[Snail]

Can we see some Covenant ships? Will they be properly smoothed?

[Devrous]

TECH ROOM
Subject: Covenant Ships

Unlike the nice, blocky UNSC ships, which are pretty easy to model as basic shapes, the Covenant ships are, well, A ROYAL PAIN IN THE @#$. They have a lot of curves, and since they are supposed to look sleek, organic, and deadly, it was hard to turn my ideas of what other ship classes may look like into models. Needless to say, I used a lot more polys on these puppies, and I used a cool auto-faceting so the game rendered it as sleek and smooth. Before I found this trick the Covenant ships looked horrible and blocky; I was afraid I’d have to either scratch the Covies or just live with butt-ugly model renders. I’ve made a corvette, frigate, and destroyer based off of the descriptions in the books, as well as taking the basic shapes from the existing capital ships from the Halo games. The battle cruiser and assault carrier were even harder to make. If I deviated too much from the ones shown in the game cutscenes I’d disappoint Halo fans. The Seraph was fun to make, and the U-shaped dropship was actually harder than the dang capital ships. No Phantom as of yet…have you looked at all the curved surfaces on that thing?!?

So, without further adieu, I present to you the Covenant Basic Model Tour. Due to the size of these pictures, I’ve posted only one or two of each as in-page viewable, and the others as links. Enjoy!

Covenant Dropship


Solid
Top
Textured

Covenant Seraph


Solid
Top
Face
Textured

Covenant Corvette


Solid
Front

Covenant Frigate


Solid
Front
Top
Bottom

Covenant Destroyer


Solid
Front
Top
Bottom

Covenant Cruiser


Solid
Front
Top
Bottom

Covenant Assault Carrier


Top
Bottom

The Assault Carrier was not only a monster model; it is the definition of a flying fortress. It’s over 5km long and packs quite a punch. Here is a screenshot of me flying towards one after narrowly escaping a pack of Seraphs.



To get a true appreciation of its size: see that grayish ship near the tail of the Assault Carrier? That is a Marathon-class cruiser blowing up after sustaining a barrage of plasma and energy projector hits. The energy projector is, at this captured moment, firing at a civilian space station a few miles away. It was subsequently destroyed right after I took this picture.

Lights, Camera, Action

Now that you’ve seen the Covenant ships up close and personal, feast your eyes on a few in-game screenshots. This mission is a single Covenant Corvette and four Seraphs taking on two UNSC frigates, a scout ship, a corvette, and two Longswords while blasting away at a human space dock. NOTE: The images were converted to JPEG format to save space, so a lot of the high-res quality was lost.

Guns blazing at a Seraph

Missile away

Poof…he’s dead


Now for the Corvette

OUCH!



Viewing from the Corvette’s perspective

Archer missiles hit shields




Firing at the frigate


My futile attempt to hurt it


Covenant shields hard at work…




Corvette blasting a frigate



Pelican!

As the Corvette succumbs (finally) to the firepower



A previous Corvette death

And my own death at the Corvette’s hands


Victorious, the Orion Frigate takes a rest


Hope you like what you see. As always, feel free to post replies and email me. All criticism, good and bad, is welcomed.

See you next time!

EDIT: Fixed the broken link for the assault carrier.

[Unknown Target]

Much better looking, I love the Dropship. Still, could use more surface details...

[Dark Hunter]

Are you sure you made the corvette's explosion gigantic enough? 

[jr2]

I wouldn't want to see a Hustion - class cooking off!  (actually, I do )

[Snail]

Mmmm, the Covenant Dropship looks like it needs better UV maps, right now they look a bit stretched. I think all the Covenant ships should have very reflective shinemaps...

Very good for the Assault Carrier, looks very good (quite authentic too),

[Hades]

Bombers can't destroy Halo; Halo is an artificial planet.  What destroyed halo was the POA's four reactors going supercritical; a "wildcat" destabilization (think the Lucy's five reactors going supercritical).

Can a Death Star destroy Halo?

You can find anything on the intertubes....
Clicky

What The Hell.....Isn't That The Ring from http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,22680.0.html?

[Devrous]

Video Link:
http://www.sectorgame.com/halo/FS2H/fs2hteaser.avi

Mirror:
http://files3.bungie.org/fs2hteaser.avi

[takashi]

awsome. are you going to change the colors of explosions for each species?

[Snail]

That's a actually a good idea.

[takashi]

convenant ships deserve purple-green explosions out of coolness.

[Getter Robo G]

Devrous, I have 3-4 Covenant models (and permission) but they are too high poly for me to do anything with (if I remember rightly 12k-60k)

I don't know about HALO so as to their accuracy I can;t verify but I liek the texturing.

Here is the Link in question. The Author's name is Major Racal and long as he is credited he's fine with usage.
I'll drop him a line later with a screenie if you end up using them. (I had wanted to try single conversions and give them to the community, but it was beyond me skill).

http://majorracal.battleclinic.com/cvn.html

Follow the links, he has many types of ships but works on so many they are spread out over various races so no single races gets a huge list of ships done so far...

[Devrous]

Getter Robo G, those are for Starfleet (Star Trek). The Covenant listed in SFC is a faction within the Star Trek Expanded Universe, and isn't Halo. But I do thank you for the effort. Glad you are trying to help    And if you come across nice Halo models I'd love to see them, even if it's just for inspiration. 

awsome. are you going to change the colors of explosions for each species?

Funny you mention that...I tried to do it a long time ago, and didn't have any luck. I couldn't set different explosions based on race, and they all blew up the same. Then, one day, it hit me to use an effect that used the thruster glow textures. THAT would make the color different per race. However, The humans have blue engine glows while the Covenant are purple-ish. And I didn't want the humans to die with plasma-looking blue--I'd rather have orange or anything that looked like flames. The Covies could die bluish. The only way I have been successful with that is:

1) To have both explosion animations in the VP and set one as the default.
2) If, for example, I set the blue shockwave as default, I'd set human ships to 0 for shockwave and just write a trigger SEXP in every mission that made the orangeish explosion effect occur when a human ship bit the bullet.

But that is tedious, not to mention inefficient.

What I also thought about doing is using WMCoolmon's scripting to make the shockwave change based on race, but I haven't even began to mess with scripting yet.

For the time being, I'm just going to use the latest and greatest cool blue 3D shockwave until I get around to making my own. Unless someone here has already figured it out--please, do share! 

And yes, the corvette's demise is at least 300% more satisfying when it's HUGE! 

[Getter Robo G]

No problem, like I mentioned I am unfamiliar with teh whole HALO universe (Aside from basic knowledge of the SPARTANS). It was worth a try.   

The only "official" Halo models I ever saw were off turbo squid (or one of their clones) they were RAW and really low poly. I think I even mentioned them here once.

Keep up the good work! l8tr...

[Snail]

Ey, how are ya going to do the Flood? Just normal ships turning hostile would be crap.

[jr2]

Flood use ships?  I heard they can drive 'hogs... so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.

[Snail]

Well yes, of course they use ships. They are able to do everything the host was able to do since they pull all the information from the host's brain.

[jr2]

Besides properly aim a rifle, you mean. 

[Snail]

Vicious disposition!!!!

[jr2]

It's funny... Apparently your infection form forgot to pull "how to laugh" out of your brain.