finally after a long time of vegastrike-withdrawal i finally had some spare time to finish one of my models.
It's just a relay station, but it's the first model i made where i used some new texture techniques. Learning that is quite a hassle.
Thanks again to Howard Day and his cool textures/ships.
And FINALLY Wings3D has an very decent UV-Editor including vertice-manipulation *doesthehappydance*
The power of AutoUV-unwrapping combined with fine/detailed corrections make the difference.
The model is something i had made a long time ago (actually only the solar panels). The body of the station was just a test, but worked out fine.
Then i read through JackS' model list and found that relays are needed to be revamped.
So i just put some antennas (and here and there some transparency) on the model to make it look like a relay.
That said i call dibs for the relay station
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/users ... een_01.png
More pics (also ingame and with form fitting shields):
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/users ... 1/screens/
As i see it the reason for the solar panels is as backup power supply, to guarantee the communication between systems. JackS?
I also gave it a more powerfull defense installation (9 heavy beam turrets) to prevent easy communication breaking.
The rest of the unit file should match exactly the old relay.
Finally the vegastrike files for this unit:
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/users ... it.tar.bz2
If there are any major changes needed just mail/pm me.
Here a few problems i had when putting this into vegastrike:
- transparency is somehow broken. if you look into the direction of the grid-antenna and another antenna is in the way the behind one will show up in front of the nearer one.
Example (looking a bit like an escher-drawing ) http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/users ... een_04.png - I didn't manage to get LODs (just some extreme lowpoly) to work. I tried different sizes and nothing worked (current CVS)
Just to prevent some questions:
- Yes i'm still working on the catfish. Do the forsaken have a unique style of ship coloring?
Current status: finished the head section.
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/users ... ls/catfish - Regarding cockpit export in the Wings3D Plugin (especially for etheral walker):
There are a whole lot of missing things in the BinarySpacePartition algorithm that i wasn't aware of beeing needed. Basically i need to do BSP-sorting 2 times to be useable...... lotta timeconsuming redundant work, we will see when/if i get to do this.
I think it would be easier to write an OBJ/BFXM/XMESH converter (perl/python), that transforms them into Cockpit files, than to change the existing code for the Wings3D plugin. It is much more likely that i try this way, we'll see.
Then you just export to xmesh and tehn convert it to a cockpit file
Also there is an aera-style (i hope) cargo hauler in the making.
Though i'm still searching for the right colors/basic layout of the hull:
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/users ... een_01.png
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/users ... hauler_01/
Should i go after the few finished ships already in vegastrike or are there other/better guidelines for aera ship-hulls?
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Last but definately not least i put some samples for texturing up for download:
- solar_relay: An example of a complete model including Gimp texture-files (xcf), wings3d models and config files for the export plugin (config, except for the LODs, they are exported extra).
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/users ... ed.tar.bz2
and the exported vegastrike files:
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/users ... it.tar.bz2 - the WIP of the catfish is also a good resource for texturing:
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/users ... ls/catfish
Pontiac
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PS: I will NOT read through ALL of the threads i missed, so if there is anything important i should have read please point me to it