New Hornet model

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 11:40 pm

Dual, doing the Hornet's cockpit area is not easy...

Hope it doesn't make you feel too much better ...

Privateer Ferrius · Post by **Privateer Ferrius** » Fri Mar 31, 2006 12:11 am

chuck_starchaser wrote:Jeezas! I think this white, bulbous thang at the back, in side-view, may be the engines...
Could this be?
Can't see the engines from the top, BUT, the roof seems to extend back a bit, covering the engines from top view, but not from side-view...
Just a theory... If right, it would mean the engines should extend further back...
Hmmm... They can't; they already reach as far as the back of the roof.
Never mind...

<randomidea>Could possibly be missile hardpoints.</randomidea>

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Fri Mar 31, 2006 12:58 am

Nah... good random idea but ...

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Fri Mar 31, 2006 8:32 am

Allright, Dual, back to you; hope you like it. Hit F12 right away, and compare with your perspective shot from the game. Not perfect, but getting close, at least to my eyes.
Then look at the forward area from the side; --granted, far from a "match" with the side view on the Claw's deck; but still pretty evocative of it, IMO.
http://www.deeplayer.com/dan_w/WCUships ... -mk3.blend
The front wings still need a lot of work; next time you get tired I think I'll redo them a different way (drawing a cross section and using Spin, so the back of them is like perfectly circular, then merge that with a new front part).
Looking pretty good already, and you haven't even greebled it yet. This baby is gonna make waves in the WC community...

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Fri Mar 31, 2006 9:34 am

Haha nice paint-job.
Thanks for the help

I see you split the front wings again.

I'm not too sure about the rounded hull though.
Will check, but I thought the edges of the hull should be pretty sharp.

Where do I put my fancy navigation-sensor I modelled for the front?

Nice job on the cockpit, now to make it open and close.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Fri Mar 31, 2006 9:48 am

Glad you like it

Actually, my intention wasn't to make the hull so rounded; more like large flat quads with quick, rounded transitions (small radius); but it's *a lot of work* to do that (it's what I did with the control tower for the Bengal). So, confession..., I'm not finished with it; just gotta go to bed; but I can finish that later, --just making more cuts, turning edges into double-strips, like a double-bevel...

Yeah, to make a cockpit that opens, find out the exact location for the axis of rotation, put the cursor there, highlight the cockpit bubble, P to separate it, then Center Cursor. From then on, you can select the bubble in object mode and rotate it around its center.

The navigation sensors, aren't they those round things near the tips and on top of the front wings? Let me redo the front wings first, like I said; I think a truly circular back edge will look infinitely better than hand-tweaked geometry there.

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Fri Mar 31, 2006 10:33 am

Looking forward with what you come up with.

The colors and cockpit should be slightly different though, see the pic below.

charlieg · Post by **charlieg** » Fri Mar 31, 2006 1:39 pm

Nice. Very, very nice. Good work DualJoe. Nice to see it coming along!

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Fri Mar 31, 2006 3:46 pm

DualJoe wrote:Looking forward with what you come up with.

With nothing at the moment; you have the ball; turned it over to you. I said I wasn't finished with some little details, but I can work on those later. Real life working time for me, right now..

The colors and cockpit should be slightly different though, see the pic below.

That's good; keep going. Having precisely the right colors is more important than most people think.
Are you sure there's no sun-roof, on the Hornet? I would have though that bombers and frigates and capships might get away without a full view cockpit; but not a fighter... (and, to my eyes, it looks like a car, with an opaque top).

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Fri Mar 31, 2006 4:35 pm

Didn't do anything to it yet. Maybe I'll have another go this evening.

And yes the top should be covered, and there is the small window in the back.

You'll have to trust your instruments then.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Fri Mar 31, 2006 4:43 pm

Okeydoc. While you work at it, I might have a crack at the landing gear; I love doing intricate mechanical stuff ...

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Fri Mar 31, 2006 7:28 pm

Fine by me, at this rate the hornet will be done in no time.

I'll try to sharpen the angles on the hull and maybe do the frontwings from scratch.

First I'll try to capture an ejection-scene, it shows some closeups of the cockpit area and the top of the hornet.

Would you be very angry if I redid the hull and cockpit?

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Fri Mar 31, 2006 10:44 pm

Taking a short break and attached a little update.
Rudders are finished, materials are colorpicked from the cutscenes and redid the cockpit
Next I will bevel the edges and take a look at the front wings.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Sat Apr 01, 2006 12:02 am

Good idea, just picking the colors from the screenshots.

