New Hornet model

Privateer Ferrius · Post by **Privateer Ferrius** » Wed Mar 29, 2006 8:01 pm

Woah. Beautiful model!

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Wed Mar 29, 2006 8:03 pm

I can think of two possible solutions for the front wings.

The first one is to attach them to the slanted side-panel. The other is to straighten them out and merge them with the back wing.

I prefer the last idea, because it feels more likely to work and it seems to comply with the cutscene-view and the side-view from the cockpit.

What was the aim again for this model in tris? Can't seem to find the post where we talked about this.
And to what level of detail should this be modelled?
I saw from that HellCat that you went a lot further than I was planning to go.
Like with the panels, should that kind of details not better be left for normalmaps?

I'lll try to get some views aligned first and then I will give those front wings a shot.

Privateer Ferrius · Post by **Privateer Ferrius** » Wed Mar 29, 2006 8:06 pm

I believe the consensus when you asked Chuck and I on polys was 'just do how many looks good', without going overboard, of course.

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Wed Mar 29, 2006 8:46 pm

Clearly the front wings need work.

The tips of the guns look a lot different in cockpit view though, but since were also making separate cockpit views that's an easy enough fix.

The cockpit could be made wider, but that would make it over 2 meters wide. It's about 1,5 meters wide as it is.

All in all I think the model is okay and just needs some details and a paint job.

Won't be able to do any work on it tonight though. If anyone feels tempted, the file that chuck posted is still the last version.

Privateer Ferrius · Post by **Privateer Ferrius** » Wed Mar 29, 2006 9:06 pm

Other than the front wings, it looks pretty damn close

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Wed Mar 29, 2006 9:32 pm

Ok, the angle is not *exactly* the same, so the problem with the front wings may actually look worse than it is. Not sure if I'm imagining this, they look a bit as if they are slanted, like lower at the back than at the front.

The back of the fuselage needs to be a wee bit taller.

Perhaps the vertical wings (rudders?) need to squeeze a little closer; but this could be that the scaling of the two pics is not identical.

Guns/-mounts; look like they could shift forward a tiny bit, like 1/2 inch

Cockpit bubble could double --I feel poetic today...

Tri-count-wise, don't be concerned. After you're done we'll work together on a clean-up, and we'll probably get rid of like a thousand tris, easily; but during the design phase you can't be thinking of optimization; you need to just concentrate on getting the form right.
Those panels on the side of the Hellcat are only 5 sides. That's a joke, poly-wise; like 10 tris each. I should have put many more. We'll use the bump map for bumps

, seriously, like rivet-heads, things much smaller than an inch.

Gotta go; I'll be back later tonight.

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Wed Mar 29, 2006 11:38 pm

Ok will give it another shot.

Fireskull · Post by **Fireskull** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 12:30 am

Sorry for my absence, but I have something to add which I feel is important.

The cockpit could be made wider, but that would make it over 2 meters wide. It's about 1,5 meters wide as it is.

Forget nearly completely about realism when dealing with wing commander. Its all purely fiction, and though there is a consistency within the WC universe, there inst a consistency between WC and the real world. If the cockpit bubble is 2 meters wide in the original model, so be it.

I did some rescaling with the WCU capships a couple months ago. Trust me: everything in WC is crazy scale wise. Just do what looks close to the original, cause thats what WC fans will be looking for.

Privateer Ferrius · Post by **Privateer Ferrius** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 12:39 am

As long as you make planets real-sized, all will be good. People'd cry bloody murder if you deviated too much from what they expect on the fighters, though.

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 1:16 am

Well this took me a while but here it is, the Hornet Mark II.

I put up an ingame top view of the Hornet and adjusted everything to that. So this is the ingame original hornet.

The only thing that has to be done now is adjust the cockpit. Should be easy enough compared to the rest, but I am too tired now.

Here's the updated blend

http://www.deeplayer.com/DualJoe/Hornet ... -mk2.blend

remembered your ftp this time Chuck.

PS You don't need to zip blendfiles. You can turn on compress file in the file menu and Blender will do it for you.
You can also pack all you images and textures in the one blend-file.

