How would you detail a 15 mile long ship?

biotech

I mean I know the SSD is meant to be around that length, but you can still see windows on her, and that seems a little out of place when you consider the scale.

The SSD is pretty much the biggest mainstream ship most of us are familier with, and they got away with their scale by having normal SDs in the same scene, and by having a city on top.

I just wonder how you would do it, if you had to create a 15 mile long ship, from a new universe, and yet still have it instantly recognisable as being huge?

Sphynx

I've done a few city ships like this, and the only way that I've found is to put things in the scene that were recognised as huge from a viewers own own experience - pretty much what was done, as you describe above, with the normal star-destroyers.

In my case, much of the detailing of my sity-ships were sky-scrapers like constructions on the surface - show something that can only be huge in the viewers everyday perception, regardless of what it is, and you'll probably get away with it.

Mr. Extrude

well, nothing against shameless megalomania but you really have to consider if this mega size is necessary, a one kilometer ship staged properly can be as impressive, for example by putting it in a very basic familiar surrounding, like a planet surface or docking on a small station, so the viewer is very close

then there is the old principle of common elements in small scale like the hangars, nacelles, bridges etc.

another important aspect is the character of the shape, rather simple main-shapes contrasted by small more dynamic elements and greebles illustrate size nicely, you couldnt just scale up the galaxy class by five and make the windows smaller, the dynamic shapes make it less believable

also an option: the famous homeworld mothership looks extremely huge just because of its unusual horizontal shape

for economical concerns you can only do greeble openings in an otherwise rather plain hull and some thin channels extruding from these openings over the rest of the ship, saves time and work

the even bigger ID-ship was also a good example of size illustration

biotech

In the stories I wrote, 1KM long ships are the norm, so to have a ship that makes them look puny you have to go bigger.

The ship in question is pretty much a huge planet destroying laser, with a ship built around it.

Its very organic in shape, with almost no straight lines, its just a hard concept to get down on paper, never mind in 3D.

SGA-3D

I'm glad that you said that it was organic .

The Wraith Hive Ships on Stargate Atlantis are supposed to be around 11KM long. As the ships are organic, it meant that little detail was needed around the hull. Instead, small rifts and dips in the hull were 'greeblized' with was were essentially mini cities. The single pixel windows helped greatly in portraying the size of the ship.

Coolhand

it's a real challenge, i mean that stargate ship doesn't look 11km, but they did their best. sphynx is on the right track imo, take a look at whay 15 km of city looks like and somehow emulate that, i can't really think of any better reference, perhaps some of the larger oil refineries... maybe think about how many aircraft carriers and oil tankers you'd need to put end to end to make that distance to get the concept of that kind of scale into your head.

[Deleted User]

How about the Angel of the North as a hood ornament? :eek:

That, or, like sphynx and SGA suggested, windows are always a good sense of scale. (maybe the huge radar dishes/ radio telescopes might help too, for some variations)

Just my two cents on the matter Sorry i couldn't of been much more help

JeffrySG

Well... just look at what approx. 15km of Tokyo looks like and you'll really see how big 15km really is and what the scale of it is... I'm guessing that you wouldn't be able to see normal sized windows.... but maybe hints of light from buildings/living areas...

biotech

Yeah, there's no way in hell you'd see individual windows on that scale.

I'm thinking some sort of embedded city on top is the way to go, and some light pollution that hints at smaller windows.

Other than that the only way is to include in the same image a ship you've already established at being 1km long.

Coolhand

biotech wrote: »

Yeah, there's no way in hell you'd see individual windows on that scale.

I'm thinking some sort of embedded city on top is the way to go, and some light pollution that hints at smaller windows.

Other than that the only way is to include in the same image a ship you've already established at being 1km long.

just use that 1km ship as a greeble:)

i think for your windows you could try mapping them on, then you can see the individual windows up close (like when only a couple of km fills the screen), and from far away it might give you more of a splotch of light, like you were rightly thinking of simulating. add a few hundred omnis to complement the effect and you're there.

also, don't give it gigantic engines like so many designs do, i think maybe 30 - 50 or so small ones would sell the scale better.

biotech

The plan was always to have a huge hanger a couple of the 1KM ships could sit in.

I'll have to make a low poly version of my Jugjhool battleship for that though.

I would never have considered the 50 or so engine route, that does make more sence, after all, its what the Russians did whenever they needed more thrust for a rocket, bang more engines on!

today

If it helps, here's a shot of Midtown Manhattan from a few miles up, I was tired after coming off of a 6 hour flight, so it's a little blurry, and I was running towards the end of my memory stick so it's also a bit low res, but you can see pretty clearly groups of lights and can almost make out the empire state building, if that helps give you an idea of scale

Coolhand

yep, the SSD had quite a lot of engines too, and the deathstar apparently had something like 128 standard ISD sized hyperdrives. there are some more real world examples too, like the B52's arrays of turbojets and the, err, spruce moose... though unlike the 52 thats hardly an example of a good design...

biotech

Well it flew about 8 feet before Howard set her down again.

