|
Post by the_Demongod on Aug 19, 2018 1:53:42 GMT
I've been out of the habit of modeling but I've become addicted to it again. I tend to binge with things like this and then get burnt out and drop it for a while unfortunately I've switched to Blender from 3DS Max since I only have a student copy of Max and I figured I might as well learn how to use something free and avoid getting in trouble if I made some cool animation and wanted to monetize my video on youtube or something. At first I didn't like Blender because it lacked some tools that were important to me in 3DS Max (namely non-destructive editing and particle nodes) but it's really an awesome piece of software and also has a huge community which means if I ever get stuck I'm always fewer than two or three google searches away from an answer. I've been learning a ton doing animation, which I'd never really done before. Here's the short scene I've been working on, it's only about 10 seconds long and unfortunately goes pretty fast but it's a lot harder to make test renders if it takes 45 minutes every time I'll probably go back and slow it down when everything is done. Full screen it so you can see the cannon impacts :^) Critique and ideas would be appreciated. <iframe width="10.600000000000023" height="6.899999999999977" style="position: absolute; width: 10.600000000000023px; height: 6.899999999999977px; z-index: -9999; border-style: none;left: 5px; top: 187px;" id="MoatPxIOPT0_58226081" scrolling="no"></iframe> <iframe width="10.600000000000023" height="6.899999999999977" style="position: absolute; width: 10.6px; height: 6.9px; z-index: -9999; border-style: none; left: 473px; top: 187px;" id="MoatPxIOPT0_83845413" scrolling="no"></iframe> <iframe width="10.600000000000023" height="6.899999999999977" style="position: absolute; width: 10.6px; height: 6.9px; z-index: -9999; border-style: none; left: 5px; top: 474px;" id="MoatPxIOPT0_93814822" scrolling="no"></iframe> <iframe width="10.600000000000023" height="6.899999999999977" style="position: absolute; width: 10.6px; height: 6.9px; z-index: -9999; border-style: none; left: 473px; top: 474px;" id="MoatPxIOPT0_96933271" scrolling="no"></iframe>
|
|
|
Post by the_Demongod on May 6, 2018 23:59:45 GMT
Same here, at least for the iconic laser frigate and gunship. If you couldn't tell by my pic, I love the gunship purely for its rugged bulk. I'm currently working on modelling the cockpit of a weapon systems officer onboard the gunship, as if the vehicle was built in the 1970s (with analog instruments and all that cool stuff).
|
|
|
Post by the_Demongod on May 3, 2018 23:03:11 GMT
Yeah I agree about the looking horrible part; the cylindrical, monolithic nature of the ships was always my favorite part. Besides, concave armor increases the likelihood of penetration at angles to the vertical, and would be harder from a construction standpoint too. I really wish the option would stay but that the stock ships would go back.
|
|
|
Post by the_Demongod on Dec 21, 2017 22:08:10 GMT
The new element browser is awesome! Concavity is cool too although I rather miss the monolithic aesthetic of the stock designs, now they're all bulbous and some are kinda ugly It works well with some of them but for all of them to be all rounded... seems like qswitched went a little ham lol. I miss the old gunship. I think I'd rather them be polygonal than concave. It also seems like building your armor like that could give the enemy too much information about how the internals of your ship are structured, which is normally hidden with the plainer armor schemes.
|
|
|
Post by the_Demongod on Dec 19, 2017 1:58:41 GMT
As you may have seen in some of my "fan art" posts I'm capable of some amount of 3D modeling. My animation skills are pretty simple but CoaDE is pretty simple itself so I may be able to make some B-roll of ships flying around and shooting at each other.
|
|
|
Post by the_Demongod on Nov 1, 2017 7:53:26 GMT
I was thinking of a glow gradient rather than a specific tracer geometry, but I suppose it would work too. Actually a glow gradient could work as well if I applied the glow using a mask, I'll try that if I can't get good results the other way. Usually I just change the geometry since the glow intensity is partly based on the visible glowing surface area.
|
|
|
Post by the_Demongod on Oct 31, 2017 3:54:44 GMT
Nice! Is it possible to circumvent the precision issue by scaling everything down (models included)? Also it would look better if tracers had more of a forward glow IMO. Yeah I agree, the model I used for the tracers (wasn't getting a good effect using particles w/motion blur like before) actually did have this feature (imagine two pyramids with the bases touching, but one is 300 meters long ), but it got hidden when I applied the glow. I'll have to tweak it. I'm still waiting for a new version of Earth rendering! Reference: DISCOVR satellite pics I know I know , I haven't touched it since I made that post, because I spent so long on it without getting good results and burnt myself out. There's a complex interplay between the color and density of the atmosphere and the color of the surface, so the surface will look right but then I'll improve the atmosphere and the surface (viewed through the atmosphere) then looks too white (especially when trying to match the shades of the ocean) or wrong in some other way. I'll definitely work on it further and post when I get some decent results.
