I'm back, so Bengal first, spirit?

[chuck_starchaser]

Q: "What do you do in your spare time?"
A: "I work at a virtual shipyard in Irrulan..."

[mkruer]

On to the launch tubes, just because I am interested, where did you get the depth of the hanger. The way you have them now, there is no way to get this ships into them other them lowering them in from the top.

I got their depth from being horrified about their shortness
Seriously; like, now they are like 80 meters long. How much acceleration could you impart a ship in just 80 meters?

Well lets see the theoretical max velocity of a rail cannon (I assume they would being this technology to launch fighters rather then… say steam) is about 10kmps. Right now we have experimental rail cannons that will send a projectile to 2kmps in only 10m. So all things being equal the problem is not the distance (length) of the tube, its the acceleration. Just how much acceleration do you want to subject your pilots to, but because the ships have inertia dampeners, this is all irrelevant.

[chuck_starchaser]

Well, if they have "inertia dampeners" then you could accelerate them over a half-meter tube, as they'd NOT oppose acceleration and therefore any force would result in instant acceleration. Crappy pseudoscience and startrekky fantasy. Anyways, I made the tubes to follow canon as much as possible but I'd rather NOT be reminded that in doing so I'm reaffirming that bullshit; I might change my mind and take them out.

EDIT:
Sorry if I haven't much to show, lately; this business of making an inner hull is a lot more work than I was bargaining for. Problem is, you can't just scale the mesh down, because you want to keep constant distance to the surface, more or less. And even after any reduction, rounding the edges isn't trivial because the bevel tool that comes with blender is buggy. And one can't do a rough manual job of it and expect to fix it by smoothing, because the smooth tool is a little weird too. So I've been creating all those ribs in the pics above in order to then join the inside edges of neighboring ribs to come up with the hull; but lining up the outside of the ribs with the mesh's surface, although trivial, is hard work. Almost done now, though.

[spiritplumber]

Eeep.... uhm, what's the inner hull for? ^_^;


BTW, I played a bit of Super Wing Commander... is THAT ever ripe for a remake. Nice game but the Talon becoming a Gratha is just cheesy.

[chuck_starchaser]

Eeep.... uhm, what's the inner hull for? ^_^;

For nothing much, admittedly; but the little it is for might do a lot for visuals. Basically, I want hull and armor to be and look distinct. So, rather than the standard solution of having one mesh and painting armor plates on it, I'm modelling the hull and the armor separately. Through the gaps between, and holes in the flat-shaded armor plates, you'll be able to see the smooth, rounded hull underneath.
I have reasons to theorize that this will save me a lot of work in the long haul (pun intended), in that it will add enough complexity to the overall picture, that very little greebling will need to be added to it.

[chuck_starchaser]

One thing I can show, anyways: if you compare this pic to the one at the top of this page, you'll see that the ribs are nicely flush against the outer armor mesh, whereas they used to be floating and out of alignment. Now I can start building the hull.

[chuck_starchaser]

The hull is finally starting to happen...

[chuck_starchaser]

Closure. This is far from polished or pretty; but it's a significant milestone for me. The hull is finally closed. A solid. This is the space for the reactor and engines. I'll probably delete and redo most of the geometry back here before it looks decent, but at least I'm no longer wondering how I'm going to close it.



Not much room left for engines in the "wings", with the launch tubes in there; so the engines will be a little more cramped than in the references.
Above and below you see the edges of the armor. The armor is still in one piece; I haven't started breaking it up into individual plates yet.

[klauss]

Remember that after you're finished, you have to remember those parts of the inner hull that are invisible, to keep polycounts small (I'm hoping large parts of the inner hull will be invisible).

[spiritplumber]

I can do that from here if you want

right now I'm trying to add support for Prophecy-style engine pods.

[chuck_starchaser]

Absolutely. Like I said, I'm going to optimize at the end. Opposite of in programming, where I like to optimize from the start. Here I prefer to optimize at the end because I won't know for sure what parts are visible or not before the armor is finished. And I'm too unsure how exactly I'm going to break the armor, so I prefer to have a full hull underneath so I can try different ways.
The rooms inside will be gone. Even the launch tubes will be gone. Each room will be a sub-object that you programmatically load on entry. It's just during construction I need to keep it all as a single model.

[Spaceman Spiff]

@chuck

Your work is really amazing. Espacially because most people wouldn't care about the construction , but about the looks in the end...
I like your approach.
Do you use any reference?

[chuck_starchaser]

Thank you! References for the ship, you mean? Just these pics...



For the working style, no references; as an engineer, I need to make things make sense to me, so I approach modelling as if I were designing an actual ship. I try to figure out where I'd place the power plant, how I'd move ships around, inside the carrier, how things attach together. I just made a set of engines, for example, and I put them in place to try and figure out exact positions, but once I do I'll move them to another layer and build internal support structures for them. Here's a pic of the engines in the hull, without the armor...



... and here's the same view with the armor on top, except, right now armor covers everything; eventually it will be separate pieces with gaps between them, holes around turrets (which mount onto the hull, not the armor), and little holes near the edges for decoration



But before the armor, there will be electrical piping running on the surface of the hull, between each turret and the power plant; and after the armor there will be little scaffolds leading between EVA hatches in the main tower and the turrets. With all that there should be enough greebling not to need anything else, basically.

[chuck_starchaser]

Here's a first test of armor subdivision...