One other detail about the front wings, which I hadn't noticed before, is that the tips are actually squarish, in the blueprint, as well as evident in the in-game model.

And I just noticed also a blatant discrepancy in the positioning of the rudders, as shown above. In the original, they are like half way between the fuselage and the step on the wing; wheras in your model they are almost at the step.

WRT your idea that the hull should be perfectly straight; I just want to remark that indeed that is the case in the blueprint; but not in the case of the in-game model. Notice that in your current geometry, the width of the hull is exactly right at, or near, the cockpit, but a bit too wide both: at the nose, and at the back. Without writing a math theorem, simply looking at your top view game shot clearly shows curvature. But like I said, if you want to match the blueprint, it's your call, of course.

I think that, other than the beveling and front wings as you mention, that pretty much wraps up the 'fixings' stage. Next is either cockpit interior, greebling, or landing gear.

I'm trying to come up with a landing gear for ya, for use or inspiration, but I'm having a hard time understanding the blueprints...

Privateer Ferrius · Post by **Privateer Ferrius** » Sat Apr 01, 2006 2:42 am

Forward thinking thought: You should have the guns as seperate objects so that they can be moved to subunits if and when someone makes it so we can have configurable hardpoints with WC1-era weapons such as those Mk.25 Laser Cannons

charlieg · Post by **charlieg** » Sat Apr 01, 2006 2:45 am

As a matter of pragmatism, I would suggest that model is close enough. It's 95% there and refinements can surely wait. Better to get 10x95% models than 2x100% ones.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Sat Apr 01, 2006 3:55 am

Well, moving the rudders closer together, for example, takes 2 seconds. Beveling takes a little longer; and modelling a cockpit interior takes a lot longer. But when you're really into something, that's the time to do it all. If you only do 95%, it will be years before you, or someone else, does the last 5%. Where I work, *everything* is 95% done, because the boss is pragmatic. This means that 50% of engineering time is devoted to firefighting: Old projects we don't even remember coming back to haunt us. We just pissed off our biggest customer: 200 controllers failed in the field in the first month, because of a cheap transformer we used in it. We would have at least caught the problem early if we'd done a burn-in of the first batch we shipped; but we were in a hurry to ship... and of course "we HAVE to ship on time"... Pragmatism at work.
WCU has more ships than all other mods of vegastrike combined, but only a half handful could be said to be 100%, if that, and what good is it? Who's singing the praises of WCU, yet?
What WCU needs is not more 95% ships; --enough of them. WCU needs 150% ships, or 200% ships, and for a change give them WC fans something to talk about...

And if we were in some hurry, I'd concur with you at least partially; but we aren't in any hurry whatsoever. Spirit has tons of work to do in AI and whatnot before we can ship a WC1 Remake; and we'll need something to make up for movies and screenies... --hopefully 3D bases and first person.

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Sat Apr 01, 2006 4:04 am

Well I'm calling it a night and this is how far I got.
Progress was very slow.
Needed to figure out how to bevel in blender and it seems there's a working version of the bevel2center-script.

@Chuck: didn't get to the wings today. I wasn't aiming for completely flat, but I wanted to retain large flat area's across the length of the craft.
It's not apparent on the reference shot but ingame the model had those long reflective planes.
The only part that should be rounded I think (what I could deduce from my own refenrence shots) is the bottom.
I will do some more research, or if anyone else has got some insights in this any help is welcome.

Also I am trying to merge the two ingame styles, preferably get closer to the cutscene look and the way it looks from inside the cockpit, since those are way more detailed than the very pixelated ingame-shots.

I think the cockpit is very close now too the hangardeck closeup and can easily be split from the hull.

I've still got a backup of your hull by the way Chuck, should the concesus be to go with your version.

Not much progress to show, but I learned a lot nonetheless.

and the blend
http://www.deeplayer.com/DualJoe/Hornet ... -mk4.blend

Post by **klauss** » Sat Apr 01, 2006 4:13 am

IMO, that model is ready.
Really - it just needs a nice texture job.
(visually speaking).

Well... anything tending to better adhere to canon (reference shots) that won't take overly long, go ahead. But, all in all, that's a complete model.

Do the customary cleanup pass (clean up the mesh, make sure it's a single material - that is important, anything else, coloring, etc can be done with textures - remember you'll have specmaps with shininess, diffusemaps, glowmaps, ambientmaps & normalmaps - you don't need separate materials, every parameter in the material is on a map).

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Sat Apr 01, 2006 4:14 am

That's looking very good Dual. And, well, you know a lot more about Wing Commander than I do, --I've never seen those views from inside, or the cutscenes, or played WC for that matter-- so you're the boss and the expert. Take my opinions with a grain of salt.