Post by **klauss** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 1:42 am

Lovely.
Can't think of anything bad to say - but I'm sure Chuck will (not that he's prone to bad saying, but he knows modelling better). And if Chuck fails, Ryder won't (no offence, Ryder, but it is in your nature to be... well... pinchy).

Privateer Ferrius · Post by **Privateer Ferrius** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 1:46 am

When at a lack of words, the thesaurus can be your friend

Personally, I think it's a downright gorgeous model, especially for a first time.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 2:53 am

Okay, I'll do my best to live up to my reputation for pickiness

************************************************************
Here are discrepancies I see. I do NOT mean "errors", as I know this model is modelled after the blueprint, so these are canon discrepancies for the most part, and a value judgement whether to adjust to fit the ingame model.
************************************************************

Having said that, let's see:

A) The angle of the shot is not the same, so some of the points below may be more or less valid because of it.

1) The backs of the front wings are more round in the original. This is true also of the blueprint, btw. I know you're trying to save polies. I wouldn't exactly make the curve in 75 steps, but 2 or 3 are well justified, methinks.
The back part is a little bigger also (wider), leaving smaller segments between the points near the numbers 1 and 2.

2) The tips of the front wings seem more rounded in the original.

3) There's something about the angle and length of the main wings' tips; but this may be caused by the slightly different perspective of the shots.

4) Weapon mounts seem a lot thinner in the original.

5) The back is much better but still not quite right, relative to the original game model, which seems wider... (wider at the front as well, btw).

6) There's a shade of darker green in that spot on the roof, which might seem to denote where the edges were in the original geometry, but this is just my theory; it could be just the way it's painted. However, I think that with Origin's models you can pretty much count on that, wherever the color changes, there's a geometry edge there.

7) This is hard to put in words, so I'm letting the lines do the talking. This section is going to be the toughest, no doubt. It IS a subtle shape, and there's not only the blueprint and the in-game shots, but also the side-view on deck, all of which probably have irreconcileable discrepancies. So this is an artistic, scientific and magical endeavor; to try and get something that pulls all those sources together. But I'd spend weeks on it if I had to, to get it beyond right, because probably no other part of this ship is as unique, as WC ships go, as its cockpit and front section. This area is what makes a Hornet a Hornet more than any other part. So, let me retract my earlier suggestion about beveling. Beveling should be the last step; first this section needs to be worked on. Once you bevel, editing the shape becomes a nightmare.

8 ) I'm sure what happened was Origin were planning to make round guns, but then looked at the cost in poly count and went with squares...
I think we could do both, keep the round parts round, and just add a couple of little square shapes, to better evoke memories of the ingame Hornet original.

9) Another canon discrepancy. The in-game model seems to have a larger step at the front of the wings, which explains to me why the outer segments of the wings look thinner in the original, whereas the inner segments seem exactly right.

WRT The cockpit...
I totally agree with Fireskull; getting the shape right is more important than the measures. I made the same mistake: In my initial Hellcat I put a tiny cockpit, because I figured, if the ship was so big (27 meters), the original cockpit was the size of a church.
In a later conversation with Brad Mick, he'd faced the same discrepancy, and what he did was move away from the official size for the Hellcat, to keep the cockpit at the same size ratio.
His approach is right, and I've heard it said tha Bandit LOAF has said that the official sizes were just figures for the books; nothing to take too seriously. And what Brad did was to take pictures of movies where you see people next to the fighters, and determine the true sizes of the fighters that way.

And once the geometry is right, next thing will be the cockpit's interior, and then coloring (materials), as it's much easier to get the colors exactly right in Blender than it is by consecutive iterations of changing the texture and launching the game engine. Once the colors are right, and we do a UV-unwrap, we can bake those colors to a texture using blender, and that'll give the texturing job a mighty head-start.

Oh, and thanks for the tip on compression. Question: How do you set up for mirrored editing?

EDIT:
One more: I think the vertical "rudders" or whatever, need to have their height adjusted down a tiny, tiny bit... less than 5% I'm talking.

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 10:17 am

This is a lot bette than elysiun, I get some really good feedback here. The only thing I got when I did my first two heads one female and one reptillian man (could be a Rlaan) was something along the lines of "nice".

I'll post some top, side and front shots, the one's I actually used to model.
The roundness of the wings should be better, but since I'm still changing the wings all the time I'll do that when we get to the stage of bevelling. First I'd like to have the shape and dimensions right.