I love B52s, its the one model I regret not buying when I was into model planes, even in 1/72nd scale though it was still massive.

Maybe I'll take a crack at it in 3D some day.

JeffrySG

I was looking over my "modeling the galaxy" book last night and I like how on the SSD they left the conning tower the exact same size as it was on the SD. This really helped the scale of the SSD. We all knew how big the conning tower was so when it was a lot smaller on a ship it must be huge!

It all comes down to the viewer knowing the scale of the ship in their mind...

Mr. Extrude

well for organic shapes its even harder to make them look big, just think of the vorlon supership, hardly looks that big, one possibility could be to scatter "window-craters" in the organic shape, holes which open the view on plain walls with big arrays of windows, now u cant see single windows true, but if the viewer knows/guesses that there are windows it would be enought to see the lines or surfaces of light, as others pointed out: you are in space with a much more clear view than on earth

also consider to scatter single windows and blinking lights in big distances over the hull, you would see these in almost any case (one photon every 10 ms is enough for the human eye to recognize light ^^), i think the "good" star wars capital ships (calamari?) had these

Ozylot

There is another cinematic trick that hasn't been mentioned. Aside from adding a bunch of detail all over, make areas that are much denser, that you can use for close up shots, or wide angle shots.

That was something that they always did around the SD's the camera never really could fit the whole ship into the view. Size was implied simply by camera position.

BDelacroix

Its funny, I am currently redoing a ship I envisioned way back when I used Imagine on the Amiga. It is supposed to be large, not necessarily that large. A city in space, sort of thing.

Now, I'm no expert but the ideas I have been thinking of are to use familiar objects to set a sense of scale. Like a hangar door.

I also thought about having a space suited figure in there, though it would be very small. Some smaller ships like pleasure boats or personal craft that looked similar enough to personal airplanes or yachts. A terrestrial planet in the background might work as well. I was even planning to put some skyscraper like structures on it.

Ouch, a few hundred omni lights? That would kill this computer.

biotech

You only need to use the omnis long enough to burn the textures.

Coolhand

'bake' the lighting into the textures... know you nothing of cooking?:D

though once you bake something like that, on that scale you would either lose texture detail, the amount of texels that are covering your model (assuming you're using tiling maps and not handpainting an entire 'city') or you would end up with baked maps that are so large that you would run out of memory anyway. I mean you could perhaps bake just the self illumination maps (though this will destroy any lit windows if you're mapping to that scale) and map them on another UV channel over the tiled maps.. or, you could perhaps just paint the illumination into your window light maps...

biotech

I'm thinking for a ship of this size, you need one model that you can use for full length shots, and bits of models you can use for close ups, much like they did in ESB, with a seperate "trench" model for flying close to a star destroyers greebles.

[Deleted User]

If i had to make something that huge id ,make the camera view far away so you could see the whole ship in the shot, then make a fleet of thos 1km ships you were talking about. now the camera wold be close to one of the one km ships so you could see that as being big. but then the rest of the 1 km ships would be flying near the 15km ship. Close enough to see the shadow of the 1km ship on the 15km ship, so that the 1km ships cant just be mistaken as far away.

Now if the 1km ships dont help, then near the camera you could stick a bunch of fighters close to the 1km ships (again the shadows casting onto the hull) that way they can say, the fighters are that small compared to the 1km ship, and the 1km ship is that small compared to the 15km ship, so the 15km one must be huge.

Then again if you dont want to put a fleet into it, and just want to have the big city ship, then im at a loss as much as you are. i guess id just greeble normally so that when you zoom in really close you can see complete detail and when you zoom far out it wont look very detailed, just have variations in color (that would be a b*tch polycount though)

Theres also a question of camera angle, if you put the camera in front of the ship as if the ship were flying towards the camera, but the camera is tilting upwards at the ship, that always gives the feeling of something being big and powerful.

If you were to just get section of the ship in the shot, so that you cant actually see the whole ship just the part you wanna see and some stars, or whatver background you have that would also help make the ship recognizable as bigger, even better if you were looking from the back of the ship all the way down to the end of the ship, and you had the camera parallel, and close to the ship,that would make it look big. A tiny little guy working on something in a Space suit standing on the hull would also be helpful if you get close enough to see it.

I guess most of this wasnt really about the actually detailing was it, i just kinda rambled on about ow to make it recognizable as HUGE. Oh well i hope it helps anyway.

$0.02,
Armorhead

RedEye

The book I'm reading now made me think of this thread. David Weber's Empire From the Ashes, in which the Earth's moon is actually a camouflaged planetoid-class warship over 3000km in diameter. Later battles feature about 70 of these against one and a quarter million enemy ships of more modest size, but still 20km long minimum.

Imagine greebling a few of those

[Deleted User]

put some tie fighters in the hangars (if it's star wars) or something similarly small. You see If people see the tiny things they think "Wow thats big" 'cause of the small object thats recognizable. Or like was said use a recognizably large object and make it small.