Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: Vertigo 7 on December 03, 2008, 11:21:56 pm
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ok so I decided to delve into uber nerddom here and do a model of the Enterprise from TMP era. Here's where I'm at so far...
(http://i421.photobucket.com/albums/pp294/dkinnane/Enterpriserender1.jpg)
I really don't have a super whole lot left to do (mesh wise anyway). I've got some poly cleaning to do on the front of the nacelle and theres this cap thing that goes over the front of the glass like stuff on both sides... once im done with that i'll mirror it and attach em to the struts...
then i gotta round out the saucer a bit more (I couldn't remember what poly count I should be less than so I didn't round as much as i should have to begin with... no biggy tho) followed by modeling the bridge, sensor array, deflector dish, impulse drive and the hangar doors... oh and the lil nipple like things for the phaser banks. I havent triangulated yet but as it stands I'm a lil bit over 1k polys all together so i've got all kindsa room to work with. I think this will turn out fairly well =)
If all goes well with it I *may* even do a mod... i know i'll prolly end up doing a few other fed ships like the Miranda class and the Constellation Class... might even do a Proxima if i'm so inclined =p
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Yay Connie Refit! In my opinion the best Enterprise and it's looking good so far.
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ok should be done with the warp nacelles. on to rounding the saucer!
(http://i421.photobucket.com/albums/pp294/dkinnane/Enterpriserender2.jpg)
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a bridge to blowz up! theres not a whole lot to do to it, I may round off the back edges a bit, but that'll come later
(http://i421.photobucket.com/albums/pp294/dkinnane/Enterpriserender3.jpg)
shes gettin there! :D
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Sensors and deflector dish goodness
(http://i421.photobucket.com/albums/pp294/dkinnane/Enterpriserender5.jpg)
now to do the hangar, weapons and some detailing
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I like it. Your skills are getting better.
Speaking of... (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,56008.0.html)
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i'm gonna get to it! its next on my list. My buddy from school hooked me up with max... i gotta tell ya, this has been like a dream. I will NEVER go back to TS... EVER! I started doing this model to get familiar with max and I fully intend on going the distance with it... LOD's, Textures (even tho i can't draw a straight line to save me arse) the works. Then, XG-1, here I come!
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Glad to hear it. Keep practicing then! If you stop by #hard-light there's usually a Max modeller or two around, but the forums are definitely a good place to get help, if you don't mind the occasional delay.
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(http://i421.photobucket.com/albums/pp294/dkinnane/enterpriserender6.jpg)
I'm getting close =D nother day or so and i should be ready to start texturing... i hope anyway
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Right now i'm working on smoothing out some of the rough edges and corners... im also starting to round out the engineering hull a bit more (it just looks too boxy to me :p)
(http://i421.photobucket.com/albums/pp294/dkinnane/enterpriserender7.jpg)
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nother update! finished smoothing out the hull as much as im gonna do it :p got a few lil things i wanna do to the warp nacelles and figure out how i wanna do the hangar. Other than that, just the phaser points and i'll be done with the mesh =)
(http://i421.photobucket.com/albums/pp294/dkinnane/enterpriserender8.jpg)
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That looks pretty damn good. :yes:
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Thank you :D im right proud of er so far.... although I'm not exactly sure what happened but one of those lil clamp like things near the dish... All i did was model 1 and then made 2 copies and then Boolean joined them to the hull. the one in the picture and on the bottom came out fine, however i didn't notice till after i took the pic that the one on the port side came out like a pile of smashed ass. It was all spikey and for whatever reason max triangulated the whole thing... poorly (and whats odd is that was the only one that got triangulated). so I've been cleaning it up... its fix0red now =D Anyways, i'll prolly have another update late tonight or some time tomorrows
edit:
i donno wtf happened but both nacelles for whatever reason have lost their face data. Or atleast thats what it seems... when i convert them to an editable poly, they vanish... i checked the object properties and it reports having 0 vertices and 0 faces. And that makes no sense what so ever cuz with edged faces mode on, i can see the faces so wtf chuck. I guess ima have to rebuild them. I checked on my saves and they're doing the same thing. I donno what happened.
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Aren't you normally not supposed to boolean join in Max? Or is Max one app where it's ok?
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i've been doing it from the get go and it hasnt really given me any trouble. theres been a few artifices that i've had to clean up but nothing major cept for that one clamp lookin thing, everything else has been fine. I still don't understand what happened to the nacelles, tho. The last thing i did was boolean join a capsule at the bottom then i mirrored it and moved both into their positions. I hadn't touched em since.
But as far as joining, it seems to work ok. it doesn't tend to create bad geometry on the inside of the object, like if i were to join a cylinder to a face on a cube, it would remove all faces that would be on the inside of the completed object.
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booleans are exactly what happened. its not the best thing when it comes to joining together objects. if its imperative to join the meshes properly without much trash verts and polys, you're much better off doing it manually than letting boole do it by intersection detection. i've had events where i spent an hour or so cleaning up the mesh from booleing stuff together.
in most cases when you really want to connect two objects together, you can just punt them near each other, make a single poly mesh out of two of them and pretty much "bridge" the polys in the gap.
i really have to give max a more thorough try... C4D's, or rather Bodypaints UV tools are a bit lacking with seam fixing and i have no idea where to even begin with the fixage -.-
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i was able to merge objects together like that in TrueSpace (bridging them) How do i do that in max? I haven't figured out how to edit the hierarchy yet
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no idea. but i think it should have a tool in the direct poly/edge/vert edit mode just for that.
dont remind of TS's booles... by the dear gods... gaah
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i never touched em in TS... they scared me :nervous:
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ok so i hadda rebuild the nacelles from scratch again. this time i made damn sure they didnt get screwed up! so with out further ado... new and improved nacelles!
(http://i421.photobucket.com/albums/pp294/dkinnane/enterpriserender9.jpg)
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I figured out how to triangulate and im lookin at ~10k polys give or take, 12 tops. This thing is gonna be about the size of an orion. Is that too much poly or a good number or wot?
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just a FYI, the Sovereign class was about 360 meters or so long. more like a levy or fenris in size :p
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ehh connie refit is 305 meters long and ive got a sovereign at 685... according to the trek encyclopedia. From what lil i've read on it thats sposed to be the cannon reference
*edit
ok so i underestimated how long an orion is =p i just looked it up. so the connie is gonna be a bit bigger then a fenris =p anyways, poly count wise, am i ok for a ship that size?
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whoops? :p
in any case, the connie is the size of a levy tops, not an orion, thats my point :p
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Problem in FS2 is apparent POV, ie shuttles accurately sized will NOT fit in doors and hatches that are canon for them. The Defiant's bay, voyagers bay, ect accurately scaled are just too small for their support craft to enter/exit.
Therefor with experimentation I concluded that cap ships must be resized to 2 -2.3 times bigger (it varies) to give proper effect. you can use the docking rings on various Fed ships for more scaling (like when Kirk or Spock used shuttles to dock ect).
This is key because of the fact I was doing the "fighter Mod" and the real sizes look ridiculous when your pilot almost took up teh whole bridge section (what is he a 50' tall zentreadi?). Thus if you use smaller craft in teh same missions as cap ships those caps ship should be sized up to compensate.
Your alternative is to scale the smaller craft down, but I do not do that, I use book numbers as a minimum.
(Or do not use them at all)
I know you are doing your own effort, but are you familiar with the Conversions done first by Omniscaper and then a few by myself? Merely as a possible guide in your modeling.
(http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b321/Star-Dragon/fedtarget1.jpg)
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O.o when, where? i searched for a star trek mod a while back and the only thing i came up with was an abandoned project
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Omni's files are probably still active on penguinbomb site. He abandoned Trek
My effort started before that but creeps along slowly.. Very slowly. In fact don't even think about it. I merely concentrated on conversions part of the mod only. So in effect I like people to believe it doesn't exist at all aside from the blurb in my siggy.
If there was something specific you were looking for I might release to you but I figure Omni's files eill hold you over.
He had links here and on Game-Warden if you can't google them.
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Omni's files are probably still active on penguinbomb site. He abandoned Trek
My effort started before that but creeps along slowly.. Very slowly. In fact don't even think about it. I merely concentrated on conversions part of the mod only. So in effect I like people to believe it doesn't exist at all aside from the blurb in my siggy.
If there was something specific you were looking for I might release to you but I figure Omni's files eill hold you over.
He had links here and on Game-Warden if you can't google them.
I semi-revived that project at one time, mending tables and fixing shinemaps and the like, and then later on mucking around with the models thanks to 3.6.9 being bat**** crazy about anything that was slightly wrong (even crashed when I destroyed the Constitution), and almost had the Constitution working up to the point the point of the ship breaking up into debris, but I suffered a hard drive failure and lost everything.
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Slightly wrong is still wrong, that's the point of (at least debug builds) going crazy. That's a terrible shame you lost all that hard work, I still think it would neat to have that stuff even if it were just for machinamation.
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Eh, it managed to give errors out of the debug build too, so without help it was pretty much a lost cause at the time. If I had my stuff I could probably restart it again but I've got other stuff going at the moment.
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Is there actually going to be a Star Trek mod where this can be put to use?
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if things go well, perhaps =) i'm really new to the modeling world so theres a bit i have to learn before things can go into full scale production. If I can manage to get the model looking good, in game, then i'll start working on more models develop a story line etc etc and work on a total conversion.
I'm not going to make any promises. A lot of this is stuff I want to tackle on my own so that I can have a better understanding on how things go together. I feel like I have a good grasp of the major concepts, but i'm still not 100%. I'm not going to commit to anything unless I have a firm sense that I can make it happen and bring an experience to others that will be enjoyable and worth their time.
I don't mean for that to sound as negative as it does but in my searching for a trek universe mod, ive come across 2 or 3 abandoned projects and I just don't want to get people's hopes up if this doesn't come out how I intend for it to.
Now on the other hand, I DO feel good about how things are going. Some minor technical hiccups along the way and still to over come, but I'm confident I will over come them, especially with the level and quality of support from the HLP community. There is no doubt in my mind that I will, at the very least, finish this model =)
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I really hope this turns into something, but since Darth brought it up, for the record it's public knowledge I am the Trek mod(er) since 2003 and not abandoned (just on extended hiatus) and for reasons that have been mentioned MANY times over.
Still the legacy of Trek mods in relation to FS2 is "dicey".
Out of the 4-5 projects attempted I have the least skill, least amount of (skilled) help, and least progress. But I have probably 5 times the content ever created...
Regardless, Good luck to you Vertigo 7, I'm sure this will get many people excited (for a time).
if on the other hand this actually gets some people interested enough to give you a hand, then it's a good thing...
The previous Trek thread: postedd last conversions, weapons pics, and musings from the board.
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,38359.0.html
my Trek weapons test on youtube: Rom cap and Fed fighter tests.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPOQS6h_wAs
Sorry for the minor Highjack Vertigo 7 !!! :)
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Is there actually going to be a Star Trek mod where this can be put to use?
I have a more or less working version of all of Omni's stuff, if you want it. It's fun, and different but the AI's not great with the bigger ships. There're a few half finished missions in there where you get to fly and fight in Trek ships.
If you want it, I can probably email it to you.
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Maybe you could upload it somewhere, because the question as to where those files can be found pops up every few months.
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Had a play with it tonight and for some reason the fighterbeams aren't working. So unless someone has a SCP reason why that might be (the only thing I've changed between when I last played it and now, AFAIK, is the build I'm using) I'll fiddle with it and try to make it work again before I UL it anywhere.
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I think there were some code changes related to fighter beams but they were supposed to fix bugs if so.
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Bah, OK, will have to look into that.
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BW, there were two commits related to fighter beams in October, https://svn.icculus.org/fs2open?view=rev&revision=4913]4913 (http://) and 4886 (https://svn.icculus.org/fs2open?view=rev&revision=4886), both to fix mantis 1795 (http://scp.indiegames.us/mantis/view.php?id=1795). Hope that helps.