[Black Wolf]

If you’ve read the “Introductory Thread” You might understand the gist of this project. If not, I’ll summarize it very briefly here. What I want to try is a co-operative approach to FS modding, to see what happens if a whole lot of people contribute just a small part to a single project. Will it turn out to be a mess of different styles and ideas, or will people complement eachother, smooth over mistakes, fix errors and generally produce something half way decent. I honestly don’t know. That’s why we’re experimenting.

The process is like this. I’ve attached a very small fragment of a model. And I do mean very small. It’s 140 polies. I don’t want to overly influence the design of the ship. I want it to grow, organically, and see what we produce. As such, my piece can go on almost any part of a ship – it can be a big, major detail or it can be a small greeble. That’ll be mostly up to the first few designers.


This is how it’s going to work. I’ve posted the first piece. Whoever wants to claim the next stage does so by posting his intent on this thread. You then have two hours to post your modifications. No more. If two hours have past and there’s no new submission, whoever wants to claim it can have it from the last properly submitted piece. I know this is a short amount of time, but that’s deliberate and there are a lot of advantages. Principally, it keeps the process from getting bogged down with one person holding onto the model for hours, or even days, without needing someone to decide how long is too long. This way the forum clock regulates everything. Also, this way people from different timezones will get a chance to access the model, since there’ll be nobody holding it overnight. Moreover, it means that no one individual will have much of a chance to do too much to the model – it keeps it a group project, with no one individuals vision having too much bearing.

Anyway, once you’ve volunteered and completed your modifications, upload the model using the forums attachment system, post your edit number (the last number plus one) and if possible put up a pic somewhere as well. This isn’t absolutely essential for every little modification, but it’d be nice to keep people appraised. Please, only upload in a widely recognized format - 3ds or cob are good examples of such, and please, zip files only. I know other programs have better compression, but I don't want to have to hunt down some obscure program just to open someone's archive. Anyway, the next person to volunteer starts the cycle over again, following the same rules (first in best dressed, two hour limit etc. etc.).

Some Guidelines:

Please, only volunteer if you’re at least somewhat experienced with 3d modelling. I’m not trying to be elitist here – it’s just new modellers tend to make serious mesh errors, and fixing errors isn’t going to be on anybody’s priority list when they’re on such a strict time budget. As such, errors are inevitably going to end up piling up and up, leaving us with a final mesh that’s so full of bugs that fixing it would take more time than building it took. The only way to prevent this is to not make the mistakes in the first place, and the only way to do that is to be experienced. I’m not saying you have to be at Aldo or Nico’s level, but you will need to be competent. I’m sorry if that restricts people, but that’s the way it has to be. Practice up, and if things go well, maybe you can get involved in the next one .

Secondly, be aware that you’re involved in a cooperative process. Editing people’s work is fine – tweak away until your heart’s content (of course, this also means you have to be willing to have your work tweaked) but try not to completely eliminate someone’s contributions (although I expect the early stuff to be severley morphed by the time the final product rolls off the line). Also, try not to overdominate the design – some modellers (I’m looking at you, tempest ) can do a lot in two hours, but that doesn’t neccesarily mean that you should. Try to let everyone contribute without your vision dominating too much. The point of the project is cooperation and experimentation – we can always model a ship entirely to our own satisfaction at a later date. At the same time, sometimes people are going to have to take bold steps and really do large scale work. It’s a matter, I suppose, of striking a happy medium and editing other peoples stuff if you don’t like it.

Thirdly, we are building a HTL ship here, so don’t feel overly constrained by polycount. That’s not a license to waste polies, but nobody’s going to snap at you for greebling here and there, so don’t worry.

Finally, I’ve deliberately defined the species, class and name of the ship. The ship is terran because Terran ships are the easiest to make, it’s a corvette because that puts it square in the middle of the combat food chain, and it’s been pre named something fairly neutral to head off inevitable arguments down the line. These aren’t going to change, so please don’t try. Otherwise, go nuts . The project will end when people lose interest, or after an arbitrary number of edits. At the moment, I’m setting that at 50, but that will be reviewed as we approach it.

One note before we start – I suspect I’m going to cop a little flak from the non modellers around here. Initially, I was going to go for two threads, one for modelling and one for FREDding, but I’ve decided to see how this one goes before tackling FREDding, which is going to be a very much more complex, given the difficulty of understanding someone else’s sexp tree. But I have high hopes .


