Just thought I would post a ship that I was given to texture:

The model mesh was originally made by Major Striker and given to us for Epsilon mod.
I 'refined' it slightly and removed some hidden faces, made a cockpit etc.. even so its still pretty heavy on the polys. I then spent 3 weeks texturing it (on and off), creating the plated panels layer on layer using both lithium unwrap.. (very cool proggy) and free!.. and some tile mapping for detail. and good old photoshop 7..

The ship is called the Infyrno and goes to the Spider faction in Epsilon Mod as a heavy assault fighter/come modular utility ship.. Without giving too much away this will be a ship not often seen .. but if seen - and you aint friendly.. .. lol .. 'adequate' armament/armour will make this a hard ship..

Harrier.

Piccys follow.. thanks to Parabolix hosting them..


Infyrno

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9

These are preliminary and the model still needs to be tweaked in hardcmp/utf to edit some rotations, orientations and lock down the torps etc.. but I am pleased with the result.. comes up wicked in game..

Harrier

Edited by - parabolix on 7/28/2005 7:39:06 AM

Very pretty indeed The only things that might be improved, imo, is that the tail with the spider symbol looks a bit pixelated and if the cockpit glowed a bit with some yellowish light it'd set off the rest of the darkness of the design a teensy bit better. Keep in mind that it's not always going to be seen in good lighting conditions, so anything that helps players see it well enough to engage is a good idea. Otherwise... just about perfect. I especially like the recessed grills, which have good color choices, setting them apart from the rest of the hull Also, since players flying it are going to be mainly looking at the rear, could we see an in-flight shot from the steering perspective?

great texturing there harrier the model is excellent - how many separate materials besides glass do you have,like grilles etc or is it a single material?

Cold_Void,

Bloody forums.. I did a detailed answer to your question only to lose the lot while spell checking it.. bummer..

5 x .dds (with lods) texture panels make up the .mat file of 813 Kb in size. The whole model is only slightly more than a meg (.cmp,.mat & .sur)

2 x main ship panels at 512 x 512 with the textures made as layers and moved into position, piece by piece..using both Lithium unwrap box map them and the milkshape texture co-ordinator for tile mapping some areas..

1x re-used tex for the weapon mount at 256 x 256 'common' to many of my models.(I re-use common parts and have a couple of 'special' weapon mount textures.. similar to the way Native freelancer models are done)

1 x re-used tex for the instrument panel at 128 x 128 (again a re-used texture tho none of the shots show it very well)

1 x 128 x 128 separate glass texture.. (I also import the MIPS, especially if my 'glass' has a texture, this technique can also be used to make any texture translucent).

Argh,

Glad you like it, although as far as lighting it up goes i didnt do so as the ship has been a deliberate attempt at muted dark colours with highlights. So far, the dark gray seems to look pretty good in most system lighting colours.. this is meant to be a ship if seen, and not friendly with, best avoided like the plague, and I intended for it to have a dark sinister feel to it, the only time it really seems to light up is when docking.

Parabolix has been playing with it testing weapons and some rear views are Here in the Epsilon mod thread..

Harrier.


Edited by - harrier on 7/15/2005 6:56:58 PM

I think that some lights to contrast with the darkness is a good thing, myself, especially after having seen the in-game shots. It's supposed to be sinister, sure, but it's basically going to be hard to see, which is probably not what you're after

Gotta remember- a dark ship like this will look like grey/brown blurs against the stars, whenever the viewer's seeing them farther out from the sun's dynamic light. It's a subtle thing, but as a player I really appreciate being able to actually see my opponant- shooting at dark blurs doesn't have much appeal. I distinctly remember encountering this with the ships in the Firebase shippack, for example- many of those ships look really cool in the well-lit Base but are very disappointing when seen in combat, imo- and a lot've that disappointment is because in space, the lack of glows or brighter colors means that they become featureless blobs with vague hints of specularity...

Not every ship should be as showy as the Treefrog that I made for the Toolkit mod, of course- the FL designers mainly did it with flashing lights and fairly light-colored textures, instead of using extensive glowmaps- and they used a lot've light gray in large part because it colors very neutrally. I prefer using solid colors and a lot've glow areas to break things up and enhance visibility.

