[Renegade Paladin]

Looking good. 

It may be a little late, but it seemed to me that there wasn't a definitive decision on how many engines it should have in the thread.  Want me to fire up XWA real quick and fly behind one, or did you get it figured out?

[chief1983]

I saw that post.  It's a bit of an older thread, someone might notice it though.  Might just have to keep modeling it for now and maybe someone can take a look at it later.

[Galemp]

If nobody knows...


...why would anybody care?

[chief1983]

Yeah Galemp's right, if there's no canon setup then whatever looks good will probably do.

[Gank]

the only pics of the rear are in the thrawn trilogy graphic novels which show 4 engines in a 2x2 configuration. Other than that theres the XWA model, the Big Score above which has the same configuration.

[jacek]

I add some dirt 
Here are renders of action6 convoy 





Renegade Paladin: A lot of sources say that action6 has 4 engines so I chose this configuration

[chief1983]

I think the way the engines are attached will need some work, something to make seem like they're actually attached to the ship.  They seemed a bit too plain before.  Renders look good though.

[jacek]

Yeah I know I will add details in engines section but I had few minutes yesterday so I would like to to do some tests with texture and dirt 

[Galemp]

I think the way the engines are attached will need some work, something to make seem like they're actually attached to the ship. 

I agree. I'd actually recommend modeling the back as a 'shell' like the nose, and burying the base of the engines deeper inside.

[jacek]

Ok I add some details and now it has about 5100 polys I must add details on engines and on place near big gun. Here are two renders:

Calm down mates  I will do this soon..

[TopAce]

It's looking good so far. I especially like that it doesn't need a hi-res texture to look good in-game. Lighting is weird in the picture, though, but it's probably not related to your model.

Quick suggestion: Please add some greebles to the nose.

[chief1983]

It will need a significantly high enough resolution texture if it's going to be normal mapped, otherwise they'd look pretty bad.  And if that's the case I'm sure someone can find things to put on the base map to make it worthwhile.

[jacek]

It will need one big texture 2048*2048 because I want AO baked on texture. And last good news  I know how to import .cob to PCS2 with smooth groups  look at this screenshot from game with fixed action6 and working smooth groups 

[Snail]

2048*2048 eh?

Well then I guess I'll never be able to even see that ship at all since ATI graphicks cards make FS crash on seeing anything bigger than 4 pixels.

[chief1983]

That does seem a bit large for a cargo ship, but maybe the ship is bigger than I think.  Still, are you going to use a similar method to baking the AO map like Brand-X does?

[Galemp]

2048 is way too big for a transport. Pare it down to 1024 and I guarantee you won't be able to tell the difference in-game. It will make a huge difference in performance however.

[jacek]

This ship should be bigger because now its size is comarable to fighter but it is easy to change so I will do this soon I don't know what kind of method use brand-x but I do this in 6 steps:

1. modeling ship
2. unwrapped it
3. render to texture only diffuse map
3. adding some details on texture in gimp or photoshop
4. apply this texture to model
5. add lights
6. again render to texture with baked shadows.

sometimes I use AO also baked on texture and use it as kind of dirt map

Galemp: 2048 isn't too big in my opinion because this ship has about 150m so it's so much bigger than for example Tie/In which has about 8m.. I don't think that brand-x will use texture for Tie lower than 1024 when I finish this ship I will send it to You so when You think that 2048 is too big You may easy change it to 1024 BTW. I use only one texture of course and maybe I add another one normal texture.

[brandx0]

My workflow is slightly different, but similar.

1. Model ship
2. Unwrap
3. Render AO on a white material with a spherical dome light
4. Create Diffuse, Shine and Normal maps together, using the AO map as a multiplier layer

[Archaic]

add drive scorching on the engines and blaster scars to where ever

[chief1983]

That kind of stuff would only normally be on a 'dirty' texture.  We tend to start with a clean one, fresh out of the shop, and then add the wear and tear afterwards.