Thanks. I normally don't mind texturing, in fact I enjoy it. However, when you're dealing with rectangular and circular shaped maps, you can make something like a stripe or some text and you know it will line up correctly and look right when applied to your model. However, this thing unwrapped is just a bunch of curves, so even doing a stripe would be a pill because of the shape I'd have to make it. And I don't even want to think of doing text like that.
You could just "glue" a strip with a logo or lines to the side of the hull. While I don't know the corresponding commands in Lightwave, in MAX all you do is create a "conform" space warp that uses the hull as the target. Then create your logo with a transparent alpha channel. Bind the logo to the space warp and you got your faked UVW map on the side of your hull.
The advantage of this approach is that you can easily slide the logo around in real time to position it exactly where you want it. Plus, because it's independent of your hull texture, you can modify the logo's color, illuminance, specular highlights etc. as you see fit and you can also modify the hull without re-doing a complex unwrap.
Here are a couple of pics to show what I mean.
In the first shot I created a random blob and a flat plane (with lots of subdivisions so it can "wrinkle" easily). The plane has a simple texture map with an alpha channel.
In the second pic, the plane is glued to the blob. Easy to do! No unwrapping and no guesswork. You can collapse the plane to an editable poly if you wish.
In the third pic I rotated the plane to a different position. Takes just a few seconds.
You could just "glue" a strip with a logo or lines to the side of the hull. While I don't know the corresponding commands in Lightwave, in MAX all you do is create a "conform" space warp that uses the hull as the target. Then create your logo with a transparent alpha channel. Bind the logo to the space warp and you got your faked UVW map on the side of your hull.
The advantage of this approach is that you can easily slide the logo around in real time to position it exactly where you want it. Plus, because it's independent of your hull texture, you can modify the logo's color, illuminance, specular highlights etc. as you see fit and you can also modify the hull without re-doing a complex unwrap.
Here are a couple of pics to show what I mean.
In the first shot I created a random blob and a flat plane (with lots of subdivisions so it can "wrinkle" easily). The plane has a simple texture map with an alpha channel.
In the second pic, the plane is glued to the blob. Easy to do! No unwrapping and no guesswork. You can collapse the plane to an editable poly if you wish.
In the third pic I rotated the plane to a different position. Takes just a few seconds.
I know what you mean, I could do that with my old software. (TrueSpace) However, what I did for the text on the nacelles works just as well, so I'll just stick with that. (plus, I don't know how to do that in Lightwave ) Thanks for the tip, though.
I added a bunch of stripes and stuff. I still have to do the bottom, but the top is coming along nicely. I also added a hatch to the tower. Even though this isnAât a submarine, I figured a submarine hatch is a good place to find inspiration. It fits with the retro look IAâm going for. By the way, it turns out you can find lots of pictures of submarine hatches on the internet. Finding dimensions for a submarine hatch, however, is another story. So, I finally decided to just wing it. The hatch is a little over 1.5 meters wide. I figure that will do fine. (you go through it vertically) I decided one isnAât enough, so I also added one to the bottom. It required a minor modification of the mesh structure down there to make the AâopeningAâ for it, but nothing major.
nice work on it, though the stripes look like the craft was immersed in water shortly after they were painted on therefore making the paint run. that serves to make it seem more submarine like. nice design work on many new features. the rear half of the ship is fantastic, i won't grumble about the bow again as i know it is your preferred design. have you considered adding a litle more irregularity in your panelling they seem to be very much all the same, maybe have different shapes of panel in different places.
have you considered adding a litle more irregularity in your panelling they seem to be very much all the same, maybe have different shapes of panel in different places.
I'd like to throw my hat in the ring at this point and COMMEND you for the regularity of your panel designs.
One of the function over form problems that I have with many cool-looking ships is the seemingly random shapes to the hull fittings. Regular sized and shaped panels makes repairs FAR easier ("Joe, the dorsal plating on sections eight through eleven on deck nine took a micro-meteoroid strike. Get some spare panels out of stores, would you?") than the alternative ("Joe, the dorsal plating took a strike, dust off spares A-12, B-25, R-452, and three of the hex-slats and we'll see if we can squeeze in a fit.").
I mean, yeah, the irregularity LOOKS keen -- it gives the eye something to trace over, which is the point the original model (physical) makers had, that and a sense of scale. But is serves no functional purpose.
