Stuff I've been working on.. New Sovereign, among other things

[Chronocidal Guy]

I'm partly posting this so I have some continuous motivation to keep going to be honest.. I have so many versions of my Sovereign that change one little thing or another, that I figured it was time to start from scratch, and see what I can do if I'm not limited by the original model.

The original CG Sovereign is close to 10 years old now, at it's earliest form.  It started as a mod for X-Wing Alliance, and was around 5k polys at that time.  Since then, I've been revising it, but it has always held onto the original underlying structure I used way back then, and I think that limited how good it could get.

My most recent version topped out around 25k polys, after a buttload of chamfering and blending, and it looks awesome, but after finding the high res renders of the actual Nemesis CGI model recently, I thought maybe it was time for a new approach.

With a set of nice plans that are accurate finally in place, I can really go to town and lay out the model in a clean and smooth way I think.  While the old model was originally built polygon by polygon in Rhinoceros, I'm making the most of Max9 this time.

The model so far is laid out entirely on the existing hull contour lines.  I'm basically building it to where, if I wanted to, I could almost instantly just raise all the hull plates.  I'm debating which surface details to add, and I might go a bit crazy after the main model is done, but I think I'm keeping the surface clean for now, except for a few things.

What this method will do though is make this thing a breeze to texture, even if it gets warped when unwrapping.  Since all the natural panels will follow the mesh, it'll be easy to align things like windows, and keep the distortion to a minimum.

Anywho, I don't have much done yet, just the upper saucer surface.  I modeled the escape pod areas into the saucer for now to see how it looks, but I'm thinking they will look too thick unless I actually build them into the saucer, and that's a lot more polygons than what I have now, since they're just sunk into the surface.  I probably won't keep them in the end, but they look interesting for now.

Total so far is about 4k, or 2.5k without the escape pods.. so double that for the other half of the upper saucer.

[Toa_Kaita]

Its nice to see a legend back at it again.

[Nebula]

wooot this is looking good even at this early of a stage

[Nihilus]

I actually think it looks really neat with the escape pods modeled in.  You know what would be really interesting though?  Saucer Separation.  You can see the separation lines on the high detailed pics and using John Eave's original sketches you could make a battle bridge and everything.  This isn't a request or anything though, I'm just throwing that out there.  I'm sure what ever you do will be awesome   

[Nebula]

um sorry Nihilus but the sep lines are not present on the Nem sov only on the FC Sov... The back spine connecting the Saucer and the engineering hull around the shuttle bay is completely solid now.

Though a saucer sep could exist... if you explain that away as hidden explosive bolts lol and they have protective plates over them now but lol that's to much speculation!

[Chronocidal Guy]

Oh, definitely planning to at least model the yacht, possibly saucer sep as well.  There actually is still a possible separation line there, it's just not as pronouced as before.

Main problem with the escape pods is how thick they have to be to make sure they don't glitch out and merge with the surface below them.  BC has always been pretty good about managing that though.

The big thing is that I had to remove some finer detail like that before.. when you get details that thin, you get edges that only show up as a pixel or so thick, and unless your computer uses epic anti-aliasing, it looks worse than a plain texture.

I'll definitely save the pods, just dunno how they'll look in BC.

[Nihilus]

um sorry Nihilus but the sep lines are not present on the Nem sov only on the FC Sov... The back spine connecting the Saucer and the engineering hull around the shuttle bay is completely solid now.

Actually, as CG said, there are some slight visible lines in the Nemesis Sovereign.  You can really tell because there is a color variation between the Saucer and Secondary Hull.

As to the Pods, I suppose if it looks better to paint them then that works fine too.

[Nebula]

If you look at that section on the FC Sov it is completely different...
The Nem Sov has that area joined with the secondary hull while the FC sov didn't.
It may well still be able to sep somehow it just won't be as clean.

About pods... could always make both lol and release sep if they work.

[Dawg81]

  CG is back!!!!!
All i can say is wow u have put alot of thought into this ill be deffinatly be watching this from start to finish have a dawg cookie

[FarShot]

"Sweet Jesus!"