Mirrored editing in Blender works like this.
First you need something to be mirrored obviously, could even be a single vert.
Then place the 3d-cursor where you want the plane of mirroring to be. In object-mode push "Centre Cursor" to make that the centre of the model.
Select mirror from the list of modifiers and set the direction of mirroring. I also suggest do-clipping so you don't accidentely move through the looking glass (some weird stuff happens there).
If the mirrored part seems off you probably need to press Ctrl-A to apply size and rotation.

Second way of doing it, if you would like to model from both sides.
Make a linked duplicate and mirror the copy. Then you allign the two halves. The only trouble with this is that you'll have to be very carefull at the edge of the "mirror" since there's nothing stopping you now. It also has the added hassle of manually merging the halves back together, remove doubles is your friend there.

Will post those views later today.

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 12:03 pm

Here are the views, rushed it so the scaling is not exactly right, but it'll have to do.

Some of the reference shots seem to have been taken at a slight angle, but the views of the model are all head on.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 3:11 pm

Ah, good stuff. I see now some of my observations were in error, like what I said about the step size in the main wings and the thinnes of the outer segments. That thinnes in the original is due to the way the wings are painted.

Ok, so, top view:

The backs of the front wings don't need to be bigger, like I though; only rounder; but the tips could use a trimming.

Thinnning of the weapons is definitely needed, like ", S Shif-X 0.5 Enter" kind of thing.

Something new: The weapons could use a slight scaling down in the z-dimension, (front to back, centered on the weapons; i.e.: mounts moving fwd, fronts moving back), which I think is your x dimension, IIRC).

(Note, for export to .obj, we'll need to rotate the model so tha positive z is forward, positive y is up through the roof and x is side to side.)

I was wrong: the width and proportions of the back are exactly right in the top view; but the width and proportions of the cockpit and surroundings need some serious beefing up; and it would start from the very nose; its width seems nearly double in the game pic.

Side view:

There's a mysterious something in the side-view of the original; I don't know what it is, white painted, that appears to extend the back at the bottom.

The bottom of the model needs a plane cut that flattens it towards the back; --it doesn't keep going down to the very back, in the original.

One general observation I have about the Hornet's side view is that, looking at the game shot, it does have the same "flavor" as when you see the ship up-close on flight deck. Unmistakably the same flavor. We need to destill the essence of this flavor and make sure it's there in the model.
Part of it is the roof: Although is needs to be lower at the back, it needs to be a bit higher at the fron, --i.e.: less slant, by like 5 degrees. Then, the slant of the rear bottom edge of the cockpit bubble will increase. The forward half of the bottom edge of the cockpit bubble needs to move lower and flatter. Although there is a bit of a rise in the fuselage, forward from the cockpit, it's more like a long, shallow, flat mesa.

The outer edge of the hull, in the original side view, seems to go all the way forward, perfectly horizontally, like the edge of an SR-71; would be nice to have a frontal shot too; I can't tell what this horizontal line going all the way forward actually represents... But whatever it is, it seems the front wings are below it.

Back view:

I was right about the vertical rudders needing their height adjusted down, and the weapons squeezed in a bit. There's something else, between the weapons and rudders, on top of the wings, missing in the model. Hopefully it will remain unclear what it is so we can put some complex greeble there

The top edge at the back could move a bit straight down. This would fix not only the height, but would also fix the angle of the top slanted sides.

I also seem to see that, in the original, the weapons are not vertically centered on the wings, but slightly up...

*******************************************************
All of the above, as I said before, is optional fixes IF wanting to fit the ingame original model better than the blueprint, which would be my personal choice, but by no means a mandate.
*******************************************************

Thanks for the mirroring instructions; I'll try that.

Glad you appreciate honest feedback. Some people are offended when they hear anything other than "nice"

(notably one VS forum modeller whose 4-letter handle starts with an A, who routinely becomes defensive at the slightest deviation from "nice" (and whose work generally sucks, IMO)).

EDIT:
I just noticed the weapons, in top view, show some asymmetries, in the original, that aren't present in the model; like that bottom tube near the mount shows on the in-side, in top view; which means it's not positioned straight down below the barrel, but at an angle. There's also an asymmetric little detail at the forward tip of the weapon.

