[Scooby_Doo]

Looking better. Looks like you might need to do manual selection of smoothing groups (or whatever blender uses) round the cockpit area.

*Paging Vasudian Admiral* 

[Einstine909]

i use blender too...

well it looks like he made some new faces after he set the smoothing, just reselect and smooth again

[Vasudan Admiral]

Actually I wouldn't bother looking into smoothgroups blender-wise, since there's no way they'll survive the conversion to cob.

Scoob, stop stressing about smoothgroups so much! As I said in the other thread, just let the geometric detail speak for itself rather than hiding it under smoothing. The process of making sure the smoothing is right is just about the last thing you do before converting your cob->pof, so it really doesn't matter at this stage.


Anyways, good progress Davin.
Out of curiosity, have you got a cockpit modeled under where I presume the glass is?

[Scooby_Doo]

If your doing blocky FS2 type ships then yes, smoothing is really irrelevant. If your doing aerodynamic style, then smoothing is quite important, it'll allow you to get away with blockier ships than you would actually need. Personally this early on I'd remove smoothing all together.

Is this sorta what you were aiming for Davin?

[Davin]

i use blender too...

well it looks like he made some new faces after he set the smoothing, just reselect and smooth again

Nope the auto smooth setting didn't like those faces, had to mess around with the wacked goemetry around the cockpit. If my original plans for this ship went right it'd be more of a destroyer now, but seeing as it looked to me more like a fighter I changed it, and the cockpit addon wasn't done the best.

Edit: Updated the pic in my last post.

If your doing blocky FS2 type ships then yes, smoothing is really irrelevant. If your doing aerodynamic style, then smoothing is quite important, it'll allow you to get away with blockier ships than you would actually need. Personally this early on I'd remove smoothing all together.

Is this sorta what you were aiming for Davin?

Not quite, when I was modeling my ship I really couldn't visualize what I wanted clearly enough, and thats whats taken me the longest about making this thing. Just a question, how long did it take you to model that?

Anyways, good progress Davin.
Out of curiosity, have you got a cockpit modeled under where I presume the glass is?

I really wish there was, I'll probably work on that thursday night, tommorrows a  bit busy so i won't have any time to do work on it then. I was experimenting with glass materials with blender, and I wonder, If I did it in blender would it survive the conversion to cob? Because I personally loath ts 3.2

[Einstine909]

oh u are using autosmooth... i thought u were hand selecting the verts u wanted smooth. ok. well that last one turned out nice

[Vasudan Admiral]

I'm writing up a tutorial on the whole subject at the moment actually, and I'm happy to say that yes, you can do everything but heirarchy setup in Blender.

The transparency of the cockpit actually comes from simply having the glass on a separate texture map to the main hull called 'glass', rather than having to do with setting up proper transparency in the 3d app.

So, what I'd suggest you have a go at is selecting the polys you want to be the glass and press P to separate them from the ship object. (You will re-merge it in the heirarchy setup stage) Now move your new glass object straight up and out of the way, holding ctrl to snap it by increments to make putting it back in place later a lot easier.

Then go back to your ship and see if you can model in a simple cockpit beneath the glass. Doesn't have to be fancy.

[Einstine909]

  i did't know that every thing could be done in Blender.... this is good. Very good 

[Scooby_Doo]

Not quite, when I was modeling my ship I really couldn't visualize what I wanted clearly enough, and thats whats taken me the longest about making this thing. Just a question, how long did it take you to model that?

Probably ten minutes or so.. I was jumping back and forth between max and your pictures.

[Davin]

I'm writing up a tutorial on the whole subject at the moment actually, and I'm happy to say that yes, you can do everything but heirarchy setup in Blender.

The transparency of the cockpit actually comes from simply having the glass on a separate texture map to the main hull called 'glass', rather than having to do with setting up proper transparency in the 3d app.

So, what I'd suggest you have a go at is selecting the polys you want to be the glass and press P to separate them from the ship object. (You will re-merge it in the heirarchy setup stage) Now move your new glass object straight up and out of the way, holding ctrl to snap it by increments to make putting it back in place later a lot easier.

Then go back to your ship and see if you can model in a simple cockpit beneath the glass. Doesn't have to be fancy.

Thanks for the advice, I'll have to remember this.

[ANARKIA777]

I have a idea, we create all a cruiser, and we place in mission and BATTLE!!!!!!!!!!!
We will see the best cruiser

[ANARKIA777]

 
not good idea?...

[Raven2001]

yeah blender can do almost anything, but I prefer reserving UV mapping to toher proggries... as far as im aware, blender catn bake maps from tiles nor it can UV unwrap... I may be wrong though.

I confess I havent explored much of blender except for mesh editing tools

[Vasudan Admiral]

It can do both actually. In fact, I find the UV mapping system in Blender nicer to use than lithunwrap's once you get the hang of it.

[Raven2001]

I dont use Lithunwrap... i use max

[Davin]

Hmm, well here's my attempt at a cockpit. And I have to say thanks to V. Admiral for the advice on how to make my canopy look like glass.



Edit: heh, forgot the link to the pic

[Raven2001]

LOoking good, but kill the smoothing when ur taking pics. Not very good to see the detail of the model with smoothing

Also, u can take out the missiles from the pods, its a waste of valuable polys, in a place where a texture will do fine. Better use those polys on the underdetailed areas, like the engine pods, etc

[Davin]

Ok, I updated the above picture, without smoothing amoung other things. As for the detailing in the engine pods, I'm actually a bit stuck there, I don't really know what to do with the front to them for detailing. I could easily add an inset section on the sides with some piping and whatnot but I really think that the front needs detail too, I'm just at a loss for what to put there.

[Raven2001]

greebling, exausts, anything... it just cant stay plain

[Vasudan Admiral]

Nice work on the cockpit! You've come a long way already, so well done indeed.

As for detail - what Raven said; just about anything greeble-like. Antennae, pipes, indents, extrusions, fins, domes - that kinda thing.
Just be sure that for the smaller stuff you leave it in the same mesh but separate from the hull section, and for bigger stuff merge it with the hull as I described earlier, and you should be fine on all fronts.