Courier

[bobtheterrible]

Nothing substantial in this update, I just wanted to post a picture of the "inside" :)

[nozmajner]

It's always fun to do this. :) Looks good also.

[impaktor]

Neat, but where's the flux capacitor?

[bobtheterrible]

Not much change to look at, but there are lots of tweaks and optimisation to the mesh. I have also thrown in a variant of the space-frame - I like it, but not sure I like it more than the floating nacelles on booms. Thoughts?



For those interested here is the blend:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0_sT ... zBKNk9mT0k

[nozmajner]

I really like what you did with that sensors and stuff on the nose of the further one.
I think both spaceframe shape work. The more unibody one feels sleeker, the other is a bit more industrial. What if you use both as variants? The more disconnecten one could be the earlier model.

That level 4 subsurf might be a bit of an overshoot. :P :D

[bobtheterrible]

Bah! You can never have too much subsurf - it looks soo smooth :) Im not sure where that second subsurf came from, it certainly wasnt intentional!

I was trying not to go silly with the sensors and stuff. I might add a tiny bit more but leave it at that. If you want to have a go at it yourself then please do, I actually struggle with this sort of detail. The sensor turret worked (largely based on what I have seen you do) but the other stuff could be a little more purposeful. Many thanks tho!

Im currently looking at the unibody spaceframe now. Given the way it intersects with the engine nacelles Im actually going to have to rework quite a bit of the rear to make it look right. By the time Im finished the meshes will be significantly different and I probably wont be able to reuse any of the diff. Its hard enough making just one model - Im not sure I want to take on two right now. The more I look at it the more I think I will go with the unibody. It just seems to fit overall shape better.... back to the trackpad....

[bobtheterrible]

Top down side by side comparison:

[bobtheterrible]

Ok, Im done with the mesh. It seems to have UV'ed reasonably well with very little intervention.

The ship is 95% mirrored so most of the UV map could be overlaid with the other half - I just need to remember how to do it :)

[impaktor]

I lack the ability to map this texture to the model in my head, but I'm sure it's nice, and you obviously put work into it, and it is nice to see the progress. I'm looking forward to having this baby in the game.

[bobtheterrible]

Thanks impaktor :) I would love to take the credit for this but Blender did a pretty fine job of laying it out for me. I have a feeling that it may have been down to applying the edge-split modifier before generating the UV map. The downside being I had less control over "box"-like structures resulting in separate islands for each face.... noz could probably explain better. The next task is to just project half of the texture but overlay both halves on the same image. This way Im hoping to get higher resolution across the whole model than I did for the Bluenose. I dont have much time at the moment but making progress. :)