Stwert-Spaceship Challenge-Vyrium
 

So here's my very rough start to this challenge. I decided to go with the vyrium race, cause I got a mental picture of a bunch of snakey aliens slithering around a big ship. I don't get the game reference, so hopefully my inevitable departure from it won't lose me any points :)

Wireframe of half of the control cabin frontish part of the ship so far. Comments and criticisms are welcome of course, and I'd like to get people's insight on workflow things, because I'm not really sure yet the best way to approach different types of modelling. How much do people try to keep everything as the same mesh? Or is it better for this type of thing to just model lots of components and stick them together?

By the way, the spirally bits are how the snakey aliens (or snakliens) get to different parts of the ship, because with a straight tube, they wouldn't have anything to push off of.

I like the shapes inside the aerial satellite. Its good that you have put thought into the way the aliens move to nice one. looking forward to seeing the progress. and sorry i carnt say i know to much about modeling, i guess it all comes from practice, and i think you mainly have to keep it all from the samll object when modeling organic characters and such, but not machinery.

Re: Stwert-Spaceship Challenge-Vyrium
 

a good question.. it's one that i'm always asking whenever i do hard surface models... but i never figure out the answer...

i think someone at some point told someone else... or someone asked and it never got answered....

anyway, that's a cool start so far

my stuff is separate pieces all the time, especially in creating non-organic stuff

my ship so far are 1000`s of single cubes and cylinders (slightly tweaked). Working with one complete mesh just makes things harder I find.

yeah seems like you'd break it down into pieces and work on it like that, seems easier and all you have to do is group everything together if you need to scale everything up or down or move it all around.

ha ha - really cool stwert - i like this idea a lot - do you have any concept sketches?

Thanks for all your replies. I was hoping the answer would be lots of small components, cause as some of you said, it just makes things more difficult to have as one mesh. Back to work! I think it'll go a bit faster now I can focus on individual parts and not worry too much about bridging them together to make one unified mesh.

arran, thanks! I do have a couple little sketches, but nothing really detailed or solidified. It's a bit sad actually, how much it feels like my sketching has deteriorated (or if I had any ability in the first place :) ). I don't think I've drawn spaceships since I was a kid. I'll have to get back to the drawing board, so to speak.

Update on the control center of the ship.
I'm obviously really bad at rendering right now, I haven't changed any settings. I've tried to figure out how to change the background color of the render, but I couldn't find it, and I imported it into Picasa which seems to interpret the default black as transparent, which makes sense, but how do I change that? Do I need to add a physical backdrop to the scene and apply a material?

Anyway, I'll look for some rendering info myself, (it seems about time I should learn this stuff), but any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Also, a closer up of the bomb bay and deploy mechanism. I could probably spend a ton more time on this section, but I need to budget my time and I can always come back to it, so I think I'll start creating another part of the ship, maybe an engine...

...and another question, sorry, I'm pretty new to this posting stuff :)

How do I add multiple images? So far I've just used the attach file function, but that only seems to work with one? I see the IMG tag button, but what address am I supposed to put in there? I tried the image's directory path, but that didn't seem to work.
Thanks again for help and comments :)

Here's the bombs and gun:

use something like http://www.imageshack.us to upload your pics and then use the link they provide for the image, then you can post multiple pics in one post. I use it for all of my images.

we should animate all the ships fighting each other since they all seem to have cannons of some sort on them :p

you should put a mechanical lizard tail onto the ship

So here's an update showing an engine set with a little cannon on top. I think I'm starting to get a bit more comfortable with a wider set of tools, so that's kinda cool.

I tried the ambient occlusion tweetytunes suggested in Dango's thread, but I wasn't able to get either method to work out. In the first method, I'm not sure where to get the presets option, (right clicking on the renderLayer in the channel/layers box doesn't give me that option). The second method seemed to work, but when I rendered, I got pure white and black, similar to what an alpha channel would look like. Max distance didn't affect that. I did notice a warning message in the output window:

API 0.0 warn 302018: type conflict: "outColor" is type color, "maya_color_to_vector" returns type vector

Anyway, here's a couple screenshots for now.