i have a small white box on the opposite side to the medical box which could perform that purpose, i was also thinking of some storage under the seat (it's not an ejector) but don't know if the pilot will be able to reach there.
i tossed out a load of the old panels and have refitted the cockpit with far more touchscreens and several avatar style "glass screens" (naturally they'd be made of something less fragile than glass and the means of projection is not explained). there are only a few buttons left now down at the bottom of the main panel which include: a small keypad for numerical inputs (even in the 22nd-23rd-24th(haven't made up mind yet) century i think buttons will be more reliable than touchscreen), some "tuning knob" style switches for adjusting control sensitivity(trim?), a selector for varying the fuel source mode between onboard tanks/ramjet/hybrid, a deltaV versus thrust slider (more propellant can go through the engines with a lower exhaust velocity for greater thrust or less propellant at higher exhaust velocity for greater deltaV, like vasimr but with more futuristic tech), and some covered toggle switches (for turning on and off engines and reactors, emergency functions,deploying landing gear, activating VTOL, switching space-atmo-reentry modes, sealing and opening cockpit). otherwise it's all on the screens, the black ones being touch enabled, the "glass screens" just being displays. those glass screens partially obscure some of the main panel so they are placed on hinges which let them rotate out of the way when an infrared beam is blocked by the pilots hand as he moves to touch the obscured parts of the main panel. the glass screen currently coloured yellow will not need to hinge as it is above the area where the pilot will stick his arm, it will be used to display constant essential data like delta V remaining, acceleration,engine output,reactor output, heat displays and speed relative to a selected object. the right side panel has been converted mostly to touch and those "punch buttons" replaced by covered switches (the switches are smaller than the buttons were), the left panel is still dominated by the thrust lever with just some covered switches and a small read only display behind it(anything else behind it would be constantly brushed by the pilot's elbow.). the attached image shows all this,
note that the glass screens are currently covered in random colours, squiggles, stars and crosses (just to test the texture mapping), i'll design the proper screen layouts soon.
note also that the pilot's eye view image is on a wide angle lens so is distorted, the human eye would be able to see al that stuff from where his head is but the camera in the 3d software cannot without changing the field of view angle.
i've continued work on the helllhound and now i have a full layout for the cockpit all the panels are in their final places and all the switches are fitted. it's just a matter of designing the HUD and screen displays now. i have begun work on the HUDs, starting with the small side panel ones which will display critical data (deltaV,acceleration,engine output,reactor output,thermal,speed,reactor temperature,craft status). i've designed a rather nice dial which has a needle swinging round to indicate the first two digits of the readout and a box at the centre which will show text for what power of 10 is involved (Y.Y x10^ ZZ where Y.Y is given by the dial and ZZ is text in the middle) but am now a bit stuck on colours for it. the text is also proving tricky.
1.does the current scheme, as shown, look about right or are there better combinations i could use? I'm thinking of having the displays show everything as either red,blue or purple.
2. the font: i have used "impact" ,shown on top row of fonts diagram, for everything so far but i don't think it looks "sci-fi" enough. below on the diagram are three other fonts i was thinking of changing to. which would be best for the displays and cockpit labels? is it a problem to have a different font for external labels (things like "caution no step" and "danger ramjet intake" ) that internal ones? i could changew the external nes but as they are intersections with curved surfcaes it would be ,much harder so i need to know if those ones would be better staying the same or changing font.