[WileyCoyote]

It's so perfect......almost makes me want to stop making mine. Just kidding, I might have to rebuild mine. I already have some distortion in the saucer.

[JamesTiberiusKirk]

What have you been doing all the time? One must think you would forget about modding and wont come back after such a long period of time!

I remember all the rumors about a CG Sovereign 2.0, but oh well.

Have you taken a look at the JLS retexture? http://bridgecommander.filefront.com/file/JLS_Sovereign_Class;107427

or mine?

http://bridgecommander.filefront.com/file/CGSovereign_revamped;99809


We might inspire you to try some effects we used for the textures later.

[Chronocidal Guy]

Nah, I'm just obsessive about my projects, and always wind up coming back to em after a while.    I did hear about the JLS Sov, and was glad it used the new renders for reference, I just haven't played BC in a very long time.  I work full time now, so games have taken a bit of a back seat to real life.  But I still love making models.

By the way, the crazy changes I keep making to the 2.0 is why I'm starting over.  It's just become a mess of add-ons to the model.  I may put out that model at some point for folks to use, but it's just bloated with polys at this point, and still needs to be mapped anyway.  If anything, this model will be the 3.0.  

Part of the reason I built the saucer the way I did was to keep the distortion down.. it gets really easy to bend things around while making the layers line up.

What I did was draw the saucer entirely flat first.  Then I just dragged rings of vertices up and down to match the side schematic, so all the major divisions stayed level.  Oh, and one trick I use a lot... if I do need something level, and it isn't quite, I just select the vertices and scale them all to zero in the Z direction.

One method I did find helpful though.. I didn't build the saucer as an ellipse at all.  The saucer really has no center point, and the focal point of the ellipse can change depending on which area you look at.  Safest method I found was to align the "spokes" of the saucer structure with the windows.  Assuming they're all vertically aligned in the rooms, those are your best reference for the true curvature of the saucer.

Another thing I've been doing with this is using the "facets" shaded view a lot.  It'll let you tweak how the polygons blend without any smoothing visible, so you can really see what causes distortion in the shape.

[Chronocidal Guy]

Off topic.. but one quick thing.  I tend to type a lot... and the board is NOT liking my post length.  Once I get to a certain point, the message box scrolling goes wonky, and I can't see what I'm typing, because the scroll bar starts having whiplash or something...

Is there some known way to fix that?  My first post and previous one were both too long for the forum, I had to type them in notepad and paste the text in.

[Nebula]

*off topic*

huh I just copied your post in and the box looks fine and nothing odd happened when I typed extra stuff.

what browser you using?

[Chronocidal Guy]

IE8, which could be the problem I suppose.  It's not a huge issue, maybe the board just thinks I need to stop typing such long messages. 

[moed]

It's awesome to see you back CG. I really look forward to seeing this beautiful ship come to life at your hands (and I feel the same way about Wiley's, 'cause he's real good too!)

I would recommend you download & install Firefox. It's much more streamlined than IE8... and less buggy.

Cookie for your work so far  ;)

[FarShot]

It would be super neat to see side-by-side renders of this and the v1.0.  Basing it on orthos of the CGI model is about as accurate as one can get.

[Bren]

I second that. I'd also like to see how awesome the aborted 2.0 looks now!

I'm sure a render or two would elicit several "ooh!"s and perhaps even some "ahhh!"s.

[Chronocidal Guy]

Hehe.. well, I might take a few elements straight out of the 2.0 if they fit, like the bridge and deflector.  I really liked the way I got the pylons shaped finally too, so I'll try to make the new ones just like them.

And I should say, I might not "abandon" it entirely.  It's more of a mid-way point between the 1.0 and this new model.  I plan to incorporate a lot of the features of this model in the new one, at a lower polycount.

The biggest change going on this time is going to be texture usage I think.  I plan on making the entire thing mirrored, with a few patches of different windows here and there.  That'll let me put the entire saucer on one map, the hull on another, and maybe the bridge and nacelles on a third, with a fourth for the registries.

I'm planning on either tracing the CGI renders for the new textures, or just cutting them up and pasting them directly on the model to save time.  They should fit perfectly, it'll just be a matter of mapping the hull correctly so details don't get stretched out.