Atlantia-the rework(ignore other one- forgot the poll)

[chrisdn]

Redesigning my prototype Alantia

[chrisdn]

Here's Atlantia with engine's, superstructure, cooling ports and collector/deflector array. No textures at and I've kept everything to 2 materials just to keep it simple for now. I'm working on placement of main hangars and launch tubes and exact placement of the main engine on her stern. The hull is going to roughened up alot and a great deal of more detail added to the 'wings'.

[Kangaroo]

I like it. Looks like it is able to land in aerospace, so it might need to cover the small structures with something transparent. But that's only my opinion. Still, it looks great!

[chrisdn]

Thanks Kanga...I must admit that she does look like she has an an aerodynamic hull but that's not the idea. If she did then life for me and my story would be so much easier! I have only just really set the final length of ATlantia which is 4609 metres(excluding deflector/collector array). Even is she was as aerodynamic as concorde, she still wouldn't be able to fly.

The design is streamlined because I've always liked streamlined objects like the SR71. I just have her general shape in my mind and I'm determined to design something around that. I've mentioned to you before that on top of her 120 fighters, she will also carry around 20 shuttles. Alot of these shuttles/transports will be designed for atmospheric flight, the main stay being capable of transporting 1000 people.

If you look at the superstructure, the square recess looks empty towards the bow, that area is for habitats. Thes will be transparent area with trees etc inside. These will be used for crew recreation as well as food sources, CO2 and waste management etc. When you have some I'd love for you to post your planet ship threads here as well.

This applies to any viewers...if you would like to add images or concepts of your own (with relevance to Atlantia) then please feel free to do so!

In the meantime, if anyone would like to read about Atlantia then here is the story so far:

http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/atl ... hedawn.pdf

The novel so far doesn't tally directly to the model as I've spent more time on Atlantia than the book recently. If you have any ideas or criticisms for the novel then please post them here as well.

[Kangaroo]

If I understand right, then Atlantia was ment to be built in some space shipyard. Gonna have to model that too...

[chuck_starchaser]

Nice job, chrisdn; now you're getting the hang of it, eh? Yep, there's no substitute for hard work and doing and redoing things till they look right, in modelling. That city-like patch is very unique, too. Keep up the good work.

[chrisdn]

Chuck...Trying to add viewports to the superstructure...knw the material settings to make the glass look like it's emitting light? When I'm trying to roughen the hull do you reckon it's best just to pick sections at randon and extrude some and intrude others? Think that'll roughen it or is there some incane art to roughening hulls up?

[chuck_starchaser]

Are you using Blender? In Blender, and just for rendering, there's an emissivity slider in the material properties. I've never used it but it should work. For the final model, you make a separate texture for emissive stuff, called the "glow texture". Check the wiki; there's instructions there how to specify the glow texture in the bfxm using mesher.exe.

When I'm trying to roughen the hull do you reckon it's best just to pick sections at randon and extrude some and intrude others?

Please don't do that to yourself. That's a one-way street, if you don't like it you can't get back to the original unless you save a backup. There's a much more elegant way: Bump map, or normal map, or dudv map. The new engine with the Ogre back-end and shaders will support one or more of those. All you have to do then is put a bit of perlin noise onto your bump map, and, if necessary, run nvdxt to convert it to a normal or dvdu map. That will look gorgeous. Geometry tweaks will look like crap, because the geometry subdivision is too large, as well as polygonal.
In addition, you can use what's called a "detail texture", which the VS engine supports, but I haven't used it myself yet. The idea is this:
Your normal texture, if you get close enough to the model, begins to look pixelated due to the artifacts of 2D linear interpolation. And you can only give your texture so much resolution.
The detail texture is a texture that the engine tiles across, blending it with the normal texture. At each tiling it covers a small piece of your ship. You can fill this texture with tileable noise, or some fine, repeating pattern, like lines or thatch or squares. Can be, say, 256x256 and look like TV snow. As you get closer to the ship, the detail texture begins to mix with your regular texture and provides the illusion of a much finer pattern than the regular texture; --it's a repeating pattern, but if this "detail texture" is tileable, you won't notice the repetition, specially being blended with the normal texture. This will give your ship roughness down to centimeter scale, perhaps, and help avoid pixelated looks at close range.

Here's a tileable, detail texture for ya:



If your ship is 3 kilometers and you use a 1k x 1k texture, say, that's 3 meters per pixel. I'd make this detail texture span, say, about 16 pixels of the main texture, so that's about 48 meters. It's 256x256, so 48 meters over 256 = about 19 centimeters (7.4 inches) per pixel. That's a lot finer than 3 meters...

Anyways, for windos, you'd probably want to make them part transparent, part-specular, and have a plane behind them with emissive patterns; otherwise the patterns won't move as you fly around the windows, and will look "painted on" them, unless they are so small it doesn't matter, in which case you just paint tiny squares with light grey in the glow texture.