I'll keep hacking at the landing gear. Not much luck so far.

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Sat Apr 01, 2006 10:30 am

This is the final shape.
Adjusted the angle of the rudders with 3 degrees, so it is now identical to the original game version.
Moved the front wings up and gave them the same angle as the main wings.

Navigation sensor is in the front, also some very crude shapes for powersupply, shield generator and fuel tank.

Before I have a go at greebling, I think someone with more experience than me should have a look at mesh. That would probably be Chuck.
Maybe touch some details like making those angular wingtips rounder.
It's 3866 tris now.

If this thing turns out to look anything like the blender opengl-view in WCU then it will look very nice indeed.

Blend:
http://www.deeplayer.com/DualJoe/Hornet ... -mk4.blend

EDIT
Showed the model to my nephew and he said that I should flatten the back like I did the bottom. What do you think?

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Sat Apr 01, 2006 1:47 pm

The backside is also flattend on the top now.
This thing really looks like a fighter now.
The opengl-view is much better than the render, which is good news for the game.

Blend:
http://www.deeplayer.com/DualJoe/Hornet ... -mk5.blend

EDIT
Should I make a list of the RGB-values of the main colors for the texturers?
I've got the diffuse and the specular colors of the base metal, the gun/engines and the green paint.

Chuck, I need your experienced eye too look if the model in it's current state will work in the game-engine or if there will be some strange artificats when converted to tris.
Could you also have a go at rounding the wingtips?
What I've seen from your previous changes to the wings you'll probably do a better job than me.

I think someone else should work on it for a while. I've sort of exhausted myself by not sleeping for a couple of days.
I am forcing myself to sleep now and will not be within a 100 miles of a computer after that.

I'll be back in a few days to see what you've come up with.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Sat Apr 01, 2006 3:20 pm

Well, I was cleaning up the front wings, last night; pretty hard work, and I meant to upload but I fell asleep on the desk, and later crawled to bed...

And the file:

http://www.deeplayer.com/dan_w/WCUships ... -mk5.blend

Haha, we were posting at the same time, almost.

Just take a look at *my* mk5, and if you like the front wings there, you can export them and import them in *your* mk5.

There's only one way to find out about non-flat quads, that I know of: To triangulate everything in a copy of each object, and look at it against the lights. Whenever a quad looks bad, you then triangulate that quad in the original, fix it, and join it back as a quad. Or just convert quad by quad to triangles and then back to quads. The horrible thing is that fixing one quad can mess up another, so you really have to think hard, sometimes.

Another thing I did there was pull the rudders in a bit closer.

You were right about the cockpit: The new one looks a lot closer to the side view on carrier, when looked at from the side.

EDIT:
Yeah, I'm not sure if you'll want to import my front wings, since you've done some work on them already. So, here's a shot to show what I basically did, for your inspiration:

I started off in top view, selected each pair of top and bottom vertices, and did a Scale - Shift-Z - 0 - Enter for each pair, to line them up vertically; then tried to align them into smooth lines, still from top view. Once that was done, I did alignments from side and front views, as to get nice, smooth curves. For the back edge, I put an arc using Spin from top view, for reference, and moved all the edge vertices close to it..

A lot of work, but worth it. When I initially worked with the Demon's old mesh, it was looking pretty good in Blender, at one point, but in-game it looked like crap. Smoothness and evenness of the mesh IS important.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Sat Apr 01, 2006 4:57 pm

Dual; just to make sure we're in synch; I'm assuming you're still taking a break. I've rounded the tips of the wings, like you asked me, and I'm also smoothing the wing's meshes. Just zero-sum changes, namely adjusting vertices so that all mesh lines are sort of parallel and smooth. I'll post the result in the next hour or so.

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Sat Apr 01, 2006 6:09 pm

Sorry for the confusion Chuck.

Yes I'm taking a break and the only thing I did was change the hull, cockpit and the engines, I didn't do anything to the wings front or back.

I just rotated the front wings to see how that would look but you can toss those no problem.

The only thing you need to import is the new hull, I forgot to name it though so you'll have to name it to make it easy to find when you append it to your file.
The new hull is the one that has the top and bottom flattend at the back.

By the way the top of the canopy could be glass you can't tell from the cockpit views, that part shoots off when you eject. I see no objections therefore of it being glass.

Oh I almost forgot, I also made the navigation sensor that fits in the front and some placeholdershapes for powergenerator, shieldgenerator and fueltank from the blueprints.