[Shade]

Now, I'd still like to see the turret-blisters as destroyable objects, so don't make him relax just yet

[Snaga]

Hey.....I´ll take my time anyways So don´t worry, debate all that you want. Although I agree that converting the blister pods into the turrets is the best idea, AND they should be destroyable subobjects. So I could begin with that, and later when building the pof, depending on the positioning of each blister-turret we can give them the correct field of view for each.

chief, you also mentioned before the number of turrets this thing should have. I think you said between 30 and 40? Perhaps more? 

[chief1983]

According to Wikia it has 48 turbolaser and 20 ion canons, so if we give it all dual turrets, it'd be about 34, 24 and 10.

[maje]

Doing a really bang up job there, Snaga.  I think that we're going to have a mighty fine ship there in the end.  Btw, a little off-topic, but since we're talking about turrets here, do we have any weapons effects integrated?

[chief1983]

Not yet, we've tried to do a little work on it, but currently that project is stalled.  Wouldn't mind someone else taking a stab at it though.

[maje]

maybe I'll look into it after the Z-95 is done, though I'll have next to no idea how to do any of that stuff since I'm not an Effects artist

[WeatherOp]

Looks good, but I'm wondering about all those intersecting "bumps" They may not cause I problem, but you might manna shoot it up some in FS2 to look for holes.

[Snaga]

Sorry, but I´m not familiarized with all of the modelers vocabulary yet 
What are the "intersecting bumps", and how can I fix them? Also, if you where just suggesting to test the ship in the game, I am doing that and it seems to go ok, though it is quite heavy on my computer. Also I did have some problems to convert it at the beggining. As I said before, I still have work to do.

By the way, I didn´t mention it before, but the poly count is 60 K. Far too many "blister pods".

[chief1983]

Yeah, we may be able to reduce a lot of the smaller ones a bit and just have them done in a normal/height map, now that support for them is near.

[Turambar]

definitely can't wait to see these things in action.

it will truly be epic, and normal maps will let us make this star wars mod like no other.

[Snaga]

How about detail boxes?
I grouped all those blister pods in 4 different subobjects. From big to small, and in order of location. Each blister is still a separate object, (I did that thinking of the guns), so it should be easier to work with.

[chief1983]

That should work great.

[WeatherOp]

Sorry, but I´m not familiarized with all of the modelers vocabulary yet 
What are the "intersecting bumps", and how can I fix them? Also, if you where just suggesting to test the ship in the game, I am doing that and it seems to go ok, though it is quite heavy on my computer. Also I did have some problems to convert it at the beggining. As I said before, I still have work to do.

By the way, I didn´t mention it before, but the poly count is 60 K. Far too many "blister pods".

Well, intersecting things are like this,



How can you fix them? As I see you are using TS, maybe 3.2? It's very hard to connect objects by polies in TS 3.2 without messing the whole thing up. You will have to use Wings or some other program that allows you to cut and connect verts.

[Snaga]

Thanks, I suspected as much. You were right there. There are many bumps, but in my testings they haven´t caused any problem yet. Even so, I´ll try and fix that, and if I can´t I´ll seek some help  ... maybe from Turambar again...

EDIT:  Also, I´ve begun testing with the turrets on this ship, see the first page-post for pics.

[WeatherOp]

Thanks, I suspected as much. You were right there. There are many bumps, but in my testings they haven´t caused any problem yet. Even so, I´ll try and fix that, and if I can´t I´ll seek some help  ... maybe from Turambar again...

EDIT:  Also, I´ve begun testing with the turrets on this ship, see the first page-post for pics.

If it works fine, I wouldn't worry about it. I was just making sure, because I'm pretty sure too many intersecting objects would mess up the collision detection. But it looks like that has been fixed.

[Vasudan Admiral]

Typically, using too many intersecting objects is a problem during conversion rather than in-game. Unless it's used very carefully, it becomes a really messy way to model. This is ESPECIALLY true if all those blisters are separate objects in TS, because from there they either have to be converted into separate submodels (ie, subsystems) in FS2 or they are merged into one object by PCS during conversion, depending on whether lights were glued to them or not.

Having PCS do a lot of that kind of merging is very dangerous for model stability. As WeatherOp suggests, it'd be a very good idea to spend some time just shooting and ramming the thing all over - especially at sections with weird geometry such as polygon intersections and stuff.

Oh and finally, the intersecting bumps mean you won't be able to get good smoothing at the parts where the blisters meet the hull, so don't bother trying.

[chief1983]

I would think we would want defined edges there.

[Vasudan Admiral]

Well the problem is that they become VERY sharply defined. You can see it clearly in this shot (assuming lvlshotting an attached image works):



No matter how good your textures are, in shots like this the hard edges will always show up in this same manner. Ideally you would have a bit of blending between the lumps and the hull - not much, but enough to take off the sharp contrast on the edge. There might be ways around it involving strong normal maps, AO maps and UVing rather than texture tiling, but I have no idea how effective they'd be in this case.

Uh yeah, in short - there's not much that can be done about that contrast, but the model still looks nice. Very accurate to the movie ones too, which for a mon cal cruiser is quite an achievement.

Well done snaga.  

[Snaga]

Mmmm.. ..Darn.  What would you say if I boolean union all those intersecting bumps and then just have one mesh? I know it´s really messy, but could it do the job? For smoother edges I mean? There´s got to be some way to fix that...

[Warp Shadow]