New Design: Space fighter

[Phantasee]

It looks sick rendered like that. The lighting adds that little extra something.

Don't cut down the number of guns, though. Your ships remind me of that picture of an A-10 rolling to present it's belly covered in munitions. Bad ass.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

quick update, fixed most of the polygon errors and quickly slapped some textures on it. I also took the liberty of cutting in a few windows to give it some scale so it doesn't look odd when next to the fighters...

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4008/454 ... 6e1d_o.jpg

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4067/454 ... a6fa_o.jpg

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

Don't cut down the number of guns, though. Your ships remind me of that picture of an A-10 rolling to present it's belly covered in munitions. Bad ass.

I agree, the A10 is badass. Notice that it only has the big ass gun built in, everything else is on hardpoints like I mentioned in my post. I've seen too many peoples ships that were wallpapered in guns and turrets, something which went out with WWII battleships. It doesn't make a lot of sense, and that sort of thing began to be phased out at the end of the 19th century. The trend for ships is to fewer, more accurate weapons, and that's unlikely to change anytime soon. Discuss.

[Grahf: Seeker Of Power]

That was the effect I was going for on the capital ships. However, on one of my other designs, which happens to be a dreadnaught 13.5k long, there are alot of turrets....but still not thousands like on a star wars SSD. Oh, and i'm gonna link up my old threads. If you want to look over them and find anything in particular you want to try your hand at just show me and I'll send you the model. Maybe we should do request or something?

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic. ... 4&t=133731

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic. ... 4&t=112430

[Grahf: Seeker Of Power]

Did some small revisions on the fighter design.

Removed the over-large cannons in the wing roots:




However, I did add a rather complex (for me anyways) main cannon to replace the forward multi-barrel gun:

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

I took the mega-cannons out of the wing roots as well, but went one step further and removed the wing gattling guns as well. I have left the chin gattler in place because a) I cant be arsed making a copy of your cannon, and b) because animating a gattling gun is always more fun. They look so kick-ass you cant beat them on a fighter for conveying power. Nice work though, more detail on a model is always better.

Tomorrow morning I'll post an animation using both the P38 and the big cruiser. Should be about 8 seconds long and in 720p HD format, assuming it works on Youtube. I've just spent an hour setting it up and it'll take about 6 hours to render.

[Grahf: Seeker Of Power]

Sweet.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

As promised...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eyi6KH5eHK8

It's 720p HD but it takes Youtube a while to process it, so it looks very dark and grainy right now. I'm hoping that will sort itself once the processing is done. I lightened the original source animation to try and compensate, but we'll see how it turns out. Took me ages to find and edit sound files as well. If you look close you can see the turrets on the big ships tracking about as well, although I didn't go the whole hog and have them firing. Yet.

[Grahf: Seeker Of Power]

Could you do a favor for me? Could you post up a 5-view orthographic picture of the cruiser for me all textured and rendered?

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

No problem, when I'm free tonight I'll knock that out for you.

I'm annoyed at how dark the video has come out on Youtube after processing, I'll lighten it up and try to replace it.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

...and here it is, one ortho style layout.

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4005/455 ... 7dc9_o.jpg

The only things I'd pick you up for when trying to work with this are the gun designs and the vents. The small guns are relatively ok, but the big ones look like they fire ancient cannon balls. The size of the barrels on those things is enormous compared to the size of the gun turret, and in animations and pictures I'd have to make sure you cant see right down one or you'd see it's just a tube ending in a black wall. What are they actually meant to fire, projectiles or energy beams or energy packets? If it were beams I'd expect a different design, less cannon and more waveguide, or at least to have detail in those huge barrels to show they're not just tubes. Also there's no way I can elevate the guns, they're stuck firing on one plane unless the ship rolls.

Also the missile launchers front and rear, again those are some huge holes to be putting in your ship models. The upper ones that look like a submarine launch system are probably the correct scale, but the front and rear ones could launch fighers, but look the wrong shape. Again it's painfully obvious up close that they're just huge holes going nowhere.

