Imperial Star Destroyer.....

[MajorPayne]

Okay so firstly, some boring background.....

As with many 3d modellers as they get better with time and experience some may feel the need to update their own meshes with more defined and better versions. Now whilst I still haven't managed to make heads or tails of creating textures from scratch (and believe me when I say I've tried and had help from some of the very best in the field), as far as I'm concerned I feel I've made some serious headway in 3d mesh creation. So with this in mind I've started the long process of updating my oldest meshes in view of giving them better mesh detail but still keeping them within the game conversion usage that I like to have. Results have been encouraging for me, but now I've hit an empass (so to speak).

As the title of this thread states, I've started reworking my own Star Destroyer. The original version of this is around 10 years old and as that version is only 1088 polys and uses 6 512*512 pixel based TGA files for its textures the results at the time I thought to be quite good, but the detail is seriously lacking and the model looks way to bare. Now this current version is around 4834 polys without its main turbolasers and 8662 with them (it amazes me how something that seems fairly simple in shape can pile on the polys in no time). As the base mesh stands I'm more than happy with it (it helps to use some of the best and most accurate reference material and even better when you have the 1.5million poly model done by Fractalsponge as your base to work from.

Okay so seeing as after a successful Star Trek Armada ingame test of my 20,000 poly Atlantis city ship model I'm going to try to go one step further and set a limit to around 30k. Much of this will be the what I think is necessary "greebling" on the various sections to give this model depth and will be my highest poly counted model to date (its nice that milkshape also can deal with polys better since my hardware update as well). Anyway. Heres the 3d max rendered images of the current status of the ship (which has been around 4 weeks so far, which = about 17 hours remodelling). Oh and I know theres innacuracies still but they don't concern me (I'll get to that shortly):






....and so to my current problem. I've spent nearly two full weeks trying to find a solid base texture to use and I'm totally stuck. Re-rendering from the new v3 model I'm using just isn't working right (although these renders I will be using for modelling in the correct greeble sections and as ms3d doens't have any kind of greeble plugin this will be done the hard, and long winded way). So what I'm asking for is if anyone knows a good Imperial style texture of around 1024*1024 pixels that I could use then please give me a shout, as I'm at the end of my tether on this one. If I don't get anything then the model will be archived once the mesh is complete.

[Kophjaeger]

MajPayne, I have a great base texture you can use, it is the base texture I used on the BS Valkyrie, with its levels tweaked would probably work well for you. Also, something I am playing with on the Narada, is texture tiling. Especially on a super long ship, its better to use smaller tileable base texture wrapped around than a large 2048 just to try to fit it all on one pane. That's the nice thing about Milkshape and Gimp... they keep your work practical and easily simplified.

Really looking forward to this update. PM me if you want to use the BSG hull.

[MajorPayne]

Okay so a quick update.

I have a nasty feeling this "greebling" is going to take quite some time to complete and may take weeks. I can also foresee the poly count going closer to the 3ds limit of 65,535 that milkshape is capable of exporting so the mesh may need to be exported in sections. Most of it is box modelling with some 8 sided cylinders but it still piles on the polys. However. after finding out that rendering my first image of 2048 pixels width I've found the detail to show very well so this is how I'm going to tackle this beast. Once the first section is added to the model I'll post a fairly close render and whilst it might not be absolutely accurate to the original model I'm hoping it'll be close.

[Maxloef]

oh oh oh i spy with my little eye the wrong turrets, having build an ISD myself recently i can tell you this is the ISD 2 (bridge section) and that has the 8 barreled turrets.

Overall great work though!

[MajorPayne]

 I know max. I just like the look of the turrets more. Thanks for the support though. It's going to be some time for mesh to be complete.

[Saquist]

oh oh oh i spy with my little eye the wrong turrets, having build an ISD myself recently i can tell you this is the ISD 2 (bridge section) and that has the 8 barreled turrets.

Overall great work though!

I was going to say the same.  Those are Called Octuple Turrents.  They were they are the weapons the Mon Cal Ship and the SD were trading broadsides with in Return of the Jedi that ended rather unfortunately for the Destroyer.