Imperial 528's Starship Thread [No 56k]

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

Those scenes are just quickly stuck together to show the look of the thing. The finished animation will be much longer and edited together with a bit more finesse. This is just a scene from the beginning and end of the animation.

[Imperial528]

Hi there dude. Thought you would like to know that I started making a little animation showing off a couple of models I made based on the old 80's space trading game, Elite. The Cobra MkIII ship from the game drops out of hyperspace near a planet, then flies in and docks with the classic Elite space station. The final product will probably be about 3 or 4 minutes long. Here's a taster of a couple of scenes spliced together...

<snip video>

I thought I'd spice it up by having the little trading ship fly past some ships on the way in to the planet, so I made a Python and a couple of other simple Elite ships. What i really wanted to do though, was to have it fly past a couple of improbably huge spaceships or battleships as well, just to get a Star Wars style flypast. The first one I thought of was the Warlord of yours, a version of which I host on my model website. I haven't animated the scene yet, I plan to have it fly past 2 of them and I spent an hour last night sticking about 40 lights on it to give it scale, but I did render a still to test the look. Here it is...

<snip image>

Man, wow that is good. I'm assuming that the planet in the video is a background, not rendered? The render of the Warlord is amazing as well.

I just dropped by to let you know, and now I see you're really starting to kick ass with the models. If you have any you think are worth sharing with the world, drop me a line and I'll host a couple on my website for folks to download and use in their own animations and pictures. I trawled Deviant Art the other day and the models turn up in quite a few peoples work.

I can dig around my hard disks for things I could clean up and show you, since some models I haven't posted here.
Atm though I am working on preping the hard-sci dreadnought for importing into 3DS max for some proper rendering. It's been a pain, especially since I have to explode almost every component except for those I want animated, so that the ship doesn't appear as several hundred objects in max. In the process it has gone from being a 5mb file to being almost 75mb in size, and it just gets harder to work with the closer I get to completion.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

Actually, the planet in that shot is a model, not a background. I will pre-render the backdrop for some of the shots though, i have to make an effort to reduce rendering times with so many lights and stuff in the scenes.

I cant handle .max files, but if you can send me your ship in .obj, .3ds or even just the sketchup version i can convert it to Lightwave and stick it in a scene. With a load of little lights on it you'll really get the sense of scale.

[Imperial528]

I sent you the .skp, because when I tried to convert it to .obj (I was using a more solid version of it in 3dsmax) the program crashed.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

Eek, that's a big bugger. Every time I try to load it in and convert it the damn thing is crashing before I can split it into pieces and fix it. Can you do me a favour and chop it into 3 or 4 parts and save them separately? I should be able to convert it much more easily then, and then re-assemble it as a layered model after I'm done. Use axeman3d(a)gmail.com as the mail address, that kennyscrap one is rarely used. Ta.

[Imperial528]

I sent you a simpler version, one that successfully exported to .obj format. In max it's only 49mb instead of over 200mb, as the last one was.

[Imperial528]

Here is a render of an acceleration burn I made:


It's small because imageshack won't let my iPod view the full size.

EDIT: Link to fullsize render, because it's huge.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

Thanks for that, it worked a lot better and I was able to get the conversion started. Lots of errors to fix, and of course no real surface imformation made it through, so it will take a while to set up.

[Imperial528]

I can send you the .skp, to see if that works better.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

It doesn't really matter, the problem starts once its in Lightwave. It comes across with all the points unwelded, creating millions of points and eating memory. I run the auto-weld tool and it merges points that share the same space, getting it down to a manageable level and turning it into an object rather than millions of separate polygons. It also comes across as triangles, but Lightwave can handle any flat shape regardless of points, so I run a 'reduce polygon' tool on it to get rid of more than 3/4's of the polygons. It gets it down to a manageable size, but you get polygon errors all over the place. I can run tools to fix a lot of it, but in the end i have to go in manually and sort the remaining problems. I'm getting used to it.

[Imperial528]

Is that related to why the texture detail didn't make it?

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

Yeah, very little gets through. It has 8 different materials on it after transfer, and 1 of them is 99% of the ship for some reason. Lightwave uses lots of internally generated fractal textures as well as the usual image textures, so a lot of stuff is lost in translation. It's a pain, but I'd probably redo or tweak the textures anyway even if they'd come through. I wouldn't need to use your metal images, for example, since Lightwave can internally generate that kind of look without needing images that repeat all over.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

More WIP shots of the conversion. The worst of the poly errors have been manually removed (took several hours) but there's still a fair bit to fix. It will never be whole, too many polys mangled in the translation and deletion, but it will stand up to mid range shots pretty well. I've only just begun the texturing process, just some work on the solar panels and a quick hull texture...

[Imperial528]

Very nice, I love the textures.

Although there's one issue. I really love the solar panel texture you have, but the large flat surfaces that come off of the engines are in fact radiators, not solar panels. Only the rectangular panels along the forward stalk are solar panels.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

I wondered if they were radiators or not, what with them being in a fixed position. I saw the image texture for a basic solar panel and I thought I'd do this just in case. How about I redo them with a copper or gold texture instead? Both are superb heatsinks/reflectors. If you like I could rebuild the wings and give them ribs to add to the surface area a bit and look a little less like solar panels.

Also, on the main ship itself, what are your thoughts on the look. Do you want it shiny and white like Nasa stuff, or grungy like a huge old space hulk? Some of the guys who saw it on Flickr thought grungy suited best, but its your call.

Another thought occurs to me regarding the panels. How about I do a version with the rediators mounted above/below the engine pods, rather than to the sides? It would add a bit of height to the ship, make it look a bit more 3D rather than the flat layout it is now. I could even hinge them so it could be animated deploying them before/after engine use. They could fold flat when in battle, giving cover to the engines themselves.

[Imperial528]

Go for it with the radiators, I had made them flat for the sake of simplicity, but that was when the model was still very large.

As for the textures, could you do a render with both setups? It would make sense, because for the universe I designed this ship for, some ships would be brand-spanking new, whilst others could be centuries old, yet all following the same design pattern.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

How about a texture like this one I applied to a satellite weapon I made a while back? The wings were supposed to be radiators for the weapon.

http://www.kennyscrap.com/thumbnails/killersat.jpg

[Imperial528]

It appears I can't access the image. (403 Forbidden error) Might be my school's network.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

killersat by axeman3d, on Flickr

[Imperial528]

Oh yes, that texture would work very well.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

How about this for a first try at placement? I quite like them in this position, so they could fold down out of the way against the wing. I think you could go short & wide like this, or tall & thin? Suggestions? I've also started separating out the other parts so I can put textures on them later. It will take a while as everything is connected intricately with everything else.

[Knife]

That new design is very impressive.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

Hmm, thought I'd posted these last night but no sign of my post. Ah well, here we go then. This is the start of me lighting the thing, creating a scene I can load in to any scene so that the ship will appear complete with running lights. Still got a long way to go on the texturing though, but I enjoy trying to figure out lighting and wanted to see what it would look like.

I'm also toying with the idea of maybe doing a different version of the radiators. How about 4 or 6 tall, thin radiators on either side, a bit like the Babylon 5 station had? They could still fold down out of the way for combat, giving some protection to the power generation area.

[Knife]

Funny you should mention B5 cause the ship gives me a proto-B5 feel.

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

Yup. It looks like what Earthforce would build if they tried to make a Big Fucking Space Gun. I think you're gonna need bigger radiators.