bigger equals more powerful, yes, true that. But 80 meters? I'm happy that those guns don't fire bullets, I'd hate to be the ammunitions officer for that...
Gun size does seem to scale with estimated power in SW.
For really big guns in canon, see the siege weapons on the Munificent, the axial turbolasers on the Recusant, and the W-165 planetary turbolaser.
Some suggestions:
1) Use real-world units, or a fixed arbitrary unit = x real units scale. It's more intuitive when sizing what an element should be, and easier to keep multiple models to scale.
2) Those turrets are now large enough that they look like they can't traverse. Check that; if they don't have a good arc of fire, they might as well dispense with the turret and go fixed emplacement.
Ha. Sorry my lorebabble was so intense that my use of fixed arbitrary units didn't come through. I used the smallest unit in 3ds max as a measure. However, the scale was different in the Curator model vs. the Revenant model. I imported the Curator to the Revenant scene and scaled appropriately.
3ds max shows a grid (obviously). Within this grid, the smallest division is actually 10 units (I tested this by creating a cube with snaps on). The cube came out 10x10x10 in the max readout even though it was only "1x1x1" in terms of the snaps. Revenant is 507.5 units long, or 68.965m per max unit. Once I'm sure I won't be doing any more usage of Rhino 3D, I will scale Revenant up just to make modeling easier (so it is 5075 units long, but the actual stated dimensions are unchanged).
What, exactly do you mean by "turrets that can't traverse?" Is it based on size (too big), density (they'd hit each other) or something else?
Ship rescaled. 1 unit = 1m. Quite big in terms of units but not really a problem. Both programs I use have expanding grids.
Red is the heaviest battery as-is. The green turrets are slightly higher detail (removed the ProOptimizer) and also positioned further apart. Is that better, considering these turrets are exactly 89m long from base of barrel to back of housing? They're bigger than I expected, but that's because of error multiplication. The more estimates and rounding you do, the worse it gets with something this size.
I found an area in the side of the ship that greebling just didn't want to fill in with the lengthy deck-things. So I came up with a really, really big (total diameter = 13.5m) turbolaser based on the planetary w165.
Debating whether they should just "fire straight" and be used for broadsides against slow-moving targets/planets or if I should mount them in casemates like the battleships of old.
About the big gun, I'd say have it facing side-ways. Actually several of them. Remember Ep3, the beginning? Those broadside emplacements of the Venator and the Invisible Hand? I could imagine your monster moving straight into enemy formations, using it's arrowhead to literally puncture in, then unleash it's stronger broadside fire onto any enemy essel within range...
About the big gun, I'd say have it facing side-ways. Actually several of them. Remember Ep3, the beginning? Those broadside emplacements of the Venator and the Invisible Hand? I could imagine your monster moving straight into enemy formations, using it's arrowhead to literally puncture in, then unleash it's stronger broadside fire onto any enemy essel within range...
You read my mind. That's exactly what it is, and what inspired its placement. The only difference is that it's not a physical weapon.
Oddly, Wookiepedia implies these were glorified "flak guns." It doesn't make too much sense how they operate in the movie, then. Flak bursts shouldn't be able to bring down a big ship (either a Venator or Providence).
Actually, I was more talking about the Republics version (as seen on the Guarlara, the ship blowing the Invisible Hand to it's near-death). These do not seem to be projectile operated. Either way, I think they used those guns more like a shraplen-hurling shotgun than a flak.
Flak would, however, be good at shooting down the swarms of Republic fighters with Jedi in them...
Alternate explanation would be a relatively cheap mass driver bombardment weapon, just re-purposed for the occasion because of the close range and desperation involved.
I took another look at Episode III. It appears the Separatist weapons clearly have physical ammunition of some sort. The Republic guns don't seem to--firing big blue blasts of I'm-not-sure-what that reliably explodes on contact with an enemy ship. Wookiepedia doesn't have any information on these "broadside guns" either.