Likewise with the vents on the front and side. You can get away with it on small models like the fighter (to a certain extent), but on the big models where you will be getting up close to them in pictures and animations you cant have big blocky detail like that without good reason. You can have vents and structures, but they cant just be 3 large blocks with nothing in there when you get close. Make the vents much thinner and detailed, or add structures and fins inside them to indicate more mechanical stuff going on. The small vent details cut into the sides at the rear look great, but the big ones at the front look odd. Get too close and it's obvious the big ship has no more polygons that the small ships flying past.

Your designs look fantastic from a distance, but if you're going to make big models you need to install fine detail to make them work. Fighters and so forth can get away with relatively few polys, but not large detailed models. The more detail and thought you put into the design, the closer you can get to it without the illusion breaking down.

[Grahf: Seeker Of Power]

Unfortunately, detail like that is not my strong point. I don't like excessive detailing, like say something from star wars, with tons of vents and tubes and other things sticking out. To me it seems counterintuitive to have such fragile and potentially vital structures so exposed. You look at modern naval warship design and the hulls are very clean and other than radar equipment its relatively clean on the exterior. I'm not into realism wank but I just don't that kind of eye for detail on that level.

Part of the problem also lies in the program itself. If you pack too much detail into it the whole program slows down to a great degree. If you have any ideas on different kinds of turrets feel free to exchange them in. I'm not really concerned with copyright or it being totally my design, I just want to make cool looking ships that aren't completely improbable looking.

As for weapons, the turrets are more than likely some kind of rail gun or coil gun: some kind of electro magnetic acceleration weapon. I want to add in some CIWS type defenses to supplement the medium turrets. The big turret I have no idea, maybe some extreme range directed energy weapon. Shoot me some ideas/models/sketches and I'll try and figure something out...........oh and by the way, the freiken video is sick, you have no idea how long I've been waiting to see some of my own designs moving around and doing cool stuff.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

I can believe the bit about the models slowing down, they're way more massive than stuff in Lightwave or 3D Studio. Your 6Mb model of the cruiser had something like 65,000 polygons and several times more points. Once converted properly it works out at something like 3000 polygons and about 300k in size, which is not much more than a low-poly game model. If it makes such a meal of a simple model it must be well hard to make something high detail.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

OK, Mr Grahf sent me another model to try out, the 'Akon'. I'd not seen it before, and when I converted it the thing just screams ANIME! I therefore gave it some bold colours and shiny metal, and even did a couple of cel-shaded renders of it. First off here's the converted model in normal mode...

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4061/455 ... a02c_o.jpg

and here are a couple of cel-shaded pictures. For those not in the know, by cel-shading I mean the 3D program applies a filter to make things look like cartoons. It's used in Futurama, Family Guy, etc, etc to blend in with hand drawn stuff. I haven't really tweaked it here, just the basics...

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3018/455 ... 8bf6_o.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3302/455 ... cecc_o.jpg

let me know what you think.

[Grahf: Seeker Of Power]

Actually, it is from an anime: Gall Force Eternal Story.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

Damn! The first colour I used for it was blue. I should have stuck with it.

[Grahf: Seeker Of Power]

Took your advice and started revising my weapons design. I removed the horizontal missile tubes front and rear. I started work on a new turret. Completed the basic form of the barrel itself with some decent detail inside. Right now it is using the chassis of the old turret until I can think of something better:

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

Very nice, looks much better. It still looks like an obvious big gun, but is clearly something futuristic and not a blunderbuss. You've also got an obvious way to add elevation too, although it looks like it might not take much angle for the rear of the guns to foul the hull. Still a vast improvement on the old design. Designing a good looking, viable turret is not the easiest thing to do, but you've given it a great shot.

[salm]

Do you have a cel shader that can do the ink outlines? I know it can be a nuissance to set up but it would look dramatically better if the cel shaded versions had ink.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

There are better cel shaders, but they cost. I'm pretty sure I can get it to work better, but I have to spend ages tweaking the settings to get it look right, and you have to do it for every surface on the model.

[salm]

Eh, too bad. It´s probably not worth the effort then. The cel shader integrated in Max is a piece of crap, too and everything decent costs.

[Grahf: Seeker Of Power]

Kenny, I was wondering if you are feeling ambitious? I have a model that's pretty big and detailed (for me). You up for it?

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

Send it over, it cant hurt to look.

[Grahf: Seeker Of Power]

Second turret revision: completely redesigned the emitter and the chassis for the turret. Thoughts?

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

Looking very good, much more like it.