YOUR ship (and I love it, btw, racing stripes and all) looks like a more reasonable design. The only challenge the repair crews are going to have is with the fluted curves of the design. But, that's just a matter of taking a given shaped panel and bending it!
@Sanderlee; you hit the nail on the head with what I was thinking with the paneling. Sure, it looks cool to have crazy paneling, and I've done it in the past. However, it's just not practical. Besides, I took care to get them all neat and uniform and, if I do the paneling again, that will be the third time and I think I'll have a nervous breakdown. (remember, roughly six hours spent on the main hull paneling alone, twice)
Just an FYI re: sub hatches. For the most part, personnel hatches are around .75 meters or so in diameter (about 2 - 2.5 feet). Reason is because larger hatches need more reinforcing to stand up to pressure. I only mention this because you were wondering about scaling from all the pics you found.
The only other thing I would nitpick about is that sub hatches are placed where they are and open the way they do because of the external higher pressure from being underwater - the higher pressure will help keep the hatch shut. For something that operates in a vacuum, ideally the hatches should open inward (preferably with a lip larger than the opening), as the higher pressure internally will again help keep the hatch shut and sealed.
That said, I understand what you're trying to do with this ship, and I don't expect you to change your hatch just because I said you ought to.
It looks really nice, although with all the stripes and the paint job, it looks more like someone's idea of a hot-rod rather than a fighter/interceptor. I almost expect to see Billy Gibbons or Dusty Hill in the viewports. Oh, *there's* an idea - after you finish, do another version in an Eliminator paint scheme.
Edit: BTW, I like the change to the panel lines. They're a bit more subtle than the originals.
Thanks a lot, lots of useful information. Especially the bit about sub hatch sizes and technology. Yeah, my hatch isn't the most practical thing. But, it could work with some kind of future technology.
As for the paint job, I'm envisioning this as a ship that operates on the fringes of Alliance territory, so Captains have a lot of free reign over their ships. So, many of them have had their ships custom painted. I'm probably going to do three or four different paint jobs, with this one being one of the more "extreme" ones. (yes, I do acknowledge that I got carried away with it )
True enough submarine hatches open outward. The pressure difference between outside and inside can be quite huge.
On a spaceship it might look sensible to have the hatches open inward so that the inside pressure keeps them closed. On the other hand the inside pressure is 1 atmosphere and the outside pressure is ... well zero. So you won't get a difference larger than one atmosphere. (don't ask me how much that is in pounds per square inch. The message is the same ;-) )
One reason why hatches on spaceships I design (I'll have to post something here sooner or later, when it's far enough along) usually open outward anyway is the fact that while it is called a space ship space usually is rather scarce inside. And to open a hatchet inward you need space. That might be OK for small ones for one guy getting on and off but larger airlocks or hangar doors are a different matter. They always open outward on my ships.
Thanks for the thoughts on the hatch. Honestly, I didn't think much of it when I was designing the thing. However, then I realized, these are airlocks. You'd reduce the pressure to zero before opening the outer hatch anyway, so what does it matter? Plus, if you don't, you'll destroy your hatch if it opens inward, because the pressure change will blow it and anything inside outward. However, if it opens outward, it will simply blow open, as opposed to being destroyed. That's my justification and I'm sticking with it. Plus, as you said, there is that whole space issue. This ship isn't exactly huge.
I added some glowy things to the hull. Actually, they’re thrusters. Yes, I went cheap and did a “Star Trek” treatment for them with a bit of glow. I said at the beginning of this project that I’d be borrowing from other franchises. They may not look like it in the images, but I painstakingly stenciled these things into the hull, which required some cleanup (especially on the engines) and then raised them slightly from the hull, inset them, then sunk them back in farther than I raised them and rounded the outer edges. So, they actually do “bump out” from the hull some, even though the glow pretty much covers that up in the renders.
With that, I think I’m done cutting/adding stuff to the main hull and can finally leave it mirrored. While I was working on paneling, paint and thrusters, I’ve only been mirroring it and saving it as a second file for rendering.
A note on the paint job: Yes, it’s wild. In fact, I got carried away with the wacky stripes. However, I’ve always intended to do a few different paint jobs to represent different ships. Thus, I will shortly be starting on a new one that will be less “wild.” In fact, I plan to do at least three or four total, this one will be the most crazy.