This is the array of big guns. They're definitely energy-based. Fifteen per side. The bigger render shows the area in context. The guns are mounted along the side of the huge hanger.
NOTE: My work will most likely accelerate within the next few weeks as I am getting a new laptop. Long story short, my XPS m1530 has been nothing but trouble over the ten months I've owned it. Six issues (bad battery out of the box, wrong replacement sent, NVIDIA mobile 8-series GPU of death, hard drive failure #1, hard drive failure #2, random shutdowns thought to be overheating but not when it shuts down at 85C on CoreTemp) plus a possible second GPU failure (screen goes black then comes back without any notice of a driver failure from Windows) enabled me to talk Dell into flat-out replacing this machine rather than attempting to repair it again.
The new machine is from the Studio XPS 16 line and will have, minimum, the following: Core 2 Duo 2.26GHz, 4GB DDR3-1066, ATI 3670 512MB, 320GB 7200RPM, 1366x768 LED. Much better! (Reference: 1.86GHz, 4GB DDR2-667, GeForce 8400GS-M, 320GB 5400RPM, 1280x800).
I'd reason that the REpublics weapons use the same fuel as for any other blaster, even the "small" rifles: Tibanna Gas. Means somehwere in the ship is a tank of (likely liquid to carry more and also keep it at a non-hazardous level) Tibanna gas, from which then some is tanken, vapoured and then transfered to the guns.
At least that's how I think it'd work.
Although I thought the guns to be placed on the edge of the ship itself. That way they could be spread a bit more and maybe couples (into duos or trios). Because my initial idea was, that uch a huge beasty, in order to keep up with the size-increase, has at least 3 dozens of them.
I finally accomplished something. I've been setting up my new laptop and only got around to installing CAD software recently. You know, the good, proper procedure of "install everything, then image."
For anyone interested, the new machine is quite a bit better than the old. It's a Studio XPS 1640; Core 2 Duo T9400 (2.53GHz, 6MB cache), 4GB DDR3-1067, ATI Mobility Radeon 3670 512MB, 500GB HDD, 1920x1080 RGBLED screen, 2.0MP Skype-certified webcam, Blu-Ray drive & DVD Burner, light-up keyboard, decent audio though still integrated, and glossy enough to use for doing hair/straightening ties.
Problem is, the SXPS 1640 has a habit of throttling precisely when you need power the most (the same issue affects Latitude E6400/6500). So it makes rendering difficult when the CPU kicks down to its lowest state (6x w/a 133MHz FSB via Super-Low-Frequency Mode) because, ohnoez, insufficient power from the 90w adapter. 130w on the way though, so that problem will die in a fire shortly.
Super-large rendering alert (12500px horizontal). The ship is 35km long so I figured that would be appropriate.
I started in on the trench detailing, which will be superior to the Curator. That is the reason for the huge render--otherwise you can't really see anything in the trench. Methodology is "Start with a few low-detail greebles, then make pass after pass adding additional detail until you're happy with the result."
How many times can a man use the same greebles, before anyone says something?
The gun batteries will be redone in the near future as well. As was mentioned by the ever-helpful Aresius and FS, my turrets were too close together.
It isn't a project if big parts of it don't get redone! I've redesigned the turrets for Revenant. They are mostly inspired from real-life battleships, then given a Star Wars twist. The turrets are slightly smaller than they were previously (71m end-to-end not counting barrels).
Note that the big turrets have a quad point-defense gun on top of them, alleviating, at least in appearance, "point defenseless" (which so often occurs on big ships, especially Imperial ones). Plot armor still works, however
Back Row: Flechette Cannon (again, not point-defenseless--shreds unshielded fighters, missiles, etc.), six-barrel turbolaser, heavy turbolaser (biggest gun minus spine-mounted cannons seen earlier).
Front Row: Octuple point-defense cannon, ion cannon.
3ds max 2012 default scanline renderer. Go figure. Rhino brings my laptop to its knees (alpha-ness, I bet), iray and Quicksilver require more GPU memory than I have (512MB). Again, giant render warning (12.5k).
