Despite it being relatively simple in shape, the "Block" is weighing in at 30,400 tris which Im putting down to overly ornate thrusters and cargo loader detail.
Im not sure I should model a cockpit or even what it should look like...
Im expecting the landing gear to be a simple affair retracting into the main fuselage. I can add further greeble using decals/normals.
I wonder if wheels are the way to go? This ship wont be starting from a runway, I assume. Then maybe tri goes down when modelling them as helicopter landing support rather than circular wheels?
I thought about supports/skids and those are still an option. I had a discussion with Noz way back when doing the Bluenose. It went along the lines that wheels are useful for manoeuvring on the ground i.e. towing out of the way or fine adjustment etc... happy to take guidance.
Also, Im not sure we would recover many tris by replacing them :-/ The rear engines are still over engineered so I can reduce the count simplifying those.
I prefer wheels, even though they are adding to the tri count. Easier to move them around on the ground.
But on the other hand, the other Haber ship, the Lunar Shuttle has legs.
And as far as I gathered, tri count isn't that important metric nowdays anyway.
I like that cockpit you put on. And I see you are using the docking collar templates. :) I'll check the model itself later, I only looked at the pictures yet, but it is looking good.
* have added RCS thrusters
* cleaned up the cockpit
* remodelled the ventral thrusters
* remodelled the sensor module
I still need to do some more tidying up but I think I am there with the general design.
At this point before I go any further, if anyone wants to comment on how this looks or if they want me to tweak the style or whatever say now before I move on to the UV textures etc :)
I think it is looking really good, and the modeling is nice and clean.
But I'd detail it a bit further on the model. I could do some draw-overs if you want, could be helpful for this and the surface details as well.
The RCS thrusters could benefit from a bit of elaboration. (See the Sino remodel for an example)
25 vertex for their circle feels a bit of an overkill though. For the Sino I used 12, but this is a larger ship. 18 might be enough. Not sure how the tr count will look in the end. But for the highest lod we have more leeway. (The Sino will have about the double of your tri count I think for the highest LoD. Then we can aggressively lod out the details, since most of the time we won't see the ships that up close, but give some nice visuals for the player to look at while they are looking at their ship :) )
I really like what you did with the landing thrusters.
The main engines are at a right S3 size.
I suspect you used the templates, because the retros are exactly S0 as well. Nice!
Head and tail lights would be nice, and those likely need a bit of modeling as well, not just decals/texturing.
You could also elaborate the radiators a bit more. I'll push the Sinonatrix, you could copy those radiators over and tweak. There's an array modifier on them, so you can adjust how many repeats you want. (I've also added you to the repo)
If you rotate them in edit mode around the object origin, all the duplicates will rotate properly. If you change the dimensions, you might need to adjust the distance in the Array modifier.
The docking collar would need a bit of specific texture detailing, but I'm not sure when I'll get to that size with that. I'm at the S1 right now for the Sino, but I could do it after that.
I'd elaborate and articulate the landing gear a bit, with some nice actions, so it is not just moving up-and down. I could do that for you if you don't want to bother with rigging and such. Extending the prefab repo would be good anyway. I like the proportions of it, and the tree pairs of wheels each pronounces the mass of the ship as well.
Not sure, how useful the front hatch would be, now that I think of it. You'd need a ramp of specific height on port to be able to access it. You could swap it out for a larger docking collar. An S3 would fit there perfectly.
And then there could be a ramp on the bottom side of the nose (should be enough to indicate it on the texture with paneling lines and such)
The cockipt would sure benefit from a bit more geomatry on the curvature at the front, and it would be nice to detail it a bit in the geometry.
Thanks for the input Noz - impressed you were able go through that investigation so quickly!!
RCS thusters:
* I like that additional detail - will add
* I can reduce the node count
Engines:
* complete fluke that the size of any the thrusters matched your templates - it was all done by "meh, seems appropriate" :D
* those cones are pretty basic - Im open to adding some more detail if you think appropriate
Radiators:
* they are really nice and I can look at adding those, tho the tri count will definitely shoot up
Landing gear:
* I feel like I should learn how to do this although for expediency Im sure you could knock something up in an evening that would take me weeks to build! Give me a bit of time, but I might just pass that over to you.
Cockpit:
* the windows are meant to be angular, similar to the bridges you see on ships. To me, angular sort of fits with the over all blockiness of the ship. I can certainly add some additional relief tho I was wondering if this could be achieved using decals/normals
Loading bay:
* I had similar thoughts - the hight makes it difficult to load from the ground. My rational was that it is not unusual for airports to have mobile rising-platforms to get luggage and cargo into the holds of aircraft. I would have assumed there would be similar equipment at a starport. Having said that, it dosnt really fit with the over all style of other ships in pioneer so I will have a rethink.
* had similar thoughts about adding a ramp in texture
Draw-overs and surface details:
* always happy for these!! You have significantly more ability than I in this regard :)
I could record myself doing the landing gear, to show the process, if that helps.
In the Sino rework, the RCS boolean cutters have adjustable division count, you could use them. Might be easier to cut them, then cleanup on the slanted surfaces at least. I just got the idea looking at your model on how to achieve that adjustability.
The angularity of the window at that angle feels a bit odd, feels like a low-poly curve, but adding some detail to it might alleviate that, but not sure. We will have to try it out.