3. intakes, i've redesigned the rear of the primary engines to place a kind of bell nozzle inside them, this is more realistic as a lot of a rocket's thrust is produced by the shape of the bell nozzle and how it affects the way the propellant expands as it leaves the rear end. now i want to redesign the intakes, i've tried sticking the inner part of the new exhaust into them to create a new design but this doesn't work well without the cone in the engine and without the cone the intake starts looking a bit "wrong". please suggest some cool design for intakes i could use, the key things to bear in mind are, firstly it's an intake BUT it can also eject a small amount of gas from the front to act as a kind of thruster. also the intake design must be able to meld nicely into the fuselage down on the primary and a very similar intake design must meld into the fuselage up on the secondary engines. please post some sketches/ images you have previously seen of what might be a good intake design.
below is a single attachment containing pictures of all the things i've mentioned.
thanks
As far as fonts, I'd say the bottom one. The lower swing out displays should be opaque for the simple fact that there will be confusion if the pilot can see the displays behind the displays. Other than that this has improved a lot. Nice work overall on the new cockpit setup.
thanks. i'll swap across the fonts and test what it looks like with increased opacity on the lower displays. what about the use of "impact" font on the outside (all the "caution no step" "check radiation levels before opening" "danger ramjet intake" ) should they be changed to the bottom one or left as they are, would it be "disjointed" to have two different fonts on the same small craft?
oh and thoughts on intakes?
thanks
Your cockpit has improved greatly, but I am not loving the swing out panels. I see them as getting in the way no matter what you do, especially in combat. Also I still don't get your reluctance to install a vertical main panel, for your pilot to reach the upper half he will have to lean out of his seat, and that is a bad idea.
Right now you have some unused real estate in front of your stick and throttle. I would move most of your panels with physical switches and keys down there or between the pilot's legs (more unused real estate). Then keep the main panels as one or multiple touch screens, eliminating the need for those swing outs.
I also do like your idea of backup physical switches, but would recommend a set of backup gauges as well. Even on my own craft I 4-5 hard backup gauges in the cockpit to give the pilot the most important info.
the physical switches aren't so much backups but rather they are for things easier to control by turning a knob than through a touchscreen interface. i took inspiration for that from this article http://www.graphics.com/article-old/mechanical-controls-interaction-design-lessons-science-fiction . vertical main panel would somewhat reduce panel space, and with the current one the pilot can just reach the upper part without leaning forward, remember most of my cockpit pics are with distorted wide angle lenses. the panel space forward of the right stick is already occupied by those emergency "buttons", they were originally "punch buttons" but i shrank them into toggle switches and a couple of other knobs. the panel space forward of the throttle and left stick looks pretty inaccessible to me, you can't get at it very easily without knocking the throttle(hence only 1 knob in that area as far forward as possible where t can be reached without touching the throttle in the process). i could add a small panel onto the bottom of the man panel(between the legs) but it would be really small and might make it impossible for the pilot to get his feet out of the foot well. if you are inquiring about the apparent extra space that could be made infront of the joysticks by changing the cockpit structure and removing those "pillars" that can't be done as they are just inside the hull and their shape is due to it's curvature and the presence of the folding access ladder. the swing out panels have become "rule of cool" but the lower ones will have a small laser tripwire just aft of them so if the pilot moves his hand towards the controls behind they automatically swing out of his way, the upper ones don't obscure or block anything. i like the backup gauge idea but can't see anywhere i could squeeze extra gauges in(it ends up heading back towards my previous cockpit design covered in hard wired switches,gauges,etc), those gauges have to have a numerical component anyway because they can end up dealing with some pretty huge numbers (engine/reactor power can be in the gigawatts and above, but also go very low. delta V can go pretty damned high as well) and also needing to display small numbers.
thanks for your tips though.
some questions i would like to ask:
1. ideas for intakes, as i have said a few posts back the current design is annoying me but i can't think of a better way?
2. when it comes to threat displays, radar and scanner data and navigation screens (all of which will be displayed on the main screen) how should i design them. current radar displays show things like a "needle" sweeping round on a circle showing where all the detections are or a sweeping wedge infront of the fighter but space is a 3d environment in every sense, how do i design a flat display that adequately shows how things are arranged in 3d space and looks cool at the same time?