Anyway, Edit Number = 0. Let’s go


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[akenbosch]

all my exports will be .obj or .x because my .3ds export is buggy. is this okay?

edit: a samll update too the model. part 0 is now part is the top! the sides move outward, and there are many good places for turrets on this one piece. remember, im nothing close to a detail-lord. i just added more shape.

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[Hades]

Here, these quite possibly could be the main guns on the ship.
EDIT: They still need some work, but I think that they'd work out fine.
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[akenbosch]

awesome turrets! now can someone do more work on the body?

[Black Wolf]

Dude. Zip.

[Hades]

Ok in zip.

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[Black Wolf]

Rar is one thing, but what's 7z?

[akenbosch]

7-zip
heres a zip





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[Bob-san]

Too bad this project moves so quickly--I do internet stuff on one computer and 3D modeling on another. Maybe I'll claim 2 hours tomorrow to put out a rough idea of what I want to do, then bring it back. Of course that reduces my editing time by ~5-10 minutes, but that's the cost to contribute! Anyways--I'll see back on this tomorrow and see what I can do with it. I'm not a perfect modeler, but adding in basics shouldn't be a problem.

[RazorsKiss]

I'm looking at 272 errors in STL check, for the 1st edit.

We want to look at that, before it goes farther?

Hades' checks out fine, though.

I looked at it, but I stopped, after seeing the errorfest :/

[akenbosch]

it must have been blenders .3ds import. i've seen it screw up geometry before.

[Vasudan Admiral]

OW! 1776 polys in Moscow1?!
Already reduced this down to 488 polys, so now I'll check it out and see about adding some stuff.

This is a really cool idea btw. I'm very interested to see where it ends up.

[Flipside]

Looks interesting, I might have a twiddle myself.

What are you planning to do about the textures?

[Nuke]

cool idea and all but there is the problem of too many cooks in the kitchen.

I'm looking at 272 errors in STL check, for the 1st edit.

We want to look at that, before it goes farther?

Hades' checks out fine, though.

I looked at it, but I stopped, after seeing the errorfest :/

let me set the record straight about that stl check modifyer in max. its useless for determining if a model is buggy for rendering!!!

the stl format is a format designed to store information for stereolithography, which is a rapid prototyping technique which builds a physical model one cross-section at a time in a tank of photopolymer resin. this cures instantly when in contact with a uv laser beam. ime sure you seen this on the discovery channel or durning the intro to 'small soldiers'. the reason this check exists is to determine if a model can undergo this process successfully. problems can occure on any free-floating part of the model. sence the model is drawn bottom to top, you cant create anything thats not connected to something else and support structures need to be added to those parts to hold them up while the rest of the model is being created (theese are also shown in the 'small soldiers' intro). that modifyer exists to help the modeler determine where supports must go. sence 3d models for a game will never be physically need to be helt up while theyre rendered, stl check is useless.

[Vasudan Admiral]

Gah! I'm burning out my creativity drives trying to work out what to do with this peculiar shape. :\
I think I'm gonna ditch the hollow-ness it has and turn it into a more substantial piece of hull. At this stage heavy greebling is a bad idea.

And Nuke - yeah the cooking analogy is right, but it's still an interesting concept that should be given a try I reckon.

[RazorsKiss]

Yeah, I know.  There's more to a model than just rendering, however.

It does do a good job of checking to see whether something has open faces, multiple edges, or the like.

Which, obviously, will be bad for collision detection, no?  Sure seemed to, when I was testing those busted-up max4 Tachyon models

[Nuke]

actually the engine was long ago made capable of running open meshes. sure in the days of retail it was practically a death sentance to make a model with open anything. but ive actually gotten into the practice of using open sub-meshes (not a sub model but an attached unsealed mesh) for things like attaching wings to fuselage. this saves on your poly count and generally makes attaching stuff easyer/faster. ive yet to see any colision failures from using such a model.

[Black Wolf]

Gah! I'm burning out my creativity drives trying to work out what to do with this peculiar shape. :\
I think I'm gonna ditch the hollow-ness it has and turn it into a more substantial piece of hull. At this stage heavy greebling is a bad idea.

Don't be afraid to edit other people's stuff. That's vital to making this work.

[Vasudan Admiral]

It looked like it might have worked, but everything I tried failed, so it's not hollow anymore.

Nearly out of time now. I'll complete the segment I'm working on and upload it.

[Fearless Leader]

somebody anybody post a pic.


please