Longnose Bulkship from Kaluri

[FluffyFreak]

I missed that this had been uploaded, will check it out tomorrow but I like all of these ideas and models!

[bobtheterrible]

Ok Im going to throw in my two-pennies worth of feedback in the hope that it is useful.

First of all, its an awesome model in both implementation and design :)

Comparing it back to the original concept art there are a couple of differences that I 'think' I prefer in the concept but would need to see in 3D. So, here go's.... two things:

The forward fuselage tubes(?) seem a little too (Edit: oh my, I forgot how to spell) far apart. Would it be possible to increase their diameter fractionally to see what that would look like? In my mind it would fill some of the void between them and make the shoulders less pronounced.

On the concept drawing between the two fuselage tubes(???) where the shoulders join, there is a sort of buttress. On the model they 'fins' and are much smaller. I like the idea of fins but they feel a little small relative to the rest of the model. Have you tried playing with their size? I have just tried making them lager and longer on the mod and to me it seems to make the transition between the shoulders and the fuselage(????? I dont know what else to call them!) more gradual without loosing the the overall shape.

Thats it really :)
Bob

[FluffyFreak]

I've been flying loops around it and it's a good looking ship.

Three things stood out, the 1st is that I really need to get around to implementing shadows in the engine :)
The 2nd is that without texturing it's hard to tell ingame which way up the ship is so to get a proper sense of scale it will need texturing.
The 3rd is that there's a lot of triangles and detail on each of those containers that is duplicated down the length - and inside - the cargo core area.

I do have a branch with bump/normal mapping implemented if that would be a useful feature to have for the future?

Andy

[bszlrd]

I will look into these when I get home.
The nose section was bugging me a bit, but I decided to push it and see how it looks this way.

The cargo containers are just duplicated right now, i want to optimize the hell out of it and only keep that structure on the outside ones.
Normal maps would be useful. I was a bit reluctant about them, bit Because of the extra work they add, but I'm open to playing with it. (Although needs to be toggleable by the player, I guess normal maps could eat up old GPUs fast.)

Cast shadows would be awesome.

[bszlrd]

Bit of a progress on Longnose.
Tweaked the nose section's proportions and the nacelle section closer to the initial sketch.
Also added a bunch of detail, like for the heat sinks, and also started adding portholes. And I remade the bridge windows completely, because I didn't really liked it that way.

Here's the mod file for it.. It's unoptimized as hell, almost 200k tris.


The tiny spec on the image right in front of the bridge is a fellow, for showing it's size. The tiny squares forward are just junk, I'm using them to make the windows and forgot to delete.

[bobtheterrible]

I think the nose suits being larger, I dont know what others think? I also like the thiner supports surrounding the habitat rings it makes everything feel a little more compact and less fat around the middle. Its looking pretty good :)

[FluffyFreak]

Looking very nice now. I like how you're remodelled the frontend and windows. Also the bracing struts between the rotating habitat rings are a nice touch that make it seem more real.

One observation to watch out for though, I see quite a lot of "sparklies" around the bridge windows.
There can be two causes of this, the first is that there is a small gap between the triangles of the hull and the window which might not be visible when modelling but when rendering we're a little less precise due to the transformations and our engines scale - you can either merge the meshes so that there is no gap at all, but this makes texturing more difficult obviously, or you can extend the window geometry a little bit behind the hull triangles, if set back from the hull by a short distance this shouldn't cause any visible z-fighting and allows you to texture separately and reuse the window geometry repeatedly.
The second possibility is that it's caused by the sharp edge and our engine lighting, the only way to deal with this is to chamfer the edge so that it has more geometry and is smoother visually.

Wasn't there a script that had static ships behaving less statically and actually flying from station to station like regular ships? I think it's time we revived something like that with a beauty like this coming along.

[DraQ]

Personally I found the old bridge much better suiting Kaluri stylistics and more practical for deep space vessel (that doesn't really need conventional decks) even if it was a bit weird.
Other than that it keeps getting better and better.

[FluffyFreak]

Perhaps you're right Draq, I just took another look at the old style it's grown on me I think.
I can imagine it being a less conventional style viewing area than a bridge, might make for a great "cockpit" with a captain chair/station at the centre.

[DraQ]

Perhaps you're right Draq, I just took another look at the old style it's grown on me I think.
I can imagine it being a less conventional style viewing area than a bridge, might make for a great "cockpit" with a captain chair/station at the centre.

That's how I'd envision it as well. I don't think we should have artificial gravity in Pioneer (aside from the obvious centrifugal kind) and this definitely isn't the kind of ship you'd want to put down anywhere larger than an asteroid, so ease of movement is not a good reason to keep the bridge deck-shaped. I'd see the interior of the bridge as bowl shaped with flat-ish seats/acceleration couches (because that's how you'd like your seats to look in a spacecraft not designed to maneuver in the atmosphere - like couches set up as if the ship was standing on its tail) arranged around captain's station in the centre and a little in the back on the bottom of the "bowl" (giving a good view forward - I'd remove reinforcing beams from the inside of the central circular piece - and overview of crew stations).

This also fits Kaluri as they seem to love their bubble canopies, seem a bit obsessed with distinct style and don't seem terribly traditional.