[Stryke 9]

500k+ polys, 3547.69m x 2563.99m x 1112.95m, standard crew of 495 and over 150 fighters in bay, fully self-sufficient (infinite deployment time), 15-foot thick armor plating, microbrewery optional. For that special humongous, all-powerful interstellar totalitarian government in your life.



Keep in mind that it's a WIP, and that it'll be pretty much covered with little thingies when I'm done- I figure I'll make it a nice round million.

[an0n]

ARGH! ROMULANS!!!!



Greeble.

[Stryke 9]

Something like that. Actually, carefully designed over many experiments to look really, really cool when it blows up, and to be just frail enough (count the guns, there really aren't many more, and they're all AA plasma but one) that this would be a common occurrence.

[Stryke 9]

Woah, it's really all THAT ugly?

And yeah, like I said, I'm working on the greebling thing.

[Nico]

oh, he's getting good!
don't like the shape tho.

[Stryke 9]

I don't particularly, either. The Tok was better- I just can't do the organic sorts of things. Everything's pretty much fine, in my opinion, except for the bridge, but there's no good way to do that, I don't think.

[Nico]

of course there is. try again, and again, and again, and you'll find a good way.

[Sandwich]

Originally posted by an0n
Greeble.

Whazzat?

[Nico]

Originally posted by Sandwich


Whazzat?

tiny details you add to a ship to add sense of scale ( and make the ship look good, think central part of the SSD in starwars for exemple )

[Styxx]

And a plugin for MAX that does that automatically.

[Nico]

Originally posted by Styxx
And a plugin for MAX that does that automatically.

yeah, but severely lacks randomness.I can tell if you used it on first sight

[Stryke 9]

...Which is fine, since I don't use MAX. Luckily for me, I figured out a way to mesh a particle generator to give me greebling. Problem is, in four uses of it the poly count shot up to nearly double (from 300k, mind you), so I'm working on perfecting the technique, and getting it so that I can use it on whole chunks of the ship, rather than only the few flat surfaces.

I tried several approaches to the bridge section- this is the least ugly one for the general shape. I think it'll improve if I lengthen the neck and get rid of that damn crease, but we'll see.

Right now, I've had enough of this one. I've gotten twice as far in half the time in other ships, and I feel like taking a break from ships right now, anyway.

[wEvil]

i'm looking into the greeble code to allow you to place arbitrary objects on the surface of a mesh.

THe problem with greeble is it only generates boxes.

Now to even do that by hand is a long and tedious process.

To add other types of effects like vents, smoother shapes and radiator panels makes  everything a helluva lot more complex.

True - greeble is "cheating" - but if you can do it anyway and use it in a way that makes everything look good then its fine - otherwise you might as well go back to modelling your stuff in notepad because your fancy GUI makes everything easier

[Stryke 9]

If it works, it's all the same. 'Taint no such thing as "cheating" when modeling, except for stealing other peoples' models and using them as your own.

[Nico]

never said using greeble is wrong ( I use it too: http://www.3dactionplanet.com/hlp/hosted/ott/renders/eisenhowerwip6.jpg ). I say it doesn't make things random enough, so all the models that use it looks alike. So I'm looking forward to what Wevil might do to it
btw, you think doubling 300k polys is bad? this station has 1 500 000 polys

[Stryke 9]

500,000 is bad for the amount of detail I have in at the moment. It's not at a tenth of the completed piece, and already I'm having trouble loading it.

BTW: Greeble looks pretty damn good- but I see what you mena about it making everything look the same. Now that I know what it is, I recognize a lot of ships I saw as using it. Still, spaceships are far from "random", so it's not all that bad. And it cuts back on hours of work- it looks only a little more interesting when I do it by hand, and it takes days.
All in all, I don't know that it has my particle generator beat, though. generates big chunks of randomized, aligned planes (or triangles, or spheres) that I can add thickness to and give about the same effect- I can send you some, if you want.

[Nico]

well, with max wouldn't be of much help, i do my greebles by hand now anyway ( saves on the polycount, and much more varied ( heat sinks, fans, stuff like that )

[Stryke 9]

Dammit, Stop reminding me that most people have programs that can support a billion polys at once, without making everything happen at roughly the speed of a turtle with no legs!:p

[Nico]

you think so? max is draining my pc resources like there is no tomorrow ( tho I installed new drivers for my radeon, and dunno what happened, everything now runs like magic, very good drivers it seems ).

[Stryke 9]

Look, when I had a copy of MAX, I got excited right away because I could pan around a cube in real-time, insteading of having it sit for a minute before drawing. A render farm would be nice, but where I am, something that doesn't take half an hour of processing for every hour of work is pretty fantastic.

So, naturally, the stuff I've always had survives the Admin from Hell, but the damn fool screws up the registry so I can't use Titan's MAX crack any more, and reserves so many admin priveliges that I can't install any other. Why the HELL do they charge as much for a legit version of that program as it'd cost to get a friggin' CAR?

Ahem... But anyway. Ray Dream ain't bad, it's just almost ten years old, and thus has a FRIGGIN' slow engine. It's kind of suprising, they have things like hair and lightning generator plugins that are that old...