[Gloriano]

oooK

[Taristin]

[IPAndrews]

Originally posted by SadisticSid
I don't think it looks much better than the original to be honest.

I agree actually. Then again, everyone else seems to like it so the problem must lie with us.

[Fineus]

Keep in mind it's untextured at the moment - and of course it'll adhere to the general design of the original model. The idea is to make it more detailed via re-modelling and retexturing - but it'll still stay true to the original.

[Taristin]

Plus it needs to be smooth-shaded. Facets are ugly.

[Bobboau]

no, it does not need to be smooth shaded. smooth shadeing looks a lot uglier on models it shouldn't be on than flat shadeing does on models that should be smooth shaded

[KARMA]

When I decided to start this model, I immediatly defined as objective to make exactly the same model, with tons of details and minimal differences, so if the model looks very very close to the old fenris, well this is exactly what I wanted it to be.
There are two order of reasons to do so:
The original fenris/leviathan had custom textures not tiled, and those maps are high res and nice looking. (to me, the fenris is one of the best if not the best texture work on a capship of the entire shipset)
There is no reason then to make completely new maps: this could be needed for other ships, but not for the Fenris.
Plus I'm lazy and overbusy, I don't have much time to spend on this, and I already spent too much on the model, so I don't want to have too job to do on the textures (to be honest I hoped to find someone else to do this, so I needed the mapping job to be as easyer as possible obviously).
For these reason I needed a model as much precise as possible to the original model textured, to make it easyer to use the original artwork.
Second order of reasons is how original models should be done. I could have made many changes to the Fenris design, but then we'd have people complaining that it wasn't a fenris anymore.
The Fenris is supposed to be blocky nor I think that just smoothing angles makes a ship looking better, if the design is supposed to be angular, then it must remain angular.
In my opinion to rebuild a model means to make the model as the artits would have done it if they could have used 10 times the polys they effectively used.
The Fenris design is well defined, and I surely could have changed a couple more of thing (expecially in the middle section), but revolutioning the whole concept would led to a fenris refit, rather than just a better Fenris model.

[Taristin]

Originally posted by Bobboau
no, it does not need to be smooth shaded. smooth shadeing looks a lot uglier on models it shouldn't be on than flat shadeing does on models that should be smooth shaded

I dodn't mean complete smooth shading, but rather, just making those pipes look like pipes, rather than hexagonal tubes, and making one face bland ino the others on the same parts, rather than every face reflecting off in it's own way, as the picture shows.


@Karma: You did the job well. and if I could, I'd attempt to cheply UV it too.  *Kicks his dead PC*

[Vasudan Admiral]

i'm giving it a try
no pics yet tho.

[Vasudan Admiral]

bleh, i'll be away for four days starting tomorrow, so i thought i'd post a couple of WIPS now
(they're on geocities btw, so if they don't show, that's the reason )











i havn't done anything on the bits the map won't cover just yet (the sides of the recesses and greebles inside etc), but i want to try and finish the main chunks first.
after that i can go over it and fix the tiny problems, like that blue band not quite matching up

and Karma, you did an excellent job on placing the greebles indeed. most of them line up fairly closely and so only need a slight uv change to get them perfect. awesome job

[KARMA]

ooohhh fancy:)
it works much better that I expected then:)

[Taristin]

Amazering.

[Ulala]

Looks excellent!

[Vasudan Admiral]

ok, finished the main texture sections, now i've just gotta finish adding the trim to the portions not covered by the textures.

only done a couple of bits of trim up front and sides, but hope to do more soon.









(the pics are all from one side because there is no trim at all on the other, but at least some here )

i'm thinking of lightening the colour of the trim on those mechanical recesses in the front, as the black trim seems to hide the fact that they are recessed at all.

so, any suggestions?

[Bobboau]

you know, I'm starting to think the central bit would look better if it had been smoothed out a bit. but too late for that now.

you might want to give it a bright specular map on the metal parts, while keeping them dark in defuse

exelent job texureing it

[Vasudan Admiral]

thanks Bobboau. and i think i'll try that specular map idea. sounds like it will work nicely.

at the suggestion of Black Wolf, i also think i'll add an option to give it a nameplate. all it will be is a square plane just slightly above the surface of the hull. the texture it'self can just be the words against a pure green bg, so in-game only the words appear.

the problem is, i'm not sure where to put it. it can probably go on:

1) the front (on either side) just above the docking port
2) the large blank section the middle tower part (that the second pic shows clearly)
3) the large and nicely flat blank areas on either sides of the engine pod (no pics show this clearly but it's just above that darker recessed areas and below the lights slightly higher up)

i could put the option on all three places as well if needbe.
thoughts?

[KARMA]

it's fantastic!:)
some suggestions:
-below the radar it is supposed to be a secondary bridge, you may add some windows on the recessed parts.
-in my model the recessions of the window on the engine sections is a bit too deep: you may want to reduce it, you should be able to I think, but if not I can do it
-don't forget autofacet shadings
-I don't see in the pics the barrell of the main turret
-spec maps on the mech elements could generate a nice bump-map like effect

again, excellent job!

[Vasudan Admiral]

bah, geocities ran outta bandwidth. i'll switch them to the SG server.

anyways thanx, and in answering the suggestions;
- oops, didn't notice it was a secondary bridge, fixed.
- yep i can reduce the window depth quite easily....done.
- i intend to experiment with the autofacet vs total smooth vs total facet to get the best (although i'm fairly sure it'll be the autofacet anyway )
- hmm......i d/led the first version you posted, and converted to cob, so i assume it's about that time period that it vanished. i'll have to rectify that....i wonder how it escaped in the first place tho
- i'll certainly try that with the spec maps, although they would be the first spec maps made by me, so someone else may want to refine them.

and karma, just wondering if you intend to do any other ships up like this, since this one is VERY well done, and i'd love to try my hand at about any other ship if done in this way

[KARMA]

well, forget about smoothing, since the bobboau's version of pcs (the one with autofacet working), as quite all the olders versions of pcs, doesn't support smoothing, only autofacet.

About the turrett barrel, well that's strange, maybe check the cob I posted earlyer in this thread to get it.

For new models..well many thanks for appreciation, but for a while I'll work only on SW conversion, since it slowed down a bit while I was working on this, and I'm also working on a new ship (but I'm in a creative crisis at the moment, maybe I'll post a WIP for suggestions), so no new revamped vanilla fs2 ships for a while.
Also, the kind of work I did on the fenris details, can be done only on ships textured with unwrapped maps (fighters-like), and it is worth to only if there already are high res maps.
I'd like to work in future -if nobody else will to meanwhile- on the deimos, but considering the way she's textured I'll probably diverge a lot from the original model: I'll not only just add details using the textures as reference, since there aren't textures that can be used for this purpose.

[Taristin]

Originally posted by KARMA
well, forget about smoothing, since the bobboau's version of pcs (the one with autofacet working), as quite all the olders versions of pcs, doesn't support smoothing, only autofacet.

Odd. I get smoothing to work.

It looks excellent VasAd.

Karma... try the Lucifer next

Or better yet, the Faustus. It had HUGE maps in FS1.