Not that you have to do this. A "total realism" mod would probably have us all flying ships that were deep shades of near-black with no visible engine flames, invisible X-ray lasers, and everything would kill with one hit. Which would be about as much fun as facing the Grue in Zork with a rusty spoon, but I digress

Gunstar 1
Gunstar 2
Gunstar 3
low res angled view
high res
what you're seeing is the highest LOD i'll be exporting,its still missing a few accoutrements & its poly count is nearly 4000 now.

a few fun facts about the movie,the Last Starfighter: it was the very first movie to use genuine computer generated imagery.Released in 1986 the movie did o-k being generally dismissed as a star wars clone(it ain't)& has never gone out of print,it is always scheduled on a tv lineup somewhere - it was novelized by Alan Foster who wrote Alien.The Gunstar was animated with a Cray XMP supercomputer, which was barely powerful enough to crank out the pixels though it was the most powerful computer on earth at the time.

Edited by - parabolix on 7/28/2005 7:06:29 AM

Cold_Void

Nice model,

From what I remember of the movie its also pretty faithful, good job. Plus the poly's havent gotten out of hand..

Is that the final texture?, if so it could do with some panel highlights, say some grilles and some weathering etc.. , otherwise a lot of the panel shades will run together.. those light shades are often not handled well under some freelancer lighting conditions..

Harrier.

Yeah... the model's not bad, but the texture doesn't look anything like the reference shots. If you could get it to look a lot less tiled, it'd be a pretty nice little ship, specially with some invisible guns to mount on the Deathbloom points

must agree with the others, the textures seem to hide alot of the detail and shape of the model, from what i can remember the model looks pretty close to the original but something is not quite right and i cant put my finger on it, maybe its the textures. good job non the less

thanks guys - i have been stalling on texturing it until i have all the high poly lod parts built & a few separate ms3ds to export from-its all tiled right now.i know there is some way to project the textures uniformly on all the LODs but i don't know what it is - i haven't gotten familiar with uvunwrap yet either & making textures is somewhat of a personal nightmare %_% - although it shouldn't be too hard when the original model never HAD any textures except the side logos hehe. the death blossom - hopefully animation gets cracked someday and I can integrate some petals to open and fire perhaps i should make two gunstars - one with the death blossom addon and another without(like in the movie,Alex's gunstar is the only one with that experimental feature)all in all i am pretty satisfied with it and it is definitely my most symetrical model yet(2 axis of symmetry really eases the work )- the blueprints i got here
really helped with getting everything placed just right.

@ nighthawk: there are some things left to tweak like the cockpit struts angles,the nose cone shape & it still needs the underside nose turret - i've already resized the engine side-thrusters (they were way too small in that pic)

Edited by - Cold_Void on 7/22/2005 10:15:58 AM

Hi. I'm a straight newbie to this modding stuff and just wanted to show off a badly textured Freighter i created. Please dont mind the textures, they're just for display.

[IMGhttp://img293.imageshack.us/img293/6499/zanthfreighterangle17xs.th.jpg[/IMG

[IMGhttp://img221.imageshack.us/img221/8961/zanthfreighterangle17ds.th.jpg[/IMG













Better late than never........

Edited by - undun357 on 7/24/2005 10:45:23 AM

What do you think of my andromeda, farscape and insect inspired dreadnought? the hull is formed but i haven't yet detailed it.
Dreadnought 1
Dreadnought 2
Dreadnought 3
and the station, what do you think? it is a mix of me and a little b5 and bad sci-fi.
Station 1
Station 2

Edited by - parabolix on 7/28/2005 7:04:36 AM

pretty cool - i won't ask the poly count on the andromeda but i can tell from looking at it that it won't export to FL or possibly even milkshape.the station is very nice & looks poly efficient tho it needs to have some of those facets welded to make them look round. btw i love farscape, very nice work what's the station's polycount?

I like the ship but think it would be a pig to texture well, the station is cool i like very much, good job, although there is a beed for welding, i dont believe it is really needed for the game model, maybe if you are going to use it for 3D ART but for game models you will loose alot of non round look when the texture is applied, plus it helps keep the poly count down to a good low level, i have always found that for game models its always better to go for the lower poly count and sacrifice a little of the smoothness look, the non rounded look on the rings will be lost when a good texture is applied and if they are not then you should make a texture that highlights the faceted look and make it look like is a design feature, ie, sections of the station or a habitat ring with individual living quaters in each facet type thing, good models well done