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.

And the back of it:
It's still taking me longer than I think to model simple stuff, but I'm trying to make sure everything on the ship is there for a reason (i.e. has functionality) so maybe me just staring and swivelling the view constantly adds up :)

Ok, so I guess this thread would work to ask for help too...
I'm having trouble with rotating an object. When I rotate it, it doesn't seem to be rotating the object as one entity, the components get skewed out of proportion. Illustration:
Normal:

Rotated around an axis:
Any help would be much appreciated. Also I'm not really sure how to rotate around a custom axis so that the wings fold out properly. This one just seemed to work because it started as a cylinder. (Except it's not working :confused: )

I'm not too sure if it's the same as the problem I had, but have you checked the Normals?
I had some where they weren't all facing the same direction and that happened, or if you started with a cylinder, did you delete the history?
If neither of those are it I hope someone else comes to your rescue, or you manage to work it out.
It's looking good so far, I like the spiral tubes for travel between decks, nice idea!

Good luck!

Actually I'm not sure either of those things are right, that only happens when you are extruding and rotating at the same time, sorry if I wasted your time... :confused:

No, neither of those things seem to be the trouble. Thanks for the ideas though, and of course you didn't waste my time. It's always good to get input, even if it doesn't immediately solve the problem.

Anyway, here's an ambient occlusion render I did of the pod with cover open, wing out, and jet extended. There's little gears inside the jet compartment, but I won't bother with a screenshot cause they're not that spectacular.

I think I'm starting to get the occlusion idea; this is tweetytunes photoshop layer method (sorta), so thanks for that info tweetytunes. I'm not sure how to do multiply and exclusion layers and all that cause I'm not proficient at photoshop, but I think I could figure it out if I checked out the help for a bit. Also, still not sure how to get a black background with the occlusion render, it seems to be white for me...
Let me know if there's anything I should change or fix. And if anybody has ideas on the above wing rotation problem, that'd be super too! Thanks for everyone's comments.
And sorry for the rambling posts... I tend to do that. I'll stop now.

Yay... fifty posts... small milestones.

Hmmm... so I seem to have worked out the strange skewed rotational issue. A simple freeze transformation seemed to do the trick, combined with an ungrouping of a weird grouping that seemed to have arisen somewhere along the way.

But now I'm back to the question I posed earlier, about setting a custom rotational axis. Is there a way to rotate the pivot so I can animate the wings without messing with all three axes?

are you asking about moving the pivot? if so select the piece and hit "w" then hit insert and move to the end you wish it to rotate on. your ship is looking very nice. it has some really cool ideas implemented well.

Hello, ambient occlusion passes are supposed to have white backgrounds. But you change the colour in the environment tab in the camera attributes.

For your rotation problem you could try switching the rotation to world axis. Double click the rotate tool, at the top click world

Thanks for the replies. Tweetytunes had a black background for his amb occ pass, so I assumed that was how it was supposed to be. I can try looking at the world axis, but I think I've tried that, and what I really want is some sort of local rotational axis along the cylinder. I don't know what gimbel (?) is, but that didn't seem to work well either.

So did some quick work on a different section of the ship (the fuel tank back section). I forgot to render it on a plane or something. It's not that detailed so I'd like to spend more time on it if I can. I still haven't really figured out the blending modes with multiply and all that for occlusion over color, so if anyone feels like a short explanation, cool, otherwise I'll read up on it sometime.

the reason I have a black background is the fact I don`t use the render Layer option - I make the shadder > apply it and then > render like normal.

In photoshop you just need to change the layer tab. Anyway here is a image from my set-up in photoshop hope it helps. each layer has the name I set the layer to in it aswell so you can see what I did.

Need more info just ask - looking good by the way

Thanks for the info and comments. I didn't see that selection option in the layer tab of photoshop. I've got an old version of Elements that I got off my wacom tablets disc, so maybe it doesn't have that? I'll check that when I get a chance.

errr elements - never used it sorry but sound like that could be the case.

I just thought of a clarification for my question about the rotation tool.
The move tool has an option to set the movement axes to a specific face, click "set to face" or something, and then click the face, and you can move in a perpendicular direction, which is very handy.
Is there anything similar to this for the rotate tool, or does that go against the principles of animating things?

tweetytunes- elements works ok for lots of things, but I should probably invest in photoshop CS4 sometime. I just haven't learned enough photoshop skills to fully utilize it

nooooo not cs4 - its sucks - get cs3 instead

Ah, thanks for the advice, I'll keep that in mind. It's probably cheaper too.

Where would I find old versions of photoshop?

Small update, started working on the collar middle portion of the ship that will connect everything together...
and I just discovered that Elements 2.0 (haha... old) does have multiply and exclusion layers and all that, so I must have been blind. Thanks for the help on that, tweetytunes.

So since I'm leaving for Europe in a few days and won't be back home (Victoria, BC, Canada) until after the deadline has passed, I'm going to post what I have so far and call it a "final image". I really learned lots on this challenge, which was the main point for me, and I really appreciate everyone who made comments and gave helpful information. It's so useful to have experienced people giving tips and tricks to a novice like me.

I'm hoping to continue working on this after the challenge is done to learn some texturing and I also wanted to feature some particle effects. The escape pods are in the back of the engine bodies, which seems like an odd place (I guess it is) but that way, the smoke pouring from the engine exhaust pipes will create a literal smokescreen for a hidden getaway.

Comments and crits are still welcome, cause I'll learn from them even if I don't get to implement them.

About Photoshop, why dont you take a look at Gimp?,
its free and a very nice and powerfull program. Everyone seems to be obsessed with PS because it is the more broadly used.

Your ship is quite cool and well made, of the fantasy type more than scifi.

About rotating, is better to use the channel box. Highligt rotate x or y or z, and instead of use exact numbers you can hold the control key and move the mouse pressing the middle mouse button to change the values at your liking.

cool! looked at this on my phone this morning - ha ha - this looks mad - nice job mate - i really like all the different elements. :)

Just got back from holidays yesterday. I'm sorry I missed the rest of the competition, but I checked out the final entries and a lot of them look terrific. Hopefully I can join in the next competition and get a final entry in.

Taquion, I have tried out Gimp, and it looks pretty good. I'm more familiar with Photoshop Elements though, so I'll probably stick with that until I have time to learn some of the more powerful tools of Gimp or Photoshop CS(3 or 4 or something). I'll try out the channel box rotation too.
Arran, thanks for the comments.