Just do 2 circle style screens one with a side view of the craft in the center for the top and bottom radar views then one with a top view of the fighter that gives you the radar of front back and sides
been doing some more work. still being driven mad by intakes, i've established i want to keep the inlet cones(because they are crucial to making the design look good when viewed from angles where the inside of the intakes cannot be seen) but trying to work out a design with the inlet cones, a clear ability to act as an intake and also some capacity to act as a thruster is dam*ed hard. in good news however i've completed a schematic of the fighter to act as one of the control screens, this will be permanently on view as a small copy on the bottom of the left swinging panel and also can be brought up larger as one of the options on the main display. i have never managed to create this type of visual before but i think this came out very well. the other displays will be in the same style and attempt to use only a few colours (red, blue and shades of purple/pink). we all know that future displays will be just as full colour hd as today's but having a co-ordinated colour scheme on them always looks cooler. i've also come up with the plan for the navigation/threat display but haven't got very far with it yet(not far enough for it to be shown). the schematic is shown below, on the final display i will have a red circle object which will move to points on this schematic and flash to indicate damage. i might make some of the lines and symbols on here orange as well. the image below shows the schematic against a green background, the main material on the schematic is transparent accounting for the greenish colour taken on by some parts of it. the greyish box in the middle shows where the borders around the schematic will go once it is fitted onto a completed display.
did some minor work and have a quick image of the unfinished cockpit as rendered on blender for a test. also did some calculations about the craft's possible performance and what technologies/power requirements will be needed, found an interesting relation between the thurst and delta V(proved mathematically that decreasing one by a factor of X will boost the other by a factor of X). the key question is what's the mass? i had to use a quick and dirty way to work it out, i found the "mass when empty" of a few aircraft(f16, mig 25, sr 71) and their basic dimensions(length,wingspan,height). i used this to get a rough density for this imaginary length*height*wingspan box around each plane and came to a range of figures from 9.8 to 16 kg/m^3. i then chose 12kg/m^3 as a density for the box around my craft and multiplied this by the volume of that square box (15.82 long, 15.36 wingspan, 3.88 high) to get a mass of 11314 kg plus the pilot(84kg in my approximation). this gives a mass when fully fuelled of 34194 kg (i needed to have a mass ratio of 3 to keep tsiolkovsky happy!) and a dry mass of 11398 kg. is it believable to have a craft this size massing 11 tonnes when empty and 34 tonnes when full? or should that 11 tonnes be reduced a bit hence letting me drop the fuelled mass to something a little less tank like?
the materials in the pic have not had their spec values and such set yet, so any shiny white bits such as you see on the pilot's arm will be gone when the model is completed, the glows of the HUD parts are more or less what they will be once finished, remember the displays shown multiple different things, at the moment the main one shows a schematic but it will also show radar and navigation data as alternatives once the model is complete.
while i have to read a few things to get an opinion on the numbers you wrote
i do think, that your Display's need a little change(mho):
considering that's a fighter i assume your Pilot wouldn't have all day to read the numbers on them carefully so i thought that your idea of displaying values like deltaV or acceleration by using the power of 10 times a number could be a little too complicated for a battlescenario to quickly read them.
My idea would be to simply dynamically scale the elements to display the bigger values accordingly or by using a big number indicator like it is for example used in current airplanes to display the altitude instead of the speedometer style
also it seem's like those sidescreen's could obstruct the direct access to the bigger panel (the knobs on it)
but i have to say it looks really cool and the thoughts you put into it are impressive
Cockpit is finished, no pics yet, there will be some once it's in blender. The rest of the model is also finished, i redesigned the gun a bit, made it look more like a laser and less like a conventional cannon, until you see the images think of a CCTV camera's casing(but bigger and armoured), as a laser and camera both exist to focus light this similarity is quite reasonable. The laser aperture deliberately takes up almost the whole width of the "barrel" so that diffraction of the beam can be minimized, it therefore has an octagonal cross section as this is the cross section of the "barrel" around it. In the end i left the intakes as they were, i don't think they are brilliant but i couldn't work out a better design for the positions they occupy, many ideas i had for the intakes i had to throw out because i couldn't abandon the cones in the centre as those cones really help the fighter's overall shape from several angles. I completed an HUD, which can be animated, as well as engine control "panels", a navigation panel, a tactical display panel, a laser targeting panel and several more panels for controlling the craft's systems from. All these "panels" are digital touch screens, though i also added a few extra physical switches for turning certain systems on and off (would you trust a touchscreen with the control to activate the weapons, or fire the engines, or dump coolant into the reactors, or open the cockpit canopy?). I will be able to export it from sketchup to blender by this time tomorrow, but before doing so would like a quick favour. Can someone type out a list of all the "things" that a fighter should have, a list of all the details that should be modelled. That way i can check to see if i am missing anything before i completely finish the modelling stage. "things" means visible details, external and internal, things like: landing lights, main weapon, small storage spaces in cockpit, radar equipment, etc, etc ,etc
The videos are all fairly short (10 to 20 seconds each), and most lack backgrounds so are just the craft being shown againts a plain background, but a few of them (the "mars vtol" one and the "ascending to orbit" ones) are pretty cool. At some point I'll start a new thread and post some of the work I've done in the past year, new stuff unrelated to all this, but for now, I hope you enjoy the videos.