I was going to bevel the edges of the panels but then I figured, might as well use a normal map for that. Right now it kind of looks like crap because the armoring stands out too much. The materials for the hull and armor are too different. What I'm thinking for the final thing is pretty similar materials; just a bit lighter for the hull, and a hint of tint for armor, versus grayscale (zero saturation) for the hull. The hull will feature some meter diameter pipes in geometry, and smaller ones in the normal map. The armor plates have like rivets and square holes near the edges (normal map and alpha, respectively).

EDIT:
Okay, more sort of like this, colors-wise...

[spiritplumber]

D00D!

[chuck_starchaser]

Here's a neater armoring job on the forward section...

[chuck_starchaser]

Made a little bit of progress; time to work now; later.

[chuck_starchaser]

Armoring is done on the sides.



Put a multiple rocket/missile launcher at the corner there.



The new thing on top is a rad. Not sure yet how I'm going to cap the ends of the "wings".



The back is still the rough job it was; haven't touched it; just felt like looking at the engines again. Made them 10% bigger, btw.

[spiritplumber]

Looks very good to me! As VS is right now, ships would launch from the tubes and land roughly on the central ramp. is that OK?

[chuck_starchaser]

.. and land roughly on the central ramp.

Hopefully not too roughly; I didn't put springs on the hellcat's gear...

Couldn't help myself. Yeah, that's exactly the idea. And what I've been visualizing, in addition to that, is that once you land, and are still rolling into the landing deck, an automated tug grabs your ship by the nose and pushes you around and back into one of the elevator slots at the corners; then a false ceiling comes down on top of your ship as a door slides out from under it and brings the ship down into a tight-fitting chamber below the floor, closes hermetically, air rushes in to pressurize the interior, then the bottom of the chamber opens up pulling your ship down and into the main ship corridor; then another automated tug takes it from there to a spot where an escalator comes down near your cockpit, and the glass top opens up and you can get up by pressing the back arrow key, and climb onto the escalator with the other arrow keys, and so on. But of course, once you've been through it a few times you can cut the crap by pressing ESC or something.

[klauss]

I can't be certain until you finish... but I think you're going for far less armor coverage than what would be common sense.
It doesn't seem likely that large portions of seemingly bare hull would be exposed. Rather... only some weak spots - weak but necessary since they hold... ehm... sensor arrays, exit points, things like that that can't work through armor, you know. But almost everywhere else should be covered by armor plating.

Specifically: reduce the gap between armor plates.

But, as I said... I can't put my finger on it 'till it's fully done - perhaps when it's complete, it will look much better (without change).

Also... it seems that the gap between armor plates and hull is a bit excessive. I dunno... can you decrease it? Not everywhere... but some places look a bit odd.

Oh... another one - just curiosity - How long does it take to do one render? I've noticed you use radiosity in every render.

[chuck_starchaser]

Hold on, I'll time it...

This render:



took 63 seconds.

I struggled with the question of how wide to make the armor gaps and height above the hull. Of course, what you're saying makes every bit of sense, but then it wouldn't be visible, I don't think, but I may be wrong. What in the end decided me on the present height was z-buffer artifacts. I'm not sure whether this is a proble with Blender, or a hardware problem, but whenever I zoom out, things that are close below a surface start showing through...

[klauss]

Timing: Hm... impressive... it takes me several minutes (5-10) when I try rendering with radiosity. It may be that I set everything for higher quality, but in any case - impressive.

Z-buffer artifacts: Gotcha... yes, it would happen in the engine just as well. Worse, perhaps. But I do have a solution - the Ogre-based engine will allow you to sequence submeshes. So, you can say that no matter what, the hull underneath should be rendered first, and then the armor. That would get rid of the artifacts, at the cost of some overdraw.

[chuck_starchaser]

Here's my settings..



Notice that I'm far from highest settings. If I do go to octree 512, 16 samples per pixel, etceteras, I can easily have to wait 5 or 10 minutes. I found the octree number increases time a lot for no benefit that I can spot, though.
But my machine is no slouch, either; --Athlon 64 3000+, 1 gig DDR 400, 2 SATA drives with the windows swapfile and temp folder on the second drive...

HOLLY CRAP! KLAUSS! You won't believe what just came back here...
A picture is worth a thousand words...



Damn! Did I forget the number part of your address?
I'll send it again on Saturday. This time by FedEx or Express or whatever is the fastest way, no matter the cost.
How could I have been so absent-minded? I was really nervous about cost declaration and customs and all that, and about the lack of protective packaging, so I missed the obvious, I guess.

[chuck_starchaser]

Anyways, with regards to specifying the draw order, thing is, I've been planning to join the armor plates and hull, precisely to avoid overdraw. Sort of like,

Code: Select all

____   ____
   /___\

which will increase poly count, but, will minimize overdraw, as well as optimize for stencil shadows the way you were describing. The problem is that the hull is smooth-shaded, whereas armor isn't, and mixing smooth and solid shadings is tricky. Essentially, what I have to do is...

Code: Select all

_____     _____
    /     \
   /_.___._\

...where the dots are extra cut lines, and the little lines next to the dots are flat-shaded lead-in's, to avoid interpolating between weird normals... The lead-in's can be very thin, and lurk in the shadows there. They don't even have to be flat-shaded; they can be smooth-shaded, all the same; they'll just take the shading weirdness upon themselves in their shadowy dwellings. But poly count will certainly go up... Well, I'm going to do one deep optimizations round before I do all this, and probably another one after.

Again, though, I'm using basically one material for all smooth shading and another one (slightly more greenish) for all flat shading, just so I can select either group by material. Maybe I could leave the materials as such, and the draw order trick could be based on materials rather than meshes/objects?