Also, I’ve decided these ships do have names after all. This one is the Trident, hence the trident going up the “tower.” I hand drew the name of the ship in Inkscape, which I’ll be using (at a higher resolution, of course) for the bow of the ship:
Since that doesn’t fit with the lettering that I did for the ship’s ID number on the engines, I’ll be redoing that later. (in an appropriate font, not by hand)
True enough submarine hatches open outward. The pressure difference between outside and inside can be quite huge.
On a spaceship it might look sensible to have the hatches open inward so that the inside pressure keeps them closed. On the other hand the inside pressure is 1 atmosphere and the outside pressure is ... well zero. So you won't get a difference larger than one atmosphere. (don't ask me how much that is in pounds per square inch. The message is the same ;-) )
One reason why hatches on spaceships I design (I'll have to post something here sooner or later, when it's far enough along) usually open outward anyway is the fact that while it is called a space ship space usually is rather scarce inside. And to open a hatchet inward you need space. That might be OK for small ones for one guy getting on and off but larger airlocks or hangar doors are a different matter. They always open outward on my ships.
1 atmosphere on earth is 14.7psi. On a standard-sized door (the one I measured here is 79" x 30") the pressure on it would be 17.42 tons if there was a vacuum on the other side of it. That's one reason you might see hatches much smaller than you would find in a home.
As for room for an inward-swinging hatch, TBH, that's not really a point worth considering. If you've got a ship so cramped that you can't swing open a hatch, then you have more problems than figuring out which direction to swing it. Something like the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the shuttle spacecraft, yeah, I can see that. But for the kind of ships we do here? 99.999% of the stuff that shows up here shouldn't or doesn't have that problem.
Thanks for the thoughts on the hatch. Honestly, I didn't think much of it when I was designing the thing. However, then I realized, these are airlocks. You'd reduce the pressure to zero before opening the outer hatch anyway, so what does it matter? Plus, if you don't, you'll destroy your hatch if it opens inward, because the pressure change will blow it and anything inside outward. However, if it opens outward, it will simply blow open, as opposed to being destroyed. That's my justification and I'm sticking with it. Plus, as you said, there is that whole space issue. This ship isn't exactly huge.
You don't think a few tons of pressure (I roughly figured it at 5.2 tons for a 1.5 meter diameter hatch) on an outward-hinging hatch won't cause a little damage when it swings around and hits the outer hull? Bent hinge at best. That and a trashed wheel, not to mention scratching that nice paint job, at worst.
Easiest way to solve the whole issue (again, qualifying that I'm *not* suggesting you change it), is to have the hatches slide into the wall, a la Star Trek, or on damn near everything I've done for my Honorverse work. The pinnace personnel hatch was a pain and had to be moved from the original location on the sketch, because it curved in two directions, and it was a requirement that it slide into the hull. I had to move it aft to a straighter section of the hull so that it only curved vertically, otherwise the hull would have to have been made much thicker. The only other option would have been a complex double hinge to make it work like the door on an airliner. The other difficulty was that it had to be flush with the hull surface when closed, since the pinnace is also an atmospheric craft. This means that the personnel *and* cargo hatches have to retract inwards a few centimeters before sliding to the side.
Let me reiterate that I am not saying you should change it. The way you have it fits the retro look, as well as the inspiration behind the design, so please, leave it as is. I was posting about hatches as a more FYI kind of thing.
The sliding doors are one possibility. But they also have limits.
From time to time I am working on a ship from the Perry Rhodan universe and some of these ships have quite a few large hangars.
And while the cutaways in the magazines show sliding doors on those (at least in the early years) I have my problems with that.
If you have to make room for a sliding door 100 m high and 120 m wide (the hangar for a 60 m pinasse on ships upward of 500 m diameter) that door has to go somewhere when it is opened. That means that a hull segment of equal size is weakened by the cutout for the sliding door and in a military ship I would think twice about that.
I sometimes use sliding doors for small openings though.
Sliding doors just seem so lazy and cliche to me. It seems like the vast majority of Sci-Fi does sliding doors. Then, sometimes, there's nowhere for the door to slide into. (watch the original BSG and tell me where the door to Adama's office slides into )
Paint job #2.
I decided I had to do one in a kind of aluminum finish and candy apple red. I thought about yellow/gold with it, but I didn’t want it to have an Iron Man vibe, so I went with black for the trim. This is probably going to be the one with the tail number KAPV 015824ST, I’ll probably do something else for the Trident. Now I need to come up with a name for this one.
And as for the where do they slide into thing. That is exactly what I meant.
