StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Check this out!

I've never downloaded anything like this before. Do I have to own Lightwave, or 3d Studio to see it?

Yes, you do have to have some sort of 3-d software to view a 3-d file. Now, I know there are some free viewers for some formats, so you might want to look around on google or something, but I can't help you past that.
Not a bad piece of work at all, but strictly amature-level.

if you want to view 3DS files for example you can get gmax for free at

http://www.discreet.com/products/gmax/

you won´t be able to render pictures from it though since gmax does not come woth a renderer.

Alan Bolte wrote:Not a bad piece of work at all, but strictly amature-level.

I wish I was that 'Amateur' at making interiors, it's a hell of a piece of work.

I wouldn't even attempt viewing this file in a viewer, if I remember rightly the zip file itself is about 15 meg and I've yet to see a model viewer that did any model like this any justice. In order to see it properly you would have to load this into Lightwave and render a few stills or animations showing it off to best effect. Half the atmosphere and look of the thing will be in the lighting and texturing, something viewers tend to ignore or cut down on, so unless you've got access to Lightwave I dont think you're going to see it to best effect. I would think a decent render of something this complex might take me several hours per still picture at 1024 x 768, but I'd have to download it and try to be sure.

Kenny_10_Bellys wrote:I wish I was that 'Amateur' at making interiors, it's a hell of a piece of work.

Agreed completely.

I wouldn't even attempt viewing this file in a viewer, if I remember rightly the zip file itself is about 15 meg and I've yet to see a model viewer that did any model like this any justice. In order to see it properly you would have to load this into Lightwave and render a few stills or animations showing it off to best effect. Half the atmosphere and look of the thing will be in the lighting and texturing, something viewers tend to ignore or cut down on, so unless you've got access to Lightwave I dont think you're going to see it to best effect. I would think a decent render of something this complex might take me several hours per still picture at 1024 x 768, but I'd have to download it and try to be sure.

Yow. So, for instance, even if you own Lightwave, you can't "walk the halls" of the Falcon, just render certain pictures?

In the layout view of Lightwave all you will see is either a wireframe representation of the mesh or am openGL preview with very low detail textures, and then only if I have a lot of system memory. To see it in it's full glory you have to light the scene (probably comes with a complete scene for this anyway) and then press the render button. That works out where the light rays go, reflections, glows, high detail textures, etc etc and gives you the finished product. That's how half the current Star Wars films are made and animated, with meshes and millions of frames of still pictures sown together to make a movie. I could do an animation walking the halls of the Falcon no problem, but it might have to render overnight or for a day or two for it to be more than a couple of seconds long and at a decent resolution. I'll download it and do it if you like, we'll see how detailed the model really is.

Question, Kenny... would it be possible to automatically have a rendering program simplify the models and then render the whole thing as a Quake 3 level or something? It'd be cool to make a deathmatch level of some hangar with the Falcon sitting in the middle... make for some interesting firefights.

It's not something for an automatic program, but yes, you can convert models into game models by using conversion programs. Most games models are made in software like Lightwave and then imported into the games own 3D format using conversion software written for the job, usually supplied in the games SDK or on their website.

I've made many models for games, or had people ask permission to use them when they converted them thereselves, but there is an art to it. The model must not only conform to all the standards demanded by the games engine, you also have to make it as low-poly as possible so that the game runs at a decent speed. Modern games can handle 1000+ polys per character now, whereas Quake gagged if a guy was more than 250 polys.

I have a model of the Falcon i can use for mid to fairly close shots in animations or pictures, but it's 100,000+ polys plus dozens of image maps. To use it in something like UT2003 it would have to be reduced to a couple of 1000 with one or two image maps making up all the detail, which is where the skill comes in. There are plugins commercially available now that will 'bake' a model and texture down into one easy image map so you can wrap it round a low poly version and it still looks good from mid-range.