Light Blue are Heavy Batteries (15--300 turrets), Light Green are Main Batteries (11--220 turrets). Each battery has twenty laser turrets, two flechette turrets and twelve single heavy ion cannons. All 22 big turrets possess a quad point-defense laser. There will be batteries (three turrets each) of flechette turrets only. Take that, you fighter-spamming Rebel scum! Currently, fifty-two flechette turrets exist to ward off fighter spam and deal with excessive missile launches.
Note that this is one side, top only. Nor have point-defense guns been installed. I'm debating whether I should even bother with the quad-turbolasers/single-light-ion cannons. If I do, there will be thousands of them (not quite point defense but not exactly capital ship knockout punch either).
As much as I respect Ansel's work, I really wonder why on Earth some details are even bothered with. My guess is to showcase epic skills and "because he can." For example, some point-defense guns that can be seen in an under-construction shot (Star Wars projects thread) aren't even visible in any of the final renders... I'm going to be conserving detail somewhat. If it doesn't show up in any final shots, it doesn't get done. Yes, that literally means there will be point-defense guns in some places where I plan to do shots, and not others.
My guess is to showcase epic skills and "because he can."
What other reason do you need?
Putting the guns in batteries like that and repeating looks like a good way of filling the space, but it definitely highlights how much you've got to do. It makes me shudder just thinking about it. You'd definitely have to be careful not to make it to repetitive, like when textures are blatantly tiled and you can see the repeated sections.
Works now, and nicely as that. So.. What are the orange&purple things around there? Fighterbays (I remember seeing something that looked like a hangar)? And what are those balls? Again sensory-pods with an unruly connection to the shield-grid?
The orange are literally greeble holders (the purple are the items "held"). There is one instance of an "orange box" with three hangers. The rest are not.
Yes, my ship has balls. They're the same "whatever-the-fanbois-say-but-it's-a-Star-Destroyer-so-they're-required" that would be found on any serious "Star Destroyer."
This is the trench so far. I'm not sure what the black angled thing is (think it's a shadow). It will be gone by the time the ship is done. I'm going for a more LucasArts look (vs FS) for two reasons. One, it cuts down on polygons and two, it cuts down on required variety of greebles (they're tedious...)
I'm not going to hotlink to TheForce.net/Curtis Saxon out of courtesy, so paste this in a browser window.
That's the Millennium Falcon fleeing the Executor in The Empire Strikes Back. It shows what I mean by "LucasArts style" trench--lots of boxes, a crapload of lights (rather than fewer lights and a ton of details).
And project is on hold until I can figure out what's making Rhino 5 crash. Just started randomly out of the blue, and I don't have any system restore points to escape the timeframe in which the crashes occur... Repair install doesn't work either.
Short version: trying to draw boxes for plating causes crashes.
I think I got rid of the file corruption. It had something to do with SaveSmall vs. regular save. Background: Rhino saves each piece of geometry with its own CRC, in addition to caching all shading/render data in the file. This results in a gargantuan file-size, especially if block instances are not employed. Remember fractal's 700MB Assertor? Rhino can beat that--just by not instancing the plating for Curator. Keep in mind that's a bunch of basic geometrical shapes, nothing overly complex.
Sure, it makes Rhino files incredibly hard to destroy, but that's it. SaveSmall was easier on my old laptop's hard drive. It literally halved the time it took to save the file. My new laptop doesn't suffer from that restriction. Rhino's devs say "HDD space is cheap, who cares if our files are huge?" Great, but it's not just size that matters. Modern mechanical HDDs generally don't have sustained write speeds of 100MB/sec. So if someone's file gets really complex (a large boat with full interiors, for example), saving becomes painful.
By re-"full" saving the file, I think I cured the issue.
I was going to put guns in the trench, but only after I finish the basic detailing. I may have to build new "sideways" mounts for the guns though.