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 4:02 pm

I am working on it, maybe I'll even do the cockpit.
Will post the results later.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 5:11 pm

I was just looking at the shots in your earlier collage, trying to find out what that white thing at the back, in the side view, might be. From looking at this shot...

...it would seem to me is somehow related to weapon mounts, rather than a part of the fuselage; but in top and back views, weapon mounts are tiny, so I'm really, really not sure...

EDIT:
Can't be related to weapons mounts; they are too far forward for that.
Hmmm...
This only leaves those hipbones extending back; maybe they need to extend a bit down?

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 6:26 pm

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...

Here's an idea:
Could you make a set of screenshots that go progressively from side view to top and/or bottom and/or back views?
Nah, that's too much work, I imagine, but you could fly around in-game and just take a look, see what that is.

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 7:43 pm

This is the current state of affairs, I will update the ftp-blend in a minute.

This should be enough for even the most hardcore WC1-fan.

EDIT
Blend-file updated, see previous link.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 7:55 pm

Man! The wings are ABSO-FRIGGIN-PERFECT

Front wings too.

Ha, one thing I didn't catch before: The vertical wings, they are narrower at the tip, in the original.

This should be enough for even the most hardcore WC1-fan.

Agreed, --except the cockpit. I'd say it's gone 50% of the way to perfection, but still has another 50 to go. If you need a break, I could hack at it for a bit, after work.

EDIT:
Looking at the blend file now; nah, the cockpit's gone 75% towards perfection; 25% to go. Just needs a couple of cuts and a slight shift down. Bit more width too. I'll try and do it right now; hope the boss doesn't come in...

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 8:12 pm

chuck_starchaser wrote: If you need a break, I could hack at it for a bit, after work.

YES!!!

The cockpit just needs the bubble or the canopy (preferably), but the wings need some work.
I think it's ready to be cut up for those lovely round edges.
I can post the original ingame cockpit views if you like.

On damage.
Just saw that in the privateer mod the ships disintegrate into splinters. even the WC1 solution of standard junk was better than that.
The wingtips, engines and hull could be made into subunits for when the ship gets damaged. When you lose the wingtip, the gun is gone too.
It would also be nice if the destroyed craft fell apart in these sections, maybe even have the engines shoot off in weird trajectories.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 8:37 pm

Damage scenarios are not easy. Can't make everything into sub-units. A particle system would be more appropriate, and it could be spawned at the right time, replacing the ship. Okay, we're talking explosions, here. Damage, I had this idea at one time we could stain the ship's texture with blackness, then with alpha=0 to create holes in the armor; and we could have 2 or 3 sets of twisted ship guts that we can spawn in a ship the moment we put alpha holes on its armor, right behind the holes. But all these things are easier said than done

DualJoe · Post by **DualJoe** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 8:54 pm

If that trick with alpha-textures works, I think that's good enough for wings. Even without the spawned guts.

Then again bulletholes in the texture with bumpmapping is nice too.

EDIT
Isn't just spawning different versions of the ship an option?
Or replacing the ship with either standard debris or the parts I mentioned earlier.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 9:17 pm

Depends. If you try to replace the whole ship at once with debris, chances are the engine will stutter, just from having to load all that geometry. If you try to repace only parts, then those parts need to be subunits in the first place. Subunits are wonderful, but there are issues of performance to consider. Each time the gpu has to switch from one set of shaders to another, the time required for the setup is roughly equivalent to the time it takes to display 10,000 tris. That's why, I believe, Klauss is trying so hard to come up with universal shaders, --so that we'll hardly ever need to switch them. But then again, if the subunits use only one shader, and it's the same shader as the ship, that may not be an issue. But even with the same shader, I'm not sure if all subunits of a unit could share the same texture. If they could, we'd be all set, I think; if not, switching textures is pretty expensive too.
My idea of overwriting parts of the texture sounds nice, but it's not easy to touch textures IN the videocard memory. Well, maybe there's a way of having hole and burn textures in the videocard as well, and have the gpu blit them or combine them on the fly. Klauss could answer these questions best.
Another problem I see is that you'd want to copy on write to a texture being modified, otherwise, the hole you put on the texture of a hornet will show up on all hornets... :-/