A door is always a weak spot in the hull. So why weaken another 125000 square feet of hull to let that weak point slide away?
(single person airlocks I usually do with sliding doors as well)
@Kilminster: Yeah, doors and windows are weak points. An A-Wing through one of the bridge windows killed the Executor. That's one thing that kills me about Star Trek ships. They put windows all over them, creating lots of weak points. The only exception is the Defiant. One thing that's smart about the original BSG, they had that shield that slid over the command center view ports during combat. That almost makes up for that door that I mentioned that slid outside of the hull.
If your materials technology is advanced enough, windows don't have to be a weak point. They could possibly an area of an unbroken hull that's 'tuned' to allow the passage of a certain amount of visible light.
I decided that I didnAât like any of the fonts that I had for the hull, so I went and got some cool retro ones. (all with free or public domain licenses ) The one I wound up using is called Aero, and itAâs got the look I was going for. Some of the others I downloaded may make appearances later, or they may on future projects. I just got them because I like them and because I wanted to try out different ones. Plus, you can never have too many fonts.
With black Writing that would at least make the choice of fonts easy.
(Black letters on black background, black lights telling me to do something ...
I don't have the exact wording in my memory (especially since I read the bok in German) but that remind's me of the Band Desaster Area from Douglas Adams )
Posts
With the colors added, looks like something that could fly in the YamatoAâs Universe.
You could just "glue" a strip with a logo or lines to the side of the hull. While I don't know the corresponding commands in Lightwave, in MAX all you do is create a "conform" space warp that uses the hull as the target. Then create your logo with a transparent alpha channel. Bind the logo to the space warp and you got your faked UVW map on the side of your hull.
The advantage of this approach is that you can easily slide the logo around in real time to position it exactly where you want it. Plus, because it's independent of your hull texture, you can modify the logo's color, illuminance, specular highlights etc. as you see fit and you can also modify the hull without re-doing a complex unwrap.
Here are a couple of pics to show what I mean.
In the first shot I created a random blob and a flat plane (with lots of subdivisions so it can "wrinkle" easily). The plane has a simple texture map with an alpha channel.
In the second pic, the plane is glued to the blob. Easy to do! No unwrapping and no guesswork. You can collapse the plane to an editable poly if you wish.
In the third pic I rotated the plane to a different position. Takes just a few seconds.
Glue01.jpgGlue02.jpgGlue03.jpg
I know what you mean, I could do that with my old software. (TrueSpace) However, what I did for the text on the nacelles works just as well, so I'll just stick with that. (plus, I don't know how to do that in Lightwave
______________________________________________________________________________________________
Work, work, work.
I added a bunch of stripes and stuff. I still have to do the bottom, but the top is coming along nicely. I also added a hatch to the tower. Even though this isnAât a submarine, I figured a submarine hatch is a good place to find inspiration. It fits with the retro look IAâm going for. By the way, it turns out you can find lots of pictures of submarine hatches on the internet. Finding dimensions for a submarine hatch, however, is another story. So, I finally decided to just wing it. The hatch is a little over 1.5 meters wide. I figure that will do fine. (you go through it vertically) I decided one isnAât enough, so I also added one to the bottom. It required a minor modification of the mesh structure down there to make the AâopeningAâ for it, but nothing major.
I, um... ?
More stripes.
I'd like to throw my hat in the ring at this point and COMMEND you for the regularity of your panel designs.
One of the function over form problems that I have with many cool-looking ships is the seemingly random shapes to the hull fittings. Regular sized and shaped panels makes repairs FAR easier ("Joe, the dorsal plating on sections eight through eleven on deck nine took a micro-meteoroid strike. Get some spare panels out of stores, would you?") than the alternative ("Joe, the dorsal plating took a strike, dust off spares A-12, B-25, R-452, and three of the hex-slats and we'll see if we can squeeze in a fit.").
I mean, yeah, the irregularity LOOKS keen -- it gives the eye something to trace over, which is the point the original model (physical) makers had, that and a sense of scale. But is serves no functional purpose.
YOUR ship (and I love it, btw, racing stripes and all) looks like a more reasonable design. The only challenge the repair crews are going to have is with the fluted curves of the design. But, that's just a matter of taking a given shaped panel and bending it!
Either way, keep up the good work!
@Sanderlee; you hit the nail on the head with what I was thinking with the paneling. Sure, it looks cool to have crazy paneling, and I've done it in the past. However, it's just not practical. Besides, I took care to get them all neat and uniform and, if I do the paneling again, that will be the third time and I think I'll have a nervous breakdown.
The only other thing I would nitpick about is that sub hatches are placed where they are and open the way they do because of the external higher pressure from being underwater - the higher pressure will help keep the hatch shut. For something that operates in a vacuum, ideally the hatches should open inward (preferably with a lip larger than the opening), as the higher pressure internally will again help keep the hatch shut and sealed.
That said, I understand what you're trying to do with this ship, and I don't expect you to change your hatch just because I said you ought to.
It looks really nice, although with all the stripes and the paint job, it looks more like someone's idea of a hot-rod rather than a fighter/interceptor. I almost expect to see Billy Gibbons or Dusty Hill in the viewports. Oh, *there's* an idea - after you finish, do another version in an Eliminator paint scheme.
Edit: BTW, I like the change to the panel lines. They're a bit more subtle than the originals.
As for the paint job, I'm envisioning this as a ship that operates on the fringes of Alliance territory, so Captains have a lot of free reign over their ships. So, many of them have had their ships custom painted. I'm probably going to do three or four different paint jobs, with this one being one of the more "extreme" ones. (yes, I do acknowledge that I got carried away with it
True enough submarine hatches open outward. The pressure difference between outside and inside can be quite huge.
On a spaceship it might look sensible to have the hatches open inward so that the inside pressure keeps them closed. On the other hand the inside pressure is 1 atmosphere and the outside pressure is ... well zero. So you won't get a difference larger than one atmosphere. (don't ask me how much that is in pounds per square inch. The message is the same ;-) )
One reason why hatches on spaceships I design (I'll have to post something here sooner or later, when it's far enough along) usually open outward anyway is the fact that while it is called a space ship space usually is rather scarce inside. And to open a hatchet inward you need space. That might be OK for small ones for one guy getting on and off but larger airlocks or hangar doors are a different matter. They always open outward on my ships.
With that, I think I’m done cutting/adding stuff to the main hull and can finally leave it mirrored. While I was working on paneling, paint and thrusters, I’ve only been mirroring it and saving it as a second file for rendering.
A note on the paint job: Yes, it’s wild. In fact, I got carried away with the wacky stripes. However, I’ve always intended to do a few different paint jobs to represent different ships. Thus, I will shortly be starting on a new one that will be less “wild.” In fact, I plan to do at least three or four total, this one will be the most crazy.
Also, I’ve decided these ships do have names after all. This one is the Trident, hence the trident going up the “tower.” I hand drew the name of the ship in Inkscape, which I’ll be using (at a higher resolution, of course) for the bow of the ship:
Since that doesn’t fit with the lettering that I did for the ship’s ID number on the engines, I’ll be redoing that later. (in an appropriate font, not by hand)
1 atmosphere on earth is 14.7psi. On a standard-sized door (the one I measured here is 79" x 30") the pressure on it would be 17.42 tons if there was a vacuum on the other side of it. That's one reason you might see hatches much smaller than you would find in a home.
As for room for an inward-swinging hatch, TBH, that's not really a point worth considering. If you've got a ship so cramped that you can't swing open a hatch, then you have more problems than figuring out which direction to swing it. Something like the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the shuttle spacecraft, yeah, I can see that. But for the kind of ships we do here? 99.999% of the stuff that shows up here shouldn't or doesn't have that problem.
You don't think a few tons of pressure (I roughly figured it at 5.2 tons for a 1.5 meter diameter hatch) on an outward-hinging hatch won't cause a little damage when it swings around and hits the outer hull? Bent hinge at best. That and a trashed wheel, not to mention scratching that nice paint job, at worst.
Easiest way to solve the whole issue (again, qualifying that I'm *not* suggesting you change it), is to have the hatches slide into the wall, a la Star Trek, or on damn near everything I've done for my Honorverse work. The pinnace personnel hatch was a pain and had to be moved from the original location on the sketch, because it curved in two directions, and it was a requirement that it slide into the hull. I had to move it aft to a straighter section of the hull so that it only curved vertically, otherwise the hull would have to have been made much thicker. The only other option would have been a complex double hinge to make it work like the door on an airliner. The other difficulty was that it had to be flush with the hull surface when closed, since the pinnace is also an atmospheric craft. This means that the personnel *and* cargo hatches have to retract inwards a few centimeters before sliding to the side.
Let me reiterate that I am not saying you should change it. The way you have it fits the retro look, