Alrighty folks, I've been wanting this for a long long time. A chance to remake the good ol' HEC Typhoon. I suppose that, pending activity and frequency of updates, this may be my progress topic. Anyhow, let's start from the beginning:
What I did: The Typhoon of old has a hangar bay quite simply. Even though it was fairly detailed it was quite a fail hangar bay. The pilot had to start in the belly of the ship, fly towards the back, dive down in a split S to exit the ship. Aside from the hangar bay nothing else was new about this vessel.
What I want: The Typhoon of old is a messy ship. A handful of turrets with forward beam cannons and a single strong beam turret. It simply feels weak and lacking in presence. Also it SEVERELY lacked AA emplacements. I was simply that lazy. Worse even, it had no nameplate! And the model was simply poor compared to my skills now. What I want is a general overall remake.
What I plan: The new model will likely exceed 30,000 triangles, have a 4096x2048 texture map with accompanying shader maps. Pending on how things turn out, this ship will likely not make use of tilemaps unless it is deemed so. The 4096 should suffice hopefully. The ship will be hybrid normal mapped. A general high poly version will be attempted to smooth out seams and large details. The small details will be hand normal mapped.
The Eye Candy:
INITIAL SKETCH (my sketchbook couldn't contain the awesome, so the tip and back are not included)
Old Model
The new Typhoon will be called the Typhoon II, with any luck I can actually remake the old model exactly or keep it the way it is and have it ingame as a sort of predecessor model. The new Typhoon uses two large beam turrets up front instead of the one. Additionally said turrets are multi barrel. The upper one is likely to mount 4 beam cannons and the lower one likely to field 3. Instead of the dual turrets before the main guns on the new model will be triple barreled. Forward static beam cannons is not decided yet, but I am likely to make them out like the Trade Emergency Coalition's Kol Battleship's cannons from Sins of a Solar Empire. As in they will have a 100 degree firing arc instead of the 10 on the one before. The new Typhoon will have a gigantic hangar bay compared to the old one. The lower section is made significantly bigger and bulbous to hold said hangar bay. There are anti fighter/strikecraft mounts along the main hull and other parts wheres before it was mounted on the hump. The hull will have many of these openings to engage smaller ships at all angles. Additionally I plan on adding a large number of missile racks, maybe even a single huge dedicated missile multipart turret.
The focus on this design is to preserve the extremely aggressive form factor, lots of diagonals and a sleek body. The Typhoon II will be 3,000 meters long.