|
|
|
Post by the_Demongod on Oct 29, 2017 21:31:18 GMT
Been screwing around in Max again, mostly making myself desktop backgrounds for fun. Unfortunately it doesn't use double precision coordinate space so modeling things on large scales is difficult as I run out of float precision. I'll probably have to model simplified versions of my ships and make the battles take place on the order of 100 meters and call each meter 10 meters or something. Here's my current one:
|
|
|
Post by the_Demongod on Oct 2, 2017 23:59:35 GMT
I made a missile that has twice the payload, 600 m/s more dv and more armor as well as a slimmer diameter than the current winning design, while costing a bit over half as much. I'd be surprised if anyone was able to beat this with a NTR design, since Fl-H rockets are so cheap by comparison. With Fl-H the engine costs nothing and the fuel is cheaper than methane as well. <snip> What did you use in the way of guidance logic settings? I have some great KKVs but they only work well when fired from outside combat at high intercept velocities. When fired in combat they disperse too much and then don't have enough fuel to correct for terminal guidance, and if I tweak the settings to fix this, they crash into each other on launch.
|
|
|
Post by the_Demongod on Sept 2, 2017 3:34:12 GMT
I got burnt out on rendering after spending 3 days straight trying to get earth to look right and failing so it's been a while... I whipped this up a couple days ago when I found a good map of Jupiter and wanted to put it to use. Fun fact: if you're modeling planets, especially the gas giants, make sure you make them the right shape. It's easy to just slap a texture on a sphere and say good enough but the oblateness actually makes a big difference, albeit visually subtle. Jupiter's polar axis is around 93% the length of its equatorial axis, which is a pretty significant difference actually. It's not super obvious normally but if you put a perfectly spherical Jupiter next to the correct one, the oblate one looks way more correct. Anyways, here's a gunship being engaged (by a cutter, maybe?): Not the most polished render ever but it was fun to make; it's pretty easy to get a satisfying result in terms of emulating the weapons.
|
|
|
Post by the_Demongod on Aug 26, 2017 19:56:53 GMT
Thanks. I'll abstract that bit in my novel then. Thanks a bunch. As ever, you're a font of knowledge. Slightly off-topic, but If you're writing a novel I highly recommend Atomic Rockets as a source. It's a site basically centered around being a resource to allow hard science fiction authors to do back of the napkin math to come up with plausible/feasible technologies and environments for their stories. Click on the bar that says "Click to show topics" at the top and check out any of those pages such as the one on Conventional Weapons (which is relevant to your question). The site author is a big fan of CoaDE as you can see at the very top of the page. It's an incredibly fun site to just read like a book, highly recommended to anyone here who hasn't seen it because it's right up the alley of CoaDE.
|
|
|
Post by the_Demongod on Aug 14, 2017 7:33:58 GMT
A friendly reminder: 70s photos tend to be too red. This link looks useful. Also, this is awesome! You should totally make your own thread! Thanks That's an awesome resource, working to make it look more like that now. It might take me a few days of tweaking to get a satisfying result though. As for my own thread, I don't think I'm confident in my skills enough to do that hah, I'm just messing around here. Maybe at some point I'll make a series of images portraying a battle or even a short animation (combat pics probably soon) and I'll post that somewhere else. Might as well use the fan art thread for its intended purpose for now.
|
|
|
Post by the_Demongod on Aug 14, 2017 2:59:54 GMT
Which Earth texture did you use? I recommend these if you aren't using them already. I used one I found on the internet, but it looks like they got it from that link. It didn't look realistic though (too saturated and the ocean was too detailed), I edited the textures manually to get it to look more like this. Getting the atmospheric scattering material to look right took forever.
|
|
|
Post by the_Demongod on Aug 14, 2017 2:33:55 GMT
Ugh... why did I even do this to myself? Now I want it to become reality...
|
|
|
Post by the_Demongod on Aug 13, 2017 0:36:21 GMT
(non-metal materials like that Silica Aerogel are hard to get to look right) It's even harder than you think — silica aerogel actually looks like weird clear blue-white ice. The game renders transparent materials as black. Yeah I realized that when I went to research the material for the project, but I decided I'd rather keep it looking like the game does for continuity's sake. Let's pretend it's stuck to some sort of black substrate...
|
|