Earth Heavy cruiser WIP update-about done.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2004-06-21 05:09pm

http://www.broken-llama.com/images/ship2/
Modeled in blender and rendered in Povray, via povanim.

Any improvements that could be made? I'd like to keep that "stealth" look though (final will be colored black or dark gray).

Rough Dimensions:
41.25 m in height at thickest section including turret
77.25 m in width at engines
233.2 m in length

Armament:
6 1500mm torpedoes (max length 18m long)
12X light anti-fighter/bomber lasers
2X heavy anti-fighter/bomber/corvette laser, or 2X railguns firing Pu shells designed to go critical on impact on some variants.

Propulsion:
4X Ion/ Engines (two in both directions per pod)
4X Warp coils (surrounding engines in pods).

Power:
4X Fusion reactors

Armor:
Not much, since once shields are down, nukes will fry ship. Sufficient to protect against 2 minutes of continuous heavy laser fire- in other words, don't bother hitting with laser fire.

Crew:
50

Shielding
Should be able to withstand 2 good torpedo hits at 90°- due to heavy sloping at the front, much more- about 10. Some torpedoes can be shot down, but this requires active radar illumination

Sensors
High res short wavelength diffuse radar emitter in nose as well as high power radar sensor in nose- each turret has it's own narrow beam, low powered radar for anti-fighter/bomber purposes (usually turned off, as the idea is to use the main radar and hit the thing before it gets to the ship.

What are good values for acceleration and mass (no mass lightening technology, trying to make it semi-hard sci-fi except for FTL/forcefields/gravity manipulation internally, and maybe fuel storage)?

Also, what are good values for torpedo capacity (probably ships in combat to load torpedoes), torpedo strength, laser power, and anything else not listed?

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2004-06-22 05:23pm

http://www.broken-llama.com/images/ship ... nished.png

Added some massive thrusters, some fixes to mesh, and shiny black texture.
Cleaned up mesh and redid torpedo tubes manually- Blender's CSG sucks badly.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2004-06-25 04:10am

About done, since I can't do texturing. Torpedo exhaust added in during postprocessing with Gimp, since I don't know how to do any flame or plasma effects with Blender for static images.

http://www.broken-llama.com/images/ship4/ship.jpg

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2004-06-25 04:35pm

*groans* Yet another thread started by me which nobody gives a damn.

Jordie · Post by **Jordie** » 2004-06-25 04:38pm

The design's pretty bland, when you start adding more detail to it, people will probably take notice.

salm · Post by **salm** » 2004-06-25 07:35pm

why do you render in povray and not in blender?

Evil Sadistic Bastard · Post by **Evil Sadistic Bastard** » 2004-06-25 11:05pm

The details are one, and you might want to compare its size to something else.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2004-06-25 11:17pm

salm wrote:why do you render in povray and not in blender?

I can't figure out how to get high res images in blender, and I think povray render better. Also, what details are you thinking of? Keep in mind the shapes should resemble an F-117 (highly angular, pretty clean). Windows will not be added (stupid for a space ship when you can add camera in tiny domes(there's two, one in front of each large turret)). Probably need to add loading doors and some battle damage. Too busy, will do sometime in August.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2004-06-26 12:53am

Evil Sadistic Bastard wrote:The details are one, and you might want to compare its size to something else.

Torpedo is huge- 1.5 M in diameter.

Bob McDob · Post by **Bob McDob** » 2004-06-26 10:32am

Has promise, but not much more than a hull right now.

DarkFlite · Post by **DarkFlite** » 2004-06-26 09:52pm

Without a frame of reference, its just a low-poly model, not much to comment on until its more developed.

If is this is a low-poly mesh for a video game, it might be a just right.

You mentioned that this is a supposed to be a stealthed craft, you might be interested in checking out the contest we just finished with over at Spacebattles, to design a stealth ship of any type.

http://kier.3dfrontier.com/forums/showt ... hp?t=66740
http://kier.3dfrontier.com/forums/showt ... hp?t=64916

I like the idea that the ship is designed to fight like a sub, evading enemy sensors - although I'm not too keen on Torps myself for various reasons.

Pu-239 wrote:
Evil Sadistic Bastard wrote:The details are one, and you might want to compare its size to something else.
Torpedo is huge- 1.5 M in diameter.

Just wanted to see what the ship would look like if it was smoothed out a bit, so I took a quick shot at remodeling it on my Puter.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2004-06-27 05:24pm

DarkFlite wrote:Without a frame of reference, its just a low-poly model, not much to comment on until its more developed.

If is this is a low-poly mesh for a video game, it might be a just right.

You mentioned that this is a supposed to be a stealthed craft, you might be interested in checking out the contest we just finished with over at Spacebattles, to design a stealth ship of any type.

http://kier.3dfrontier.com/forums/showt ... hp?t=66740
http://kier.3dfrontier.com/forums/showt ... hp?t=64916

I like the idea that the ship is designed to fight like a sub, evading enemy sensors - although I'm not too keen on Torps myself for various reasons.

