I whooped this ship up in an instant..

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charlieg
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Post by charlieg »

smbarbour wrote: The question that was implied is: "Is this model worth doing?" All models start somewhere.
There's absolutely no way that can be answered by such a simple collection of triangular polygons. That's just too simple to be able to make any kind of opinion based on it. Essentially it's worthless as anything other than a way to start debates such as this.

Ok, I'm gonna shut my non-contributing ass up now. I shouldn't be so discouraging. It'd just be nice if people were a little more realistic from the get-go.
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Post by CubOfJudahsLion »

This is officially a pro-Blender3D thread. Ton is happy.

@charlieg: I like realism.

Never mind the raw billions-of-triangles figures you get from video card company benchmarks. Those are usually very skewed as real-world software and systems don't just do bulk rendering of triangles.

A more realistic figure for modern systems, if you want to keep frame rates reasonable, goes between 200000 - 500000 triangles on-screen, depending on your video board. That goes for all of the ships in the screen along with bases, stars, star halos, and planets with their atmospheres, a bit less if you have multiple-texture models and beautiful pixel/vertex shaders. Sure, you CAN have a 50000 poly model, but you can't put ten of those next to a starbase and expect your game to behave. Modelers for real-time applications still need to be conscious of limits.

Designers of pure-eye-candy Haegemonia had mesh limits of 1500 for small ships and 15000 for starbases and capitals, but these a year+ old, so I suspect we could go up a bit higher. 2000-20000 ranges are probably acceptable by today's graphics hardware.

So yes, we have better looking stuff and a lot more of liberty to shape our models (we don't have to reduce them to caricatures of themselves) but we still gotta resort to LODs, mipmaps, mesh optimization and textures for details. We're still trying to squeeze cycles off our machines. Maybe next-year's PCI-X 32x cards and 7GHz processors (I'm merely using Moore's law) will have the power and bandwidth to put an end to artistic limitations.
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Post by Duality »

Ok. Here is the final pic for the ship.

I tottaly changed the name and chassias to make it sound better.

http://edice.arvixe.com/images/tracticuspic.jpg

And a special thanks to the terrazzo feature to have it's effect applied to the main textures and made a bunch of tiles out of it.

And yes, it has been known that it has been smoothed.
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Post by MamiyaOtaru »

Nice. A well done texture can do a lot to make up for low poly numbers. I have a great deal of respect for modellers who can keep the mesh sparing and add details as possible with the texture, as opposed to creating a flat textured, all-details-in-the-mesh monstrosity. it is easy to throw polygons at something. Finding a good balance that still looks good is somewhat zen, and creating a good texture is very artistic work (and something I totally suck at).

If that ship is viewed as wireframe, it does look rather poor next to some of what we have, but taken as a whole it isn't bad. Wether it fits into VS is another question (it is a tad on the simplistic side), but I think it is obvious the finished product is nowhere near as bad as people were moaning about. Fazit: it's good to have some standards for admittance into VS. Have and use them. But don't be too dismissive of lower poly work.. The strength of Howie's models for example lies IMHO in the texturing.

Of course my commentary has been coloured by too much experience with impressively detailed meshes that never get textured ;)
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FWIW, in privr, we try to limit bases to 10,000, and any ships with more than 4,000 polys get LOD meshes. Ideally any with more than 2,500, but I only have so much time (not a single ship has come with one, leaving it to me). Another reason to smile at Duality's ship: doesn't need 'em ;) Still looks like the SWACS though :D (the triangle on top of the SWACS rotates IIRC and when it points forwards, looks a lot like yours)
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Post by Duality »

Well the final finish up for the ship model is 343 polies and the texture size is about 1024x1024 about to get compressed as well.

So I smoothed the model a little bit.
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Post by charlieg »

From below and above, that ship now looks great, the texture is superb.

From the side, especially the top triangular turret [for want of a better word] looks awful. It looks too jagged and just 'dumped' on the top of the ship rather than connected to it. Possibly a little more model detail on how the underside of the triangular turrent and the ship's main hull connect could make it look a lot better from that angle. [IM-humble-O.]
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Post by Culture20 »

Perhaps the top pyramid could be a superb sensor array and/or cloaking device, making the ship a sort of stealth-scout?

There could be a fighter version without the top portion, meaning that charlieg's observation would be 100% accurate. The manufacturers just added the top for added functions.
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Post by jackS »

While the texture does wonders to help the model, the model fundamentally needs significantly more detail to really be interesting.

As an aside - I am deeply amused at the mention of stealth properties because of similarities to the polygonal nature of the F-117 (which would have been an A-# except that they wanted more interest from pilots, so they gave it an F designation) because the only reason that the F-117 has polygonal surfaces is because the computers of the day weren't up to computing the stealth equations for more complex surfaces. The F-117 has horrible flight characteristics because of this. With advances in computational power, we got the B-2, which has a more conventional appearance.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Indeed, and that's such a funny story, when you think of it: They could have taken the polygonal model and smoothed it, and there was no reason to believe that smoothing it would worsen its stealth characteristics, --quite the opposite, if anything; but an ultra-conservative, "take no chances" attitude predominated, somehow.
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Post by Duality »

Good guess there but this ship is not supposed to be a stealth fighter in anyways. Just another ordinary starfighter I must say.

Yeah it does look like most of the ships from different series like Starwars, real life simply because I whooped it up.

Didn't get any time to come up with more of an original concept.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

I assume the holes on the sides are for forward thrusters? If so, kudos!: something that's sorely missing in most models is a confirmation or justification for their ability to deccelerate at multiple G's.
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Post by Duality »

No. They are guns and missile ports. As for the bottom hole on that ship, you can either fit two missile ports or one gun and one missile.
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Post by MamiyaOtaru »

jackS wrote:With advances in computational power, we got the B-2, which has a more conventional appearance.
:shock:
Image
I know what you mean, but really ;)
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

I thought maybe JackS was thinking of the B2 but had the image of a B1 in mind,
though definitely the B2 has rounded surfaces if not edges. The B1 preceeded the F117;
It was Regan's baby... Just PDP-11's back then...
Yet somehow they managed to give it a radar profile about 1% as much as that of a B52.
And with swept wings to boot... range is unbelievable...

Image

Image
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Post by BradMick »

i have to say, the textures are not the best they could be. they lack realism, and they're a throwback to the days when texturing was young. honestly, i think you need to sit down and hardcore study real world aircraft for any kind of texture job. unless the ship is some kind of chrystaline organic craft of some sort, or some crazy freaky race who likes to defy all logic or reason in setting up their ships....then they're not going to have all these extruded panels and what not all over the hull. if you want to give an 'alien' feel to a ship which is based on more real world craft, use more circles or organic type shapes, as opposed to straight lines or boxes. circular access panels, not a lot of raised anything, and avoid embossing stuff too. its way overdone in that job there. yup. best advice i can give, study the hell outta some real world aircraft and apply what you see there to the textures of your craft. you'll acheive some brilliant results with it.
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jackS
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Post by jackS »

the one caveat for studying real world aircraft for spacecraft design is that they are aircraft and spacecraft and the aerodynamic necessities of the first tend to have no need to transfer to the second.
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Post by BradMick »

well, sure. but its also a matter of what looks good, what looks professional and believable (especially if you're building a human ship) and what looks sub-par and amatuerish. again. look at what Strangelet and Howard Day do...and to top it, what the game industry does. compare and contrast. it goes back to the earlier discussion of vegastrike doing things which makes it second rate, or the potential industry leader it would like to hope to be.
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