Topic: Osiris Class Rennovation

[Don Karnage]

the deflector dish should be more inside the ship, are you working on a new saucer for the model?

the new warp engine are cool

keep the great work and continue have fun with it

[AlchemistiD]

the deflector dish should be more inside the ship, are you working on a new saucer for the model?

the new warp engine are cool

keep the great work and continue have fun with it

1.A new stardrive is next in line, so a new deflector will be part of it.

2.Yup, that's the new Saucer (so far).  (Thanks to FOAS for posting that saucer tutorial!)

3.Been having lots of fun working on her so far, but I think I'm partially dreading the stardrive.  It's probably going to be the most complex part of the ship, especially with what I've got in mind for it.

[AlchemistiD]

ZOMG double post.

Mesh update:

The pain in my a-err...Stardrive section is complete.  Nacelles, easy.  Turret, a simple cone.  Bridge, easy.  Saucer, breezy.  This thing drove me nuts....  Cuz I suuuuuuck. 

I made use of Madfish's tutorial on how to make fantails (located here: http://www.madfishway.rr.nu/), and it helped hugely.  Unfortunately I couldn't get a cylinder type stardrive to work with the rest of the design, so I tried doing the same steps with a cone (By now my favorite shape, it's so...ehhh..uhh...coney)

The results below...some may wish to put on their fake pilot mustaches for #2.

[Fallen_Warrior]

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[AlchemistiD]

very nice work dude im looking forward to seeing all the new parts come together, but your saucer looks to be a bit flatter than the old one? or is it just the view

Yeah, I keep thinking that too.  But I think it's because it doesn't have that raised area down the center, it's actually the same size as the current saucer.

[AlchemistiD]

Double-double post MG

Model work is done.  The ship is assembled.  I've smoothed the mesh and fixed and prodded and rotated and moved as much as I can.  Barring fixing a slight scaling problem (The Mesh is almost identical in size to Kreeargh's, but renders in model viewer from about 50 light-years away) final results are below.

I decided to go with a simpler deflector because the other didn't work with the stardrive.

And now comes the part where crying is required.  Simply put, no matter what I do, 3DS will not apply the textures correctly, if it applies them at all. 

So I wanted to inquire, as to whether anyone would like, perchance, to apply placeholder texture sheets and drop-kick the ball back into motion.

[Tus-XC]

well I suppose i can help ya out w/ your secondary hull a bit w/ a few suggestions.   The 'Tus' method of building hulls consistes of one of two things, either a bunch of extrusions from an boat shape cylinder w/ a min of 24 segments.  This is good for excel hulls.  Essentially all you do is extrude the bottom face down a bit, scale and repeate till ya get a nice shape.  The second method uses a lathe.  I use this for cylindrical hull like that of the ball and stick i'm working on.   btw, 24 segments is the min for a good curve, anything less and you'll see segmentation.  From there i usually ends up being a bunch of booleans and cookie cuts (shape merge) to get the final shape.  Hope that helps some.

[AlchemistiD]

well I suppose i can help ya out w/ your secondary hull a bit w/ a few suggestions.   The 'Tus' method of building hulls consistes of one of two things, either a bunch of extrusions from an boat shape cylinder w/ a min of 24 segments.  This is good for excel hulls.  Essentially all you do is extrude the bottom face down a bit, scale and repeate till ya get a nice shape.  The second method uses a lathe.  I use this for cylindrical hull like that of the ball and stick i'm working on.   btw, 24 segments is the min for a good curve, anything less and you'll see segmentation.  From there i usually ends up being a bunch of booleans and cookie cuts (shape merge) to get the final shape.  Hope that helps some.

The extrusion method is how I saved my sanity on the stardrive, actually (I used the cone as the top, originally intending to use it sideways, and immediately realized what I'd done).  It's how I made the main SD module.  I'll keep the advice in mind, especially for the next feddie on the assembly line, thats been sitting in my sketchbook for nearly a year now.

Started working on the kind of aztec I want.  I found something on my HD from way back to 2006.  Never really used these textures, I got to thinking I should fix that.  Or I could go the Intrepid route and not have any aztec...decisions, decisions...

Pic in question below, will probably be the background aztec....like I said long long ago, the hull will be more blue, probably a very dark blue-grey, sort of like sharkskin.  With a darker grey for things like the saucer border.  Dark blue hull...yeah.  Something that won't keep showing up as yellow in OP/EAW like the current textures, annoys the hell out of me.  But something that looks good in the dark (I like the lighting really low).

::ALCHEMIC EDIT::
Stupid Photoshop crashed when I changed the .bmp colors ; _ ;...

[Fallen_Warrior]

.

[Rod ONeal]

I think the new mesh looks great, too. Nice work!

[AlchemistiD]

Was looking at the wings.  Had to go back and edit a few things, they just looked too knobby. 

I made new swanwings that are somewhat beefier than the previous ones.  Added more modules along the outer and inner tracks to try to give the ship a more avian feel. (It's called Osiris, so something should look bird-like)

Results below.

::ALCHEMIC EDIT::

Wanted to look at what it might possibly look like when finished.  I applied some basic colors and masks for lighting, attachment added.

As for in game flight testing, apparently material colors and illumination masks send the Model Viewer into a seizure, 

[AlchemistiD]

And today I give you...

TOTAL CRAP



So can anyone name a decent smoothing plugin?  Or tell me what I'm doing wrong?

[Centurus]

Wish I could help you.  But I still can't make models.  You already know more than me.

[AlchemistiD]

I doubt it, 

I forgot to mention that the mesh above is a test mesh, I made some basic color textures for the ship and exported it to MOD to look for any problems to iron out (and boy did I find 'em, as you can see above.)

The funny thing is, when rendered ingame in SFC3, it's nowhere near as bad.  The same for SFC2, while it's not great in SFC2 either, at least it doesn't give me a seizure when I look at it.

Still looking for advice, but heres what it looks like a-la SFC3's (more powerful?) engine.

Brought to you by Mother Brain's Pretzels.  Mother Brain, she'll only blow up one of the planets in your solar system!






Also, I have to ask another question.  What are the generally recommended LOD settings?  It asks me whenever I port to .mod.

[Centurus]

Select none.  LODs aren't really necessary.  SFC3 doesn't use them at all, and not that many people that make models for SFC1/2/OP use LODs anymore.

[Tus-XC]

smoothing is easy really.  The issue is that SFC doesn't recognize smoothing groups correctly (it sees everything as either in a singular smoothing group or not smoothed at all).  What you can do is use the smooth modifier in max, that should take care of most of the work for you.  From there you might need to adjust a few smoothing groups here and there.  here are some basic instructions:

1.  Go into the modify tab and put a smooth modifer on your mesh
2.  check auto smooth
3.  Go into the modify tab and put an edit mesh modifer on your mesh
4.  select areas that need manual smoothing and reassign smooth groups as neccesary (found in the surface properties rollout)
5.  Go into the modify tab and put an edit mesh modifer on your mesh
6.  Go to the selection roll out, hit polygon selection (the sqare)
7.  scroll down to the surface properties rollout; You will see a button called "select by SG"; 
click that botton and a window should appear with all the smoothing groups used by your model, select 1 group (just click the number.  warning it might not unclick the number (an issue when parts have multiple sg) when you come back into the select by sg, so you might need to do that yourself)
8.  go to the edit geometry roleout and click detach, check the box detach to element
repeat steps 7 and 8 till there are no more groups to detach


When you export the smoothing groups will be recognized correctly.  This is because SFC smooths by elements, and by detaching them you create a new element.  aaah, but you remember you checked the box 'detach to element' right?  well this just removes a step, which is you would have to reattach it again if you didn't.  the result is the same though, you created a bunch of new elements, and thus sfc smooths those elements correctly because there is exactly 1 sg to those elements.    Hope that helps.

[Don Karnage]

the saucer seem big for the ship.

[AlchemistiD]

There be bad and hilarious news.

First the bad.  After trying out tons of tut's and suggestions (big thanks to Tus and WZ)... well...no joy.

It turns out looking somewhat allright ingame anyway so I'll take care of something else on it for now.

As for the other...that happened while blocking placeholder textures, and I just felt like sharing the fact that the textures from the original Osiris look almost way better on the new model.  At least, I thought it was funny.

[Tus-XC]

if you want you can send me the file and i can do the smoothin for ya...

[Starforce2]

Phaser banks would look better if they maintained their distance from the raised arc of windows ya got there...