Below are a few renders I made (in January just before the model was complete), since the renders below it has been changed (in April when I finally finished it)to the verson you see in some of the youtube clips, with slightly altered thruster covers and a different tail end, but it is otherwise much the same. One of the images shows the cockpit, I modelled all the displys in there, and I modelled a few other displays not visible in that image which can be shwon on the screens instead of the ones you see here. image1.jpg image2.jpg image3.jpg image4.jpg
you need shadows in your renders - absence of light is every bit as important as light to making an interesting render
edit: i felt i should explain a little more - but your images dont appear to have ray traced shadows - now i dont know how you turn them on in blender but its in there somewhere and then the insides of your engine inlets etc wont be as well lit as the bits in full sunlight - you might find you need to add some extra lights to your scene - there are plenty of lighting tutorials online though - will make a big difference to the look of your models
Thanks for the tips.
stromcloud, yes I see what you mean, ray-tracing is a bit too slow for animations but for still shots, I'll certaibly turn it on in future, it's not hard to do so. In the current renders the lighting mainly provides light to make the specular highlights visible, but you're right, it doesn't do much to cause shadows, next still render I do I'll make sure to include them properly.
Posts
note that the glass screens are currently covered in random colours, squiggles, stars and crosses (just to test the texture mapping), i'll design the proper screen layouts soon.
note also that the pilot's eye view image is on a wide angle lens so is distorted, the human eye would be able to see al that stuff from where his head is but the camera in the 3d software cannot without changing the field of view angle.
new hud.jpg
1.does the current scheme, as shown, look about right or are there better combinations i could use? I'm thinking of having the displays show everything as either red,blue or purple.
2. the font: i have used "impact" ,shown on top row of fonts diagram, for everything so far but i don't think it looks "sci-fi" enough. below on the diagram are three other fonts i was thinking of changing to. which would be best for the displays and cockpit labels? is it a problem to have a different font for external labels (things like "caution no step" and "danger ramjet intake" ) that internal ones? i could changew the external nes but as they are intersections with curved surfcaes it would be ,much harder so i need to know if those ones would be better staying the same or changing font.
3. intakes, i've redesigned the rear of the primary engines to place a kind of bell nozzle inside them, this is more realistic as a lot of a rocket's thrust is produced by the shape of the bell nozzle and how it affects the way the propellant expands as it leaves the rear end. now i want to redesign the intakes, i've tried sticking the inner part of the new exhaust into them to create a new design but this doesn't work well without the cone in the engine and without the cone the intake starts looking a bit "wrong". please suggest some cool design for intakes i could use, the key things to bear in mind are, firstly it's an intake BUT it can also eject a small amount of gas from the front to act as a kind of thruster. also the intake design must be able to meld nicely into the fuselage down on the primary and a very similar intake design must meld into the fuselage up on the secondary engines. please post some sketches/ images you have previously seen of what might be a good intake design.
below is a single attachment containing pictures of all the things i've mentioned.
thanks
cockpit.jpg
oh and thoughts on intakes?
thanks
Right now you have some unused real estate in front of your stick and throttle. I would move most of your panels with physical switches and keys down there or between the pilot's legs (more unused real estate). Then keep the main panels as one or multiple touch screens, eliminating the need for those swing outs.
