipeline with plastic refraction baking, pre-rendered lighting, and a VR room with Darth Vader model. Notable for developing the double-sided decal plane technique for transparent plastics and demonstrating Octane's baking camera for UV-mapped refraction.

Build Story

Built by kingdids (3D/rendering), benji084, and others using Octane renderer in Cinema 4D -- predating the VPX Lightmapper toolkit. The table used pre-rendered playfield and plastic textures baked from overhead camera views, with GI lighting captured in the render passes. A VR room was added by sixtoe with a Darth Vader model.

Table-Specific Details

Mechanisms & Hardware

  • Death Star assembly: Large upper-playfield toy with stacked insert lights and flashers beneath. Multiple VPX lights positioned at the same location clipped to black instead of getting brighter when the ROM triggered them simultaneously -- the combined intensity exceeded VPX's clamping threshold. Fix: use a single top flasher instead of stacking lights.
  • Upper gate primitives: Non-collidable but not marked as toys, causing VPX to include them in unnecessary physics calculations. Setting toy=true improved performance.

Art & Visuals

  • Plastic refraction via double-sided decals: kingdids developed a technique for clear plastic rendering -- model the plastic shape with a small bevel for edge thickness, create a separate double-sided decal plane slightly submerged below the plastic surface, and enable Fake Shadows/Caustics. The decal creates a fake refraction effect as light passes through the plastic above it. This technique is documented in the 3D art pipeline guide.
  • Octane baking camera: Renders textures directly onto unwrapped UV coordinates rather than projecting from a camera viewpoint. Refraction is baked into the UVs so it works from any viewing angle -- critical for VR compatibility. Camera projection is faster but produces textures locked to one viewing angle.
  • Octane General Visibility slider: For transparent ramp/plastic baking, the slider controls how much of the hidden scene shows through the transparent object. Low values give subtle edge-only refraction; higher values show more playfield through the ramp.
  • Camera projection resolution: When using camera projection, the effective resolution depends on how much of the texture is used for the playfield area. A 4K texture filling only 2/3 of the frame delivers only ~1080p effective resolution. Fix: render at 8K and resize, or render at 6K minimum.
  • Insert displacement maps: kingdids created normal and displacement maps in Photoshop from black-and-white patterns instead of modeling 3D insert geometry -- faster workflow that produced realistic starburst/ridged patterns controllable via a slider.
  • GI color temperature confirmed at approximately 2700K for real incandescent bulbs, a value referenced in the GI and flashers guide.

Known Issues

  • Depth bias in VR: The Death Star had depth bias set to -600, causing ramps to show through it when GI turned off. Negative depth bias values on large primitives behave differently in VR's stereoscopic rendering. Changing to positive 600 fixed the issue.
  • Legacy trough "can't find 0" errors: Tables using legacy-style trough code produce debug console errors when Fleep sound references are null. Cosmetic only -- does not affect gameplay.
  • Drop target RotZ requirement: Drop targets must use RotZ (not ObjRotZ) for the Roth physics code to calculate hit angles correctly.

Techniques Developed Here

See Also