Viper Spaceship
 

Hey Everyone,

Just a few quick pics of the spaceship I'm modeling based on the viper from the new battlestar galactica series. I'm still working on the wings and engine details, but thought I'd through this up to get some feedback.

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y258/Grayth/viper1.jpg

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y258/Grayth/viper3.jpg

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y258/Grayth/viper2.jpg

Thanks,
Troy

Hey Dude
Tht looks like a nice start. Throw me a wire

_J

Here's an update...

showing the wings and some of the back end, still got lots of work to do on the engines. The ailerons are seperate objects, so is the bays for the landings gear etc..thinking future animatable objects.. I'll post some wires in a sec..

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y258/Grayth/viper4.jpg

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y258/Grayth/viper5.jpg

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y258/Grayth/viper6.jpg

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y258/Grayth/viper7.jpg

Troy

Great Start! Did you use Nurbs? Really smooth looking. :)

Nope no nurbs, it's all polys.

Hmmm, Im am afraid to hear the poly count. What method did you use? Nurbs to poly, or sub to poly? Im stumped, because if thats what you can model straight from polys (with a low count, keep that in mind) then I am amazed. But otherwise, I still think it is nice work.

Wow, that's awesome! You must really know your stuff. :) I'm not too good with poly modeling yet lol.

Thanks guys,

Jango here's a wire of my low poly proxy mesh.

Alienscience. As you can see from the screen grab the poly count on the lowpoly proxy is only a little over 3000 polys. As for my method well I'm old 3dmax user that recently converted over to maya a couple months ago, and I must say I'm never going back to max :). At any rate I've always been a poly by poly modeler.

shadeblade. Poly modeling isn't really that hard. I did find it a brutal learning curve at first, but once I understood exactly how my mesh was going to smooth out, and how to create those nice hard creases without using subd's then it becomes a hell of alot easier.

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y25...perlowpoly.jpg

Troy

another close up screen grab showing the wire for the cockpit frame. This is a good example of how I create hard creases and sharp turns in a mesh, and have it all turn out nice when I apply smooth.

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y25...th/cockpit.jpg

Troy

Grayth

Thats a tidy mesh dude, love it.

You work similar to myself although I just love subd for organic stuff. What you're doing with the extra edge is the same as what Id do with SDs for the edges; just one in the middle. Then smooth accordingly.

Look forward to the rest.

Regards
_J

Woah super nice. You plan to texture or animate later?

Can i see a close up of some more wires?

Yeah Going to texture it and animate it. I haven't done to much for updates this weekend will try over next few days. I've been thinking of a nice way to model up the engine details, we'll see how It turns out.

Plus I still have to model the landing gear and inside the cockpit. etc...I'll post more wires tomorrow...

My idea is to make a composite animation shot over some background shots, using bluescreen effects and create a nice fly by, or something..

Cool model bud.. Can you ad some lights to your renders and post some new pics please

Here's some more shots. I haven't added any temp lights yet sorry. I'm working on some engine ideas for the back end. I've also added in some rotors inside the engine intakes...

Well let me know what ya think.

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y258/Grayth/viper9.jpg

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y25...th/viper10.jpg

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y25...th/viper11.jpg

Troy

Nice

Ahhh yes, that edge method thing does turn out nicely smoothed. Looking forward to some progress. Keep it up...........................DAWG :cool:

Nice work dude, keep it up!

small update finished the guns

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y25...th/viper13.jpg

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y25...th/viper14.jpg

Grayth

Dude, although this model is not your design, I really love this particular piece of modelling. You can tell its a good clean mesh under there. I have no crit really except add a pilot will you!!

Look forward to the rest

_J

Lol Thanks Jango.

Yeah I intend to model the inside of the cockpit, with pilot seat, joystick, computer controls etc...I'm saving it for last gotta think about it. perhaps I'll take your advice and add a pilot, or at least a semblance of one...