Pu-239 wrote:
Evil Sadistic Bastard wrote:The details are one, and you might want to compare its size to something else.
Torpedo is huge- 1.5 M in diameter.
http://www.darkflite.tv/july/june01.jpg
http://www.darkflite.tv/july/june02.jpg
Just wanted to see what the ship would look like if it was smoothed out a bit, so I took a quick shot at remodeling it on my Puter.

It is for use in a game demo that I'm making for my summer assignment.

Is there anyone who uses Blender for high-poly work? It's rather inconvenient to have to manually align things by zooming all the way in.

You made a mesh that fast already? It took me quite awhile to do mine, because of lots of manual vertices/face editing and merging. Blender doesn't provide a clean way to cut holes, align surfaces, etc.

I uploaded the mesh here:
http://www.broken-llama.com/images/ship4/

Also, if you render shining a light from the front, very little actually gets reflected back, so the stealth looks like it might actually work from the front. Engines are a problem though, but you can solve that with RAM. Actually, the stealth shape isn't as important, if at all, since you can coat the whole ship in thick layers of RAM, since weight is not as much as an issue. Sides, less so, and top and bottom, maybe rear, not at all- weapons work best from front and sides anyway. Top and bottom weakness requires attention to the Z axis in combat- enemies may slip around radar range and fly straight down, where the effect of shielding is also weaker due to lack of sloping and the ship's stealth is nonexistant.

DarkFlite · Post by **DarkFlite** » 2004-06-27 11:04pm

My version of your ship only took a little while (during game yesterday) cause I used a few tricks to speed things up. But mostly because I already knew what it was supposed to look like, and I had your other-views as a reference.

I started with a simple box object, then extreded the lenght a few times to match the segmentation in your hull. (Six or seven longitutal segments.) From there it was quick work to scale the various intersections to get the basic shape.

I sliced the model in half, and created a symetry object so I wouldn't have to repeat any steps. I'm not sure what Blender has for symetry, but its a fairly basic tool and it saves a tone of time. Based on the DXF of your model, I didn't see any slice down the middle so I'm guessing you didn't use anything to mirror the left/right sides.

With extrude and bevel, the engines popped out pretty quick.

I chose not to include the launching tubes for the torps, since that would have used a boolean tool. (Also, the ones I could see were barely visible, so they didn't seem relevant.) Since you are shooting for a low-poly model, I'd redesign the launchers as objects that stuck out a bit instead of recessed holes -

If the details are too small or inobvious chences are you are better to either enlage them so they have a real impact - or just remove them altogether since they aren't adding to the overall design.

Other than general tips I can't help much since I don't use Blender. However the Blender site has some great tutorials on it. Check those out for tips.

I sketch the model I'm currently working on to develop details when I'm away from the Puter. I'm a lousy freehand artist, but drawing out the ship and experimenting with the shapes is a big help - I always have new ideas when I get back to the model.

Keep plugign away, I'm sure that you'll have all sorts of new ideas after you work through a few of those blender tutorials.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2004-06-28 03:12am

DarkFlite wrote:My version of your ship only took a little while (during game yesterday) cause I used a few tricks to speed things up. But mostly because I already knew what it was supposed to look like, and I had your other-views as a reference.

I started with a simple box object, then extreded the lenght a few times to match the segmentation in your hull. (Six or seven longitutal segments.) From there it was quick work to scale the various intersections to get the basic shape.

I sliced the model in half, and created a symetry object so I wouldn't have to repeat any steps. I'm not sure what Blender has for symetry, but its a fairly basic tool and it saves a tone of time. Based on the DXF of your model, I didn't see any slice down the middle so I'm guessing you didn't use anything to mirror the left/right sides.

With extrude and bevel, the engines popped out pretty quick.

I chose not to include the launching tubes for the torps, since that would have used a boolean tool. (Also, the ones I could see were barely visible, so they didn't seem relevant.) Since you are shooting for a low-poly model, I'd redesign the launchers as objects that stuck out a bit instead of recessed holes -

If the details are too small or inobvious chences are you are better to either enlage them so they have a real impact - or just remove them altogether since they aren't adding to the overall design.

Other than general tips I can't help much since I don't use Blender. However the Blender site has some great tutorials on it. Check those out for tips.

I sketch the model I'm currently working on to develop details when I'm away from the Puter. I'm a lousy freehand artist, but drawing out the ship and experimenting with the shapes is a big help - I always have new ideas when I get back to the model.

Keep plugign away, I'm sure that you'll have all sorts of new ideas after you work through a few of those blender tutorials.

Thanks for the tips. I'll leave the details in though, since when I have time I'll add on more stuff for renders, and for gaming purposes one should be able to zoom in or fly close for bombing runs- see the S wishlist in G&C for the general idea: http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?t=46689

Most of it is completely wank, since apparently people are all working on their own projects. However, I at least want to make a small demo to practice, and have something to show for over the summer- something along the lines of shoot the stationary ship, have shield section shimmer/change color, ship blows to pieces, etc.