Right now, I'm boring myself to death by drawing in plates. I'd say a 7km long section could be rotated, diced and spiced such that the repetitiveness doesn't show. Off to do that... I know Ansel spaced his plates pretty far apart compared to what you'd "think" (2m on the Bellator) would be right, but you can't see squat in a full view if the plates are "realistically" spaced. So I'm going to use 3m spacing between plates (gotta redo the tip of the bow, boo).
To show I'm not being lazy or unproductive, I present the following. They are shots of the plating as it stands today. The first is a good view of it, the second shows how small the completed area is in context (and thus how much work remains to be done).
Oh look, something happened! I became bored of drawing plates, so I did more work on the inside. Rhino's lighting is...well...alpha still so it's kind of bad. Sorry.
Upper level of the StarLounge.
Bottom left.
Bottom right. The round thing between the table w/chairs and chair arrangement is going to be a drink dispenser. There are cups in it but I didn't "glass" them yet.
The "stadium seating" with the couches is killing me--I'm not sure how to model it without either violating spatial relationships (couches stick out the front) or making it horrendously difficult to get to said couch.
Also not sure what to do with the big empty space on the bottom level. I was thinking more chairs and tables, but it kind of gets repetitive. The chandeliers may go in favor of a more "modern" lighting system; don't know what that would be.
TWo ideas spring to mind for use on the central area:
A dance-floor (yeah sure, on a WARSHIP that belongs to the EMPIRE, but it was just an idea...), the bar. Like the Bar from Reelo Baruk on Nar Shadaar (Jedi Knight 2), remember?
I know, a centralised bar is a bit odd, but since Star Wars enjoys oddity, why not?
Posts
For really big guns in canon, see the siege weapons on the Munificent, the axial turbolasers on the Recusant, and the W-165 planetary turbolaser.
Some suggestions:
1) Use real-world units, or a fixed arbitrary unit = x real units scale. It's more intuitive when sizing what an element should be, and easier to keep multiple models to scale.
2) Those turrets are now large enough that they look like they can't traverse. Check that; if they don't have a good arc of fire, they might as well dispense with the turret and go fixed emplacement.
3ds max shows a grid (obviously). Within this grid, the smallest division is actually 10 units (I tested this by creating a cube with snaps on). The cube came out 10x10x10 in the max readout even though it was only "1x1x1" in terms of the snaps. Revenant is 507.5 units long, or 68.965m per max unit. Once I'm sure I won't be doing any more usage of Rhino 3D, I will scale Revenant up just to make modeling easier (so it is 5075 units long, but the actual stated dimensions are unchanged).
What, exactly do you mean by "turrets that can't traverse?" Is it based on size (too big), density (they'd hit each other) or something else?
"Turrets that can't traverse" as in a turret is obstructed by neighboring turrets or structure.
Red is the heaviest battery as-is. The green turrets are slightly higher detail (removed the ProOptimizer) and also positioned further apart. Is that better, considering these turrets are exactly 89m long from base of barrel to back of housing? They're bigger than I expected, but that's because of error multiplication. The more estimates and rounding you do, the worse it gets with something this size.
Debating whether they should just "fire straight" and be used for broadsides against slow-moving targets/planets or if I should mount them in casemates like the battleships of old.
About the big gun, I'd say have it facing side-ways. Actually several of them. Remember Ep3, the beginning? Those broadside emplacements of the Venator and the Invisible Hand? I could imagine your monster moving straight into enemy formations, using it's arrowhead to literally puncture in, then unleash it's stronger broadside fire onto any enemy essel within range...
You read my mind. That's exactly what it is, and what inspired its placement. The only difference is that it's not a physical weapon.
Oddly, Wookiepedia implies these were glorified "flak guns." It doesn't make too much sense how they operate in the movie, then. Flak bursts shouldn't be able to bring down a big ship (either a Venator or Providence).
Alternate explanation would be a relatively cheap mass driver bombardment weapon, just re-purposed for the occasion because of the close range and desperation involved.