I', also thinking about landing gear. That's gonna be a tuff one. I want to be able to animate it te landing gear so I'm going to have to think about how that's going to work...

That'll take me into realm of maya I'm not familar with yet. As I stated in the beginning just converting over from 3dmax, if this was max no problem but I got to get more familiar maya still only been a month or so..but I've modeled in max for several years, so some of the transition has just been learning maya specific tool sets..

Bud
There are many ways to animate the landing gear

Below is a link for a tutorial on modelling a spaceship and animating it. Its an old one and is a traditional way of animating using maya. You dont need the spaceship part etc as you are way beyond what this guy has made.
The bits you will like is the part on animating the landing gear and firing some photons from it. Just skip the first couple of chapters.
http://www.tutorialized.com/tutorial...spaceship/4675

Set Driven Key is the best way of animating the landing gear.. look at the free tutorial Here on SImplymaya, that explains this principle.

http://simplymaya.com/movie_pages/tu...html?tut_id=41

BTW.. you still need to add some lights in your renders...
Buy a point and spend it on this tutorial
http://simplymaya.com/movie_pages/tu...html?tut_id=23
Or google for a free one

I dissagree about set driven keys for the landing gear.

I would use expressions. You can easily set it up so that the gear mesh Y-axis position directly effects the landing gear covers Rotation. So when you grab the wheel meshes and pull them down, the gear covers automatically rotate out and let the wheels pass by.

Using expressions would eliminate the need to animate the gear covers individually. Just animate the wheels and the expression does the rest :)

Edit:

Meh, Looking at it again, Set Driven keys would work as well, you just have to set three objects to the attribute. It would essentially function exactly the same why using either solution. Whatever you like best :)

Heya Grayth,

Decent looking model you have there. Keep it up :)

thanks guys,

Thanks for the landing gear tips, having it behave just like you mentioned using the expressions way is exactly how I wanted everything to behave so I'll check it out..

Yeah I know I got to set up some temp lights for renders, I'll make sure I do that for my next update.

small update,

I added in some temp lights just to help show definition don't go crazy, these were just thrown in, hence the term temp lights.

Anyways it shows some of the greebling I'm doing as I detail out more of this model. Still working on greeblin out the back engines not to sure if I like it yet..your comments will help..

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y258/Grayth/ship01.jpg

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y258/Grayth/ship02.jpg

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y258/Grayth/ship03.jpg

thanks, Grayth

Are they remaking this series? Damn, this model brings back fond memories for me ...

Dave

They already have remade the series, which is what this model is based off of. battlestar galactica 2003. I got my source images for this model off of the main site galactica2003.net..

thanks,

Well I didn't like how the greebles were turning out by the engines so I re worked the area. Hope you guys like the changes.

As you can see I started greeblin the ass end now

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y258/Grayth/ship06.jpg

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y258/Grayth/ship04.jpg

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y258/Grayth/ship05.jpg

Grayth

Beautiful engine detail bud.. Any chance of a unsmothed shot of that area, the middle pic from above I mean. (Im assuming you are using a smoth proxy)

Cheers

Hi thanks,

While I am using smooth proxy, for the most part I have not used it on detailing up the mesh. In the engine detail case it's all done and sorry there is no low poly version of it.

It's real simple actually though I took a cylinder I think of around 12 segements, deleted the ends as you can't see them anyways...I applied smooth the the polys but oly with a division of 2 just to give me more mesh to work with..

I then selected a row of faces and then delected every other one, extruded with the usual 3 times standard to get proper smoothing...then used cut faces tool to cut on each side of this row of polys and through the extruded polys..making sure that I have 3 edges for each 90 degree turn in a mesh.

I then added in another poly smooth but with a division of only 1 this time..

It's the same method I used on blocking out the detail, split poly tool and cut faces but in greeblin out details sometimes you need to smooth out the poly first to give you more faces to play with...

Hope that helps..

Grayth

Grayth

Looks very cool. Best of luck with the UVs on the detail;)

_J