actually those are the high pollie versions for rendering and X2(another game for modding). The lower ones are undersconstruction. but niether is more than 30,000, and with really good opt it will fall into the range of usuable. Sadly the carrier image here is already out dated as i have continued to build it more.

this is my current attempt and a fair one imo link

@Imperatodd:

I'll hold off comments until we can see the low-poly, optimized versions. 30K isn't even in the ballpark for any game engine- if anything, FL is better than most, because you're not worrying about shaders, normal maps or other things that eat up video card processing power

@Arton Alpha:

Well, what you've got is starting to look like art That's the good news.

The bad news... and you will probably have to learn this the hard way... is that if you skin it with as many welding problems (those weird gray/black areas) as the model currently has, it's going to look very strange in the game engine. This is a topic that can wait until you've gotten through the process for the first time, though- if I were you, I'd skin this puppy, get a CMP made, and get your first functional FL ship flying... it's a great feeling, and it'll give you the confidence to take on the technical hurdles of making something that's not just functional, but also looks just like you imagined it should

Edited by - Argh on 9/6/2005 1:55:44 AM

Couple of basic ships added. They might look textured wrong a bit, but thats just cos they are fom Hardcmp. Couldn't really see the point in being too fussy.
I seem to remember that Argh did a similar thing a while back.
The idea is to create several different types of lifter classed ships and have them overlapping themselves within the games difficulty levels so that any one of the 6 (including the original) could be spawned from one encounter.
Lifter variations
Lifter with 2 toxic cargo pods
Lifter with one large red cargo pod
Lifter with a large drab cargo pod
Lifter with a 4 tank array
Lifter with 2 large tanks
Hardly a big post, i was just playing around for an hour. The ideal was of doing this would be to add a hpCargo01 hardpoint to the front grappling arms of the lifter. I'll have a little play with that too and see if I can get it working ok. If possible you could easily create 10 or so loadouts with different cargopods linked to the front.
The one above is a smaller version too at the moment which was intentional as i was considering using then as a different class of Lifter which makes sense.

Edited by - M-A-C-E_166 on 9/6/2005 3:38:21 AM

@MACE:

Don't take this the wrong way, but if you wait until XML Toolkit Mod 1.3 is out, I have a much cleaner implementation of ships with add-on cargopods done. If you're just enabling different Lifters that are NPC-only, I guess that just throwing them on with an equip = in their Loadout will work just fine, but for player-flyable ships, it's a bit more complicated, if you don't want to have problems later on.

Believe me when I say that I'm trying to get 1.3 released as fast as I can, because I really, really REALLY want to share a lot of new innovations with the FL community. It all just takes awhile, y'know?

i'd love to fly it if fl would work
i'm going to see if i can find a skinning toutorial and start work on one to fit this thing once that's done i'll submit it for download. while i'm at it here's the welded version

@Argh actually Fl is a little outdated. X2, and i have seen this as have many others, can run up 300,000. Crazy but Klingon academy can run up to 200,000. i found a model that high, that ran in the game on for downlaod. it actually did pretty well. I was amazed to be honest.

Um..

Its not so much about polys as frame rate.. the higher the polycount the lower the ability of the graphics card to draw the models quickly.. one thing about X2.. sure it can run high poly models and some of them are beautiful - but the game comes with a warning about system requirements and that it may not run well (because of the hi-res graphics) on older machines..Freelancer can support higher poly models than it uses - SINGLY.. start cramming the screen with capships and hi poly models ..and the lag, .. even in SP, can get so bad on older machines that it will simply skip frames.. take that same environment onto a MP server with half a dozen players on it and hello...crash city..Not all of us run updated Cray's, with super video cards and lots of ram .. those that are still using older machines have problems.. so many things eat into the total - bases, planets, debris, minefields, asteroid fields, weapons effects and explosions etc.. all taking resources, then we ask it to do more - we intro capships or hi-polymodels

Keep the poyls down and you can have more ships/planets/bases on screen at once without problems.. simple mathematics..

Harrier

Yeah... it's like the polycount for models for Total Annihilation, another game I've done a lot of modding for. People always tried to keep polycounts in the low hundreds, even though the TA engine can support up to about 5000 polygons without crashing. The reason is... if you have 20 tanks with 5000 polygons on-screen at once... that's 100K polygons being updated every tick, plus animation instructions, etc., etc., etc.