[klauss]

Man... you should compre your first model with this one.
It's almost unbelievable the same person did both.

Keep up the good work, yeah...

[chrisdn]

Thanks Klaus...it's amazing what a bit of determination can do.

Chuck...as I'm still using AC3D I'm buggered when it comes to bump maps etc. I'll still have to learn all of the Blaender rules for texturing etc. The texturing is even more complicated than the modelling...in fact I'm starting to think the texturing is about 10 times more time consuming than the modelling. I use POVRAY to render everything and it can do just about anything but its all script based and I really don't know where to bloody start with it as I can't find any idiot's guide style literature for it.

I'll give that texture you sent through a quick try and post it. Hot a nice one for the superstructure but the hull is one I'm stuck with.

AC3D is quite a good bit of kit but it's pretty limited in it's textures (not sure how the interface works). I would love to knock together some great reflective metal textures but I'm knackered.

Want the model for the engine? It might come in handy for any other stuff you're designing.

[chrisdn]

Just started to try and put some textures to her. I'm only showing the top at present as there is alot of work to do to the main hanger and fighter launch tubes not to mention how I'm going to configure the main engines- one gigantic one or 6 smaller- decisions decisions.







From the SBD 'wing' with cooling vents and aux engines showing




Relative close up of the C&C superstructure. Green glow is the energy weapon's core. This core is fed into multiple turrets around the ship. On top of the energy weapons she is also equipeed with multiple rail guns, torpedoes and her compliment of over 100 heavy anmd light fighters



Added a bit too much light here...Can just make out FWD Science and Astro sections

[Halleck]

Wow... the texturing really did the trick there!

It's quite an unusual asthetic you're going for... a combination of a smooth, streamlined hull with prominent patches of hypercomplex greebling. It makes me question whether the fictional designers of the ship favored form or function and in what combination.

[Ryder P. Moses]

Heh, I recognize that texture.

The patchy greebling doesn't really do it for me- maybe if there was something on the rest of the ship where it's not going all crazy or the greebles were all spread out, little sticks and buildings and such poking out of little crevasses and things that look like they're there for a reason.

[chrisdn]

Halleck...the idea od the ship is that hull and superstructure are built seperately...the hull is built as a standard type, the superstructure is then added at a later date when the specific nature of the vessel is known. The hull design will be fairly standard for all CTD capable ship.

This follows the normal track in modern ship building. Believe it or not, the same hull is used in a Royal Navy Amphibious Assault ship that is also used in a cargo ship. Other ships based on the same hull will vary incredibly. Atlantia is for Deep Exploration and is armed to the teeth for any unsuspected surprises. Other's will be primarily for building colonies, another for cargo transport, another as a gas carrier etc etc

Ryder...This is just a rough look for the hull...I am adding quite alot to the hull including gun emplacements, torpedo tubes, lifeboat launchers, a small amount of external pipework and any other suggestions anyone might have. I like the texture myself for the hull and I've been trawling through the net for ages looking for a free texture which I liked.

Just wanted to let everyone know that Kangaroo22 is helping me out now and he's going to work on the planet ships, some of the ststions...the comdcom yard (commissioning/decommissioning) and some other stuff. If you want to read about some of the ships to expect or to even have a crack at some of them yourselves then just open the pdf on this thread and have a read of the prologue. If needed I will give some much more in depth descriptions of some of the vessels.

Thanks for everyone's input so far. Anyone got any views on how the hanger/s should look like? I'm going to have 2 shuttle hangars and 10 fighter landing bays and I've also allocated space for 36 fighter launch tubes along her port and Starboard under the wings. I have some pretty contemporary designs for airtight doors but I thought someone else might have some more extreme ideas. I'll be using doors and not force fields by the way.

I think I've mentioned it earlier but if anyone has any designs they think are of relevance then plaease, please post them.

[charlieg]

Guys stop moaning. That ship looks massive, looks cool, and is definitely the kind of calibre modelling VS needs.

I like the mostly smooth hull with a small exposed area for the tourists.

[chrisdn]

Thanks for your input Charlie...glad you think she looks huge...thats what I was trying for but my god is it hard to get that effect?

[chuck_starchaser]

Yeah, I like clustering of greebles, myself. Maybe a little bit of greebles in other places would help the sense of continuity, but tiny complexity is what makes a model look big, and you can't cover everything due to poly count; and if you spread the greebles, the sense of complexity is gone. The only problem is if there's no greebles at all for very big swaths you lose a sense of connection. But a tiny gadget here and there, with perhaps a wire or pipe running to the main patch could restore that sense of unity withouth adding too much poly count, and while still allowing the greater than the sum of the parts complexity that the patch achieves the way it is.

[chrisdn]

Chuck....that's exactly what I plan to do. There's a few shots of some weapons turrets below.The enrgy turret is going to feature a fair bit in the greebling because of the energy conduits connecting turrets to the weapons core. Once they're in position and attached pipework and supply systems are attached it should start adding a bit more detail to the hull- hopefully.

Damn hanagars...where do I start?

These turrets will be surface mounted around the superstructure and hull primarily as a defensive solution.




A Beam turret...these will add to the greebling with the attached systems






One of the rail gun turrets...you just be able to see the projectile loading rails underneath








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[chuck_starchaser]

That's EXACTLY what I think is the single most powerful greebling technique; --what you're doing with the second tower: Tiny details, yet partly hidden... It gives the observer a sense of complexity that *increases* inwards. The mind then fills in with 10 or 100 more greebles you never had to model!!! Excellent!
Eventually you'll want to make your turrets into separate models and mount them onto the ship as sub-units, via the units.csv file. That way each turret can be animated and have its own AI. But you can place them on the model for now, so you know what it will look like.

[chrisdn]

That's the plan I was aiming for. In game, some turrets will be controlled by player/s others by AI. At present I'm still getting to grips with modelling and I'll really have to look closely at the actual game engine in a month or so.
Do you know if you can integrate 2D adventure and 3D shoot em ups into the Vega Strike engine? I want the game to have strategy elements like Star Control, 2D adventure like flight of the Amazon Queen, 3D shoot em up like doom on top of the 3D flight aspect of the Vega engine. Does VS support turret operations? view is fixed and weapons move?

I really want to go to town on the game and make it an all encompassing experience with multiplayer collaboration...players can be command crew, gunmen, marines, science/research etc.

What are your views on that? Would it be worth it to add mystery angles (2D adventure) and strategy to the 3D 1st person sides of the game?

[chuck_starchaser]

Have you played the Privateer Remake? There you can scroll between cockpit and turrets with the "[" key. Doom style FPS isn't supported yet, but it will be; but it will take some time. Ogre integration comes first; but klauss has been planning to tackle walking around bases and in ships; I might even be able to help him, even; and in my Bengal model for WCU I'm modelling the interior in anticipation of that addition. As for 2D adventure; I don't think I've ever played one :-/ so I can't comment... But the more complex a game, the better; tho I'm not sure how well 3D and 2D mixing would go.

[chrisdn]

Ain't had a chance to play the privateer remake yet as I'm changing broadband providers and I refuse to download it on dialup. I suppose Being able to walk around in 3D will suffice, mainly for interaction between characters and players etc.

Do any of the mods so far have some form of strategy section integrated? Mainly for co-ordinating scout missions and some of the larger battles that might involve spreding fighters etc quite thin and over a large area.

Done some new hanger doors- woohoo! Just need to work out how the hangars are going to be positioned.

I', going to add some of the habitats (from that station) to the area in front of the C&C superstructure. These can detached and placed in orbi of a planet if an outpost or station is required. Good idea or not? I'm also trying to figure out a way for her to harvest and processasteroids for raw materials (for ship repairs, water, colony building, weapon manufacture etc.) Think that'd be good or a bit overkill?

[chuck_starchaser]

In WCU there are many squadron orders and I believe some tactical orders are either in or planned. Strategy, as in fleet-wide orders, not yet in or planned, that I know. Once you get your fast connection, besides PR and WCU, you should check out Halleck's mod, Elite Strike, for a different flight model you might like.

[chrisdn]

Actually, the thing that first made me visit VS was the Elite Strike mod...never had a chance to download yet though and I can't wait to. Just said yes to the job offer so shiny new laptop and new broadband is on the way!!!
For the strategy aspects...because I want it to be Multiplayer...I thought an overall commander could give pinpoint orders to fighters---attack x area etc. This would be selected from a top down command screen by the commander...the pilots in turn will have there nav and weapons systems updated with new orders-possibly with some text or voice to acknowledge orders. I know it's a bit complex but this way, huge realtime battles could be fought with a real commander in charge as well as possibly 25 real pilots, turret crews etc The game could be played in either collaborative story mode or a full on multiplayer battle mode between teams.

I think it would make for amazing gameplay and the interations between players would be truly amazing. It'd almost be like being a part of a real warship. The banter between players would be great I reckon.

Just putting the finishing touches to the launch tubes now and I'll post some renders later today.

[Kangaroo]

Just an idea - could it be possible to introduce player owned bases in multiplayer, because I think that it would be too simple just to get better ship than everyone else has. Then a player who owns more then one base could hire people for missions (cargo runs, contraband, bounty, defend, etc.) and players who have bases could battle each other with hired people as an army and then everybody in the multiplayer could be important. Players who own bases should take care of their posessions by feeding the people inside with food, water, o2, etc. At least that's how I want the multiplayer to work.