[Black Wolf]

[RELEASE] : See this post for release details and DL link.

Been trying out a new texturing style, I think it turned out pretty well. Still needs normal and shine maps though. And turrets. Model and Textureby me, yadda yadda, current polycount is 3868, though that'll shoot way up when I turret it (should end up around 9k).

The ship is the Canberra class carrier - supposed to be an early TV War carrier, from the days when cruisers were kings and Destroyers were too large and expensive to yet be justified in the TV War, and so this was how you got fighters from system to system(or, conceiveably, even battle to battle - they were developed before subspace drives on fighters in my timeline). Anyway, final size will be 350-400m, with 5 turrets only. It's not going to be able to go into a fight with anything particularly potent - it's only real offensive weapons will be its fighter complement.







The design is inspired a little by the Fenris, but mostly by its namesake. Incidentally, in-universe the name Canberra came from the initial run being 6 ships, each named after a city from a different continent. When/if I end up using them ingame, I'll keep up the convention by giving them all city names.

Oh, and the general consensus on IRC seemed to be that it was ugly. I'm fine with that . It's kinda designed to be ugly - pure functionality over form. But mostly, I'll be glad to have a working minicarrier - even an ugly one - since that's something that's hard to find in the current, publically available modset. I'll also be releasing this when it's done, as it's not for any major project, so keep an eye out in the coming weeks if you're interested.

[Titan]

I think by ugly, they meant not very detailed. The basic design is good, it just looks to low poly, especially compared to everything else coming out these days.

[General Battuta]

Yeah, it doesn't quite convince me that it's actually a warship rather than a toy. My expertise is not adequate to pinpoint exactly why, but there are too many big stretches of featureless single colors, I think?

[el_magnifico]

Oh, and the general consensus on IRC seemed to be that it was ugly.

Bah! Ignore the haters, it has a nice set of woofers...

Oh! wait... those are the engines...

Just kidding.

[headdie]

I think for the moment the problems seem to be in the texturing (this might be fixed with shine and normal maps though).  My comments up to now would be that its missing a hull plating effect witch is best achieved by textures to the best of my knowledge.  Secondly I would say that the windows look wrong, I think its the shade you are using but that could be down to the absent shine maps

[Droid803]

Needs more pronounced PLATING of the HULL IMO.

[Solatar]

Looks WAY too low-poly.  If you still want to keep that blocky shape, I'd try to add detail - as others have said - in hull plating or something.  Look at the Orion; simple shape but lots of detail (specifically any of the hi-poly ones around).

[Scourge of Ages]

I will look forward to completion of this puppy, I am in the market for a light carrier at the moment. It looks like it has a lot of potential.

[Ravenholme]

It's the textures, they look unconvincing and plasticy (Like a toy, as either Battuta or The_E put it). It needs better textures that emphasis that it is a metallic hull (painted or otherwise) with the accompanying bump mapping.

Some of it may be the lack of detail in the model?

[Unknown Target]

Yea it's way too underdetailed for how boxy it is. It looks like a Wing Commander ship from like WC 3 or 4.

[Colonol Dekker]

Whats wrong with that

[SpardaSon21]

It needs some hull paneling, some rivets, or something.  It looks bland.

That's what's wrong with that.

[Black Wolf]

Hmm, near universal negative reviews... :s. Oh well, here we go:

I'm sorry that people think it's bland. The hull plating was deliberately designed to be subtle, as a direct contrast to my uual over-reliance on the "inner bevel" button in PSP. Personally, I was quite happy with the effect, but oviously I'm in the minority on that. Unfortunately, I'm not really keen on the idea of redoing the entire hull and I managed to lose big chunks of the layered version of the textures due to PSP crashing on me, so the option of going back and fixing it that way is out. I may be able to play with the contrast a bit, to bring out the different plating shades, but that'll probably make the dirt too dark. I'll see what I can do. Unfortunately, fixing it with normal maps isn't an option either, as I'm not going to be able to normal map it. I'd forgotten that my card can't support them, so I have no way of testing the feature.

That said, the one thing I will say in its defense is that hhat it lacks in overt, prominent detail, the presence of small, modelled detail (lots of small changes in elevation, mostly), as well as the deliberately subtle hull colour changes make it quite a visceral experience to skim along one of the surfaces. Not many FS ships have that - all the detail is in big things meant to be seen from a ways off, whic then just get in the way of trying to skim. This ship works better up close, right in your face, and personally, I like that about it.

Anyway, I've made some slight changes, and one reasonably big change through adding a little bitof greebling, but not much - TBH, I want to move on to turreting it and getting it in game. For what it's worth, the turrets are planned for the worst offenders in the "Big featureless areas" category - three chin turrets, one dorsal port bow, andother dorsal starboard stern (again, it's not going to be well defended). The size is also going up a bit - (not too much or the windows will be too big - they may need to be tweaked anyway, probably the docking ring as well) - I played around with a very rough ingame model to test for collisions and it felt way too small. Probably be around 500m long.

[Woolie Wool]

In addition to what others have said, I find the color scheme very questionable. The yellow should be gray and the blue more muted. Overall I think it would be best to entirely redo the texture. Even if the very subtle texture detail might be more "realistic", if you do a ship for the FS universe you have to deal with the FS art style, and that's big, very obvious armor plates on Terran ships. The Orion has them. The Elysium has them. The Faustus has them. The fighters have them. Even the Fenris has them to a degree (and lots of windows to break up the more featureless areas).

I'd rather stick with the Evangelist model from the 158th than use this in its current state.

Cruiser size to destroyer size is an unbelievably large jump though, I think corvette-sized carriers would have been used before destroyers. I could see something like this working in parallel with a larger class of ships.

[Droid803]

The issue I have with it is that it looks like its made from sheets cardboard stapled together. That, or its hewn from a giant block of wood.
Seriously. The color and the texture.
If the plating were more pronouced, or if it wasn't so....yellow...then it wouldn't look so much like that.

[TopAce]

On the plus side, it's recognizably pre-FS1-era. I didn't have to read a single letter in the first post to come to that conclusion. That said, the general design is fine. As the others said, you need a lot more effort in texturing.

[Black Wolf]

OK, update. Conversion has been giving me grief, but I'm nearly there, I think. I still need to do pof data and a few tweaks, but it's close.

[Dragon]

Looks good.

[headdie]

The colouring/lighting is much better there

[Thaeris]

I'd suggest a revision of the bridge design - using the Fenris/Levy as an inspiration here could go a long way. Aerials atop the main superstructure would also add a lot of life to the design.