Freelancer has exactly the same issues. Like Harrier is saying... it's not that FL can't support models with much higher polycounts. It can. In fact, I actually had a few areas in the current Beta of Warriors of the Sky where the total polycounts in the scenes topped 100K- complex cityscapes, with details such as trees and other things. I took a lot've steps to re-optimize those areas and get the polycounts much lower, because even on my rig, which is a middle-of-the-road gaming PC at this point (Geforce 6600GT, Athlon XP 2800, 1GB DDR400, SATA drives), it wasn't running as smoothly as I'd like... I aim for flawless 60FPS on my rig, and usually achieve it.

Sure, it's great that you can put almost unlimited polycount into game engines nowadays. But my experience with X2 (which I have played, and didn't care for) was that it was not really that much prettier than FL but performed much more poorly. I do think that its use of DOT3 bumpmaps would be a really welcome feature for FL's engine, but it's a pretty minor thing, honestly, except for those few times you're close enough to another ship / object to actually make the details out.

In short... just because you can raise polycount a lot... doesn't mean you should In the end... our job, as game artists, is to use both the model and the skin to convey complexity... without compromising on performance. If I built a model with 30K polygons... it'd have incredible, near-photoreal detail by the time you saw it skinned. It's just a matter of getting the most out've the least possible. I'm not super-proud of the early work I did for WOS, where I made a number of 5000-poly aircraft that really don't look any better than what I can do with 2000 at this point with better technique. A great deal of this is the skin... if you really want to improve your craft, I'd really strongly suggest concentrating on skinning, because it can make low-poly things look really good

Here is a model of the Venator-class Star Destroyer that I modelled, textured, hardpointed, and imported into the game. It is shown next to the Imperator-class Star Destroyer from the Tides of War mod for scale. I am hoping that this ship will be the basis for a Clone Wars era total conversion, but that is yet to be seen.

Star Destroyer Scale

Bretonian Battle

Edited by - parabolix on 9/21/2005 7:32:25 PM

Great job there.
I've just taken an interest in modellling, and i'd like to show off my work ;
(Click on the magical thumbnails to see the bigger images)

Rendering in 3dsmax 7:


Back:


Front:


Left:


Top:


Textures not that hot, crudely made cockpit.......
And I think the Ace Combat 3 insignia on the side that reads "The Coalition" doesnt match colors with the ship......

EDIT: Oh, and the lighting in the screen grabs isnt thst good

Edited by - Evangel on 9/7/2005 9:26:44 PM

something i threw together btw is there any program besides photoshop for texturing?
i'm still working on my last model but can't move on yet
edit almost forgot this it's a pre-version to the one above



Edited by - arton alpha on 9/17/2005 6:44:39 PM

@ arton, i know your still young to modelling but your models lack design, i feel you need to learn the art of modelling instead of the simply pulling vertex around, its one thing to take a poly shape and pull its corners around and come up with a chape that resembles a ship, its quite another to model a ship, the design needs to be thought about before modelling begins then you can add the correct basic poly shapes before any pulling around is needed, you have the basics but need to think more of the design and shapes before modelling, im sure reading this you are feeling pretty upset and im sorry if i have upset you but i do not complement models i dont consider to be good, you have some raw skill but need to work at it, draw the ship out play with shapes before modelling begins the you'll know roughly what needs to go where before even starting.

@Arvis:

Beautiful work there. The only thing that I would have to say in terms of critique is that it looks there are some smallish welding issues with a few of the bigger planes where they join at corners. I'd say that Slivik and Aldebaran (TIE Universe, Free Worlds 1.66 devs, respectively) would both be very interested in including that model.

@Arton:

Well, you're definately starting to work with more complicated shapes here- this almost looks like Art.

I'd say that this is definately a more interesting design than your previous attempts, but you still have a long way to go- keep at it, though, because you're making progress, and I'm sure that the next versions will start to come together better. BTW, you need to uncheck "Auto-smooth" in the Group menu, and unweld this model- this thing is very obviously welded improperly, and you should just leave it faceted.

Like Nighthawk, I'd very strongly recommend drawing out your designs in two or three views before constructing anything. That's generally how I do things, and it really helps me stay focused on the core design concepts as I proceed. When you draw- draw with straight lines, so that when you build it, you have a clear idea of how your curves should be modeled- that really helps me keep things as low-poly as humanly possible.

As for what to use for texturing... try the GIMP It's freeware, and while it's not quite as nice as PS, it's free, and it's still quite powerful, and has lots of FX and things, and can work with Layers.