This is the array of big guns. They're definitely energy-based. Fifteen per side. The bigger render shows the area in context. The guns are mounted along the side of the huge hanger.
NOTE: My work will most likely accelerate within the next few weeks as I am getting a new laptop. Long story short, my XPS m1530 has been nothing but trouble over the ten months I've owned it. Six issues (bad battery out of the box, wrong replacement sent, NVIDIA mobile 8-series GPU of death, hard drive failure #1, hard drive failure #2, random shutdowns thought to be overheating but not when it shuts down at 85C on CoreTemp) plus a possible second GPU failure (screen goes black then comes back without any notice of a driver failure from Windows) enabled me to talk Dell into flat-out replacing this machine rather than attempting to repair it again.
The new machine is from the Studio XPS 16 line and will have, minimum, the following: Core 2 Duo 2.26GHz, 4GB DDR3-1066, ATI 3670 512MB, 320GB 7200RPM, 1366x768 LED. Much better! (Reference: 1.86GHz, 4GB DDR2-667, GeForce 8400GS-M, 320GB 5400RPM, 1280x800).
At least that's how I think it'd work.
Although I thought the guns to be placed on the edge of the ship itself. That way they could be spread a bit more and maybe couples (into duos or trios). Because my initial idea was, that uch a huge beasty, in order to keep up with the size-increase, has at least 3 dozens of them.
For anyone interested, the new machine is quite a bit better than the old. It's a Studio XPS 1640; Core 2 Duo T9400 (2.53GHz, 6MB cache), 4GB DDR3-1067, ATI Mobility Radeon 3670 512MB, 500GB HDD, 1920x1080 RGBLED screen, 2.0MP Skype-certified webcam, Blu-Ray drive & DVD Burner, light-up keyboard, decent audio though still integrated, and glossy enough to use for doing hair/straightening ties.
Problem is, the SXPS 1640 has a habit of throttling precisely when you need power the most (the same issue affects Latitude E6400/6500). So it makes rendering difficult when the CPU kicks down to its lowest state (6x w/a 133MHz FSB via Super-Low-Frequency Mode) because, ohnoez, insufficient power from the 90w adapter. 130w on the way though, so that problem will die in a fire shortly.
Super-large rendering alert (12500px horizontal). The ship is 35km long so I figured that would be appropriate.
I started in on the trench detailing, which will be superior to the Curator. That is the reason for the huge render--otherwise you can't really see anything in the trench. Methodology is "Start with a few low-detail greebles, then make pass after pass adding additional detail until you're happy with the result."
How many times can a man use the same greebles, before anyone says something?
The gun batteries will be redone in the near future as well. As was mentioned by the ever-helpful Aresius and FS, my turrets were too close together.
Nice update.
Note that the big turrets have a quad point-defense gun on top of them, alleviating, at least in appearance, "point defenseless" (which so often occurs on big ships, especially Imperial ones). Plot armor still works, however
Back Row: Flechette Cannon (again, not point-defenseless--shreds unshielded fighters, missiles, etc.), six-barrel turbolaser, heavy turbolaser (biggest gun minus spine-mounted cannons seen earlier).
Front Row: Octuple point-defense cannon, ion cannon.
But on the modelling front, that's some impressive dakka. I assume you're working on the principle of "there's no such thing as too big or too many".
I like the heavy turbolaser, really nice work.
3ds max 2012 default scanline renderer. Go figure. Rhino brings my laptop to its knees (alpha-ness, I bet), iray and Quicksilver require more GPU memory than I have (512MB). Again, giant render warning (12.5k).
Light Blue are Heavy Batteries (15--300 turrets), Light Green are Main Batteries (11--220 turrets). Each battery has twenty laser turrets, two flechette turrets and twelve single heavy ion cannons. All 22 big turrets possess a quad point-defense laser. There will be batteries (three turrets each) of flechette turrets only. Take that, you fighter-spamming Rebel scum! Currently, fifty-two flechette turrets exist to ward off fighter spam and deal with excessive missile launches.
Note that this is one side, top only. Nor have point-defense guns been installed. I'm debating whether I should even bother with the quad-turbolasers/single-light-ion cannons. If I do, there will be thousands of them (not quite point defense but not exactly capital ship knockout punch either).
As much as I respect Ansel's work, I really wonder why on Earth some details are even bothered with. My guess is to showcase epic skills and "because he can." For example, some point-defense guns that can be seen in an under-construction shot (Star Wars projects thread) aren't even visible in any of the final renders... I'm going to be conserving detail somewhat. If it doesn't show up in any final shots, it doesn't get done. Yes, that literally means there will be point-defense guns in some places where I plan to do shots, and not others.
What other reason do you need?
Putting the guns in batteries like that and repeating looks like a good way of filling the space, but it definitely highlights how much you've got to do. It makes me shudder just thinking about it. You'd definitely have to be careful not to make it to repetitive, like when textures are blatantly tiled and you can see the repeated sections.
Yes, my ship has balls. They're the same "whatever-the-fanbois-say-but-it's-a-Star-Destroyer-so-they're-required" that would be found on any serious "Star Destroyer."
This is the trench so far. I'm not sure what the black angled thing is (think it's a shadow). It will be gone by the time the ship is done. I'm going for a more LucasArts look (vs FS) for two reasons. One, it cuts down on polygons and two, it cuts down on required variety of greebles (they're tedious...)
I'm not going to hotlink to TheForce.net/Curtis Saxon out of courtesy, so paste this in a browser window. That's the Millennium Falcon fleeing the Executor in The Empire Strikes Back. It shows what I mean by "LucasArts style" trench--lots of boxes, a crapload of lights (rather than fewer lights and a ton of details).
Short version: trying to draw boxes for plating causes crashes.
Sad to hear with the program crashing. Hope you'll soon find the binary culprit.
Sure, it makes Rhino files incredibly hard to destroy, but that's it. SaveSmall was easier on my old laptop's hard drive. It literally halved the time it took to save the file. My new laptop doesn't suffer from that restriction. Rhino's devs say "HDD space is cheap, who cares if our files are huge?" Great, but it's not just size that matters. Modern mechanical HDDs generally don't have sustained write speeds of 100MB/sec. So if someone's file gets really complex (a large boat with full interiors, for example), saving becomes painful.
By re-"full" saving the file, I think I cured the issue.
I was going to put guns in the trench, but only after I finish the basic detailing. I may have to build new "sideways" mounts for the guns though.
Right now, I'm boring myself to death by drawing in plates. I'd say a 7km long section could be rotated, diced and spiced such that the repetitiveness doesn't show. Off to do that... I know Ansel spaced his plates pretty far apart compared to what you'd "think" (2m on the Bellator) would be right, but you can't see squat in a full view if the plates are "realistically" spaced. So I'm going to use 3m spacing between plates (gotta redo the tip of the bow, boo).
Upper level of the StarLounge.
Bottom left.
Bottom right. The round thing between the table w/chairs and chair arrangement is going to be a drink dispenser. There are cups in it but I didn't "glass" them yet.
The "stadium seating" with the couches is killing me--I'm not sure how to model it without either violating spatial relationships (couches stick out the front) or making it horrendously difficult to get to said couch.
Also not sure what to do with the big empty space on the bottom level. I was thinking more chairs and tables, but it kind of gets repetitive. The chandeliers may go in favor of a more "modern" lighting system; don't know what that would be.
TWo ideas spring to mind for use on the central area:
A dance-floor (yeah sure, on a WARSHIP that belongs to the EMPIRE, but it was just an idea...), the bar. Like the Bar from Reelo Baruk on Nar Shadaar (Jedi Knight 2), remember?
I know, a centralised bar is a bit odd, but since Star Wars enjoys oddity, why not?