I also do like your idea of backup physical switches, but would recommend a set of backup gauges as well. Even on my own craft I 4-5 hard backup gauges in the cockpit to give the pilot the most important info.
thanks for your tips though.
some questions i would like to ask:
1. ideas for intakes, as i have said a few posts back the current design is annoying me but i can't think of a better way?
2. when it comes to threat displays, radar and scanner data and navigation screens (all of which will be displayed on the main screen) how should i design them. current radar displays show things like a "needle" sweeping round on a circle showing where all the detections are or a sweeping wedge infront of the fighter but space is a 3d environment in every sense, how do i design a flat display that adequately shows how things are arranged in 3d space and looks cool at the same time?
Wing Commander:
91435-wing-commander-prophecy-windows-screenshot-we-cover-a-marine.jpg
X-Wing Alliance:
xwinga2.jpg
Freespace:
freespace2_1.jpg
Independence War:
independence_war_2-_the_edge_of_chaos-294235-1255143727.jpeg
hellhound mk iiischematic complete.jpg
the materials in the pic have not had their spec values and such set yet, so any shiny white bits such as you see on the pilot's arm will be gone when the model is completed, the glows of the HUD parts are more or less what they will be once finished, remember the displays shown multiple different things, at the moment the main one shows a schematic but it will also show radar and navigation data as alternatives once the model is complete.
hud glow test pic.jpg
i do think, that your Display's need a little change(mho):
considering that's a fighter i assume your Pilot wouldn't have all day to read the numbers on them carefully so i thought that your idea of displaying values like deltaV or acceleration by using the power of 10 times a number could be a little too complicated for a battlescenario to quickly read them.
My idea would be to simply dynamically scale the elements to display the bigger values accordingly or by using a big number indicator like it is for example used in current airplanes to display the altitude instead of the speedometer style
also it seem's like those sidescreen's could obstruct the direct access to the bigger panel (the knobs on it)
but i have to say it looks really cool and the thoughts you put into it are impressive
Thanks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmUbM8mX7sc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJg44olDuVY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gBzqq4MWmE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cEpnQpclw4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUGKXNEbzy4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Knhtj2rodM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQP0aeYsQaI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qp4uyeiRYM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo0EwwjTQj8
The videos are all fairly short (10 to 20 seconds each), and most lack backgrounds so are just the craft being shown againts a plain background, but a few of them (the "mars vtol" one and the "ascending to orbit" ones) are pretty cool. At some point I'll start a new thread and post some of the work I've done in the past year, new stuff unrelated to all this, but for now, I hope you enjoy the videos.
Below are a few renders I made (in January just before the model was complete), since the renders below it has been changed (in April when I finally finished it)to the verson you see in some of the youtube clips, with slightly altered thruster covers and a different tail end, but it is otherwise much the same. One of the images shows the cockpit, I modelled all the displys in there, and I modelled a few other displays not visible in that image which can be shwon on the screens instead of the ones you see here.
image1.jpg
image2.jpg
image3.jpg
image4.jpg
edit: i felt i should explain a little more - but your images dont appear to have ray traced shadows - now i dont know how you turn them on in blender but its in there somewhere and then the insides of your engine inlets etc wont be as well lit as the bits in full sunlight - you might find you need to add some extra lights to your scene - there are plenty of lighting tutorials online though - will make a big difference to the look of your models
stromcloud, yes I see what you mean, ray-tracing is a bit too slow for animations but for still shots, I'll certaibly turn it on in future, it's not hard to do so. In the current renders the lighting mainly provides light to make the specular highlights visible, but you're right, it doesn't do much to cause shadows, next still render I do I'll make sure to include them properly.