Topic: A long time ago.......WIP (image heavy)

[Major A Payne]

Back in April of 2004 I was still relatively new to the world of 3d modelling, having only been doing it for around 4 years. At the time I had made quite a few basic models and whilst the quality wasn't fantastic they were passable and better still, game convertible. Okay so fast forward to 2010 and after coming across my model archive on cd, I decided to go back through them and to be perfectly honest most were pretty dire without their texture files. So I started the long term overhaul of many of them. After finishing up all my Imperial fighters/shuttles, I decided to take a very close look over my Star Destroyer. The original version being a very meager 1088 polys and using 6 1024*1024 3dmax 5 rendered TGAs as texture files was fine but way to low poly (hell. even the updated tie fighter was almost three times this). Still. After a few nice successful higher-than-average poly counted models (Atlantis city ship, USNC Achilles BB67 and USS Valiant) I decided to retackle this beast. So for the past 5 weeks or so I've been slowly rebuilding a new ISD (Imperator class ISD II).

Now the current status of the final model is far from finished as I'm taking a rather long approach to this. Firstly, I'm working from one of the finest high poly CGI artists I've ever seen. Secondly, as I'm solely using Milkshape 3d to model this, there won't be any shortcuts for doing such detail as the main greebling. All this will have to be individually modelled so is likely to take several months at the rate I'm going. The ungreebled version minus its turrets is around 4834 polys. The current poly count for the greebled version is just under 10,500 polys so I suspect this will be close to 35,000 polys when finished (at least thats my target figure). Unfortunately, I've no idea what the maximum level of poly counts people have attempted to use in SFC with todays hardware so if anyone has some details it would be helpful.

Lastly, before the pics, although I have a base texture, I might require something more in an "imperial" style grey/white colour, so if anyone knows of such a texture set I would be most grateful for a link. Anyway. before I over ramble heres the pics.






Now I understand some may say, "those aren't the right turrets", and you would be completely correct. Therefore, I redid them:



Funny thing is, those are seemingly more detailed and less polys (wierd but oh well). Oh and I do know about the rear "boxes" next to the outer engines being innacurate, but those will most likely be tackled at a later time. Once theres more to show, I'll post some more.

[Captain Adam]

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[Major A Payne]

Okay so this simple post is just to give a heads up. I suspect this will take somewhat longer than expected due to the complexity I'm working with. That and having to pick only what I would call "needed detail". Also having the get-up-and-go attitude isn't really high at the moment (I wish someone would invent a simplified greeble plugin for MS3d). I also believe my poly count for this might be substantially higher than I'm aiming for but its still early days.

Now bare in mind that this image below does not represent a completed side. Just the rear section under the main turbo lasers. Just this one section (and I'm using basic 10 sided cylinders for some of this (obviously I'm removing unseen/uneeded polys from each section as its placed) and cubes for the rest the poly count has jumped from 9862 (with nothing added to the sides) to 13210 so its around 3500 for this one section. Anyway. Hopefully the image is clear enough as its a render from 3dmax 6.

[Darkdrone]

Nice too see you back Modeling always loved your ships
The Ship is Looking great

Seems everyone is finding some old backups of they files last few weeks

DD

[Bernard Guignard]

Yes its looking very good 

[Major A Payne]

Thanks for those comments guys and I agree with you 100% DD. But then as time goes on I think every modeller goes through this sort of thing.

Anyway. This image below represents three sections of the main "trench" of the model. It also brings the current poly count to 16,006 and whilst the poly counts a bit higher than I would like I think I've got the overall look fine. The forward section also took about 5 hours to complete (easy enough for a duplication of the one side to the other but I think the hardest part is making sure theres no huge spaces in between each small mesh piece).