Poll

What's the best Orion out there?

The classic Volition model.
6 (6.7%)
Bobboau's original remodeling.
5 (5.6%)
Galemp's bold remapping.
69 (76.7%)
I never liked the Orion anyway...
10 (11.1%)

Total Members Voted: 73

Voting closed: October 10, 2005, 03:49:19 am

Author Topic: The Ultimate Orion  (Read 32350 times)

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Offline Galemp

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Not always... some judicious dividing of polies and edges, turning edges, and negative-dimension extrusions could do it. It takes more time but you end up with cleaner geometry, and you have more control.
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Offline TrashMan

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Depends on how and where you use booleans..

I sometimes cut and add lines manually, but I very often use booleans (of course, I prepare the both objects before hte process)
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Offline aldo_14

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Quote
Originally posted by StratComm
All of the little cutouts and depressions would have made use of booleans, IIRC.  And that Orion had a ton of those.


Nope.  Plenty of tools; extrude, shrink shape, for example.  Or create the object and manually create joining polys between it and the hull (after deleting the 'holding' poly).  Or slice, or use the editable poly tools to subdivide edges.

Loads of different ways.  I've not used a boolean in literally years; not using max atall, and only in TS to create debris from my blender-origin models.

 

Offline StratComm

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It's the circle-out-of-square cutouts that present the challenge, and that I was really refering to.  Ryx's Orion has a ton of those, and to the best of my knowledge there's only two good ways to go about doing them.  One is the method you described, which is manually creating the connecting faces.  The other is Booleans.  And given that those types of polys account for maybe 30% of all polys on a region where they are employed, and the render-quality level that Ryx was going for, the amount of work to do it correctly vastly exceeds the drawbacks of using Booleans.  As long as they work.
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Last edited by StratComm on 08-23-2027 at 08:34 PM

 

Offline Black Wolf

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Does anyone know why Slice (or boolean for that matter) in Max insists on creating all those seemingly random vertices all the way along your new edge?
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Offline mikhael

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Quote
Originally posted by StratComm
It's the circle-out-of-square cutouts that present the challenge, and that I was really refering to.  Ryx's Orion has a ton of those, and to the best of my knowledge there's only two good ways to go about doing them.  One is the method you described, which is manually creating the connecting faces.  The other is Booleans.  


I don't know. I used to use booleans to do that too, and just accepted the hellish geometry. Then I tried the manual faces thing. Now I just create the shape offset from the surface its going to be connected to and just loft a bridge. Perfect, clean geometry, all of three mouse clicks. Between that and the stencil/slice/tunnel/core, the drawbacks of booleans by far outweight the speed.
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Offline StratComm

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Quote
Originally posted by Black Wolf
Does anyone know why Slice (or boolean for that matter) in Max insists on creating all those seemingly random vertices all the way along your new edge?


Because Max can only boolean on triangulated surfaces.  Those random vertices correspond to the division lines on 4+ sided faces as Max defines them, which can be pretty arbitrary.
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Last edited by StratComm on 08-23-2027 at 08:34 PM

 

Offline Boomer

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Holy ****!

*bows down before the beauty of this ship*

Galemp, THIS is an Orion.

Particularly to me.  While I liked Bobboau's original, I always felt that is was the texturing that made the orion special not the model.  You have truly proven that point here.  

(although the cargo textures are a little out of place...)

but that's an easy fix.

But keep it up!:D
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Offline FireCrack

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Beyond exquisite!

But it still needs proper turrets.
actualy, mabye not.
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Offline StratComm

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Are these any better?






The difference being of course that the girders no longer contain black backgrounds and don't show up as much.  I'm still not quite 100% satisfied with the texture, but it's better enough for me to accept this Orion into the fleet.  I've also added in the blue runway lights that can be seen in FS1's cb_galatea.ani, though I doubt anyone would notice this change.
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Last edited by StratComm on 08-23-2027 at 08:34 PM

 

Offline BlackDove

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I just had an orgasm.

 

Offline StratComm

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Now with added blue-girder goodness!

I added a Bastion and Galatea model, so now the main campaign and the port can have the same model for the "special" Orions as for the generic ones.  I also made a proper white glow, rather than using the sun glow, and included all of the glows on the off chance someone doesn't have them.  And, most importantly, I matched the Max_POF_Radius with the original Orion one, so now it will actually jump in at the correct location and with the correct timing so it's truely drop-and-go.
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Last edited by StratComm on 08-23-2027 at 08:34 PM

 

Offline Goober5000

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Quote
Originally posted by StratComm
I've also added in the blue runway lights that can be seen in FS1's cb_galatea.ani
Are they animated? :)

 

Offline StratComm

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If by animated, you mean that they flow down the runway, then yes.  How else would I do it?  I already had the spacing worked out because of the way that I did them on the old conversion of Bob's Orion (which became very obsolete when GE remapped the runway) so all I had to do was slide the coordinates over.

Though I'm really just impressed that someone actually recognised what I was talking about.
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Last edited by StratComm on 08-23-2027 at 08:34 PM

 

Offline WMCoolmon

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:shaking:

Blue runway lights...high-poly goodness.

Need more screenies!
-C

 

Offline Goober5000

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Quote
Originally posted by StratComm
Though I'm really just impressed that someone actually recognised what I was talking about.
That was the first thing I wanted when animated textures were implemented.  I didn't know until know that someone had actually done it. :)

 

Offline StratComm

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Oh, it's unfortunately not an animated texture.  The same issue applies to this orion that has to every instance before it; the runway map is used in a thousand places across the ship and animating it would make the whole thing look like a disco.  Never mind the fact that the map is tiled, so that wouldn't work anyway.  If GE wants to reconvert it with the capacity to do that (one planar map on the runway of the exact dimensions of the textured area and a unique texture), then I'm all for throwing together the animation.  But for now I've implimented it as the same sequence of glowpoints as you see in that animation, though without the ambient glow that they cast there.
« Last Edit: September 16, 2005, 09:36:30 pm by 570 »
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Last edited by StratComm on 08-23-2027 at 08:34 PM

 

Offline BlackDove

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Hmm

An Orion Disco.

Welcome to... potential short campaigns.

 

Offline Vasudan Admiral

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Been done already...sorta :p
And may I add: well done to Bob and Galemp and more recently StratComm!
You've combined a brilliant high detail model with incredibly well used textures. I really love how complex it looks now - really gives an ISD sense of scale to the behemoth. :) :yes:
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Offline Trivial Psychic

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Hey VA, what's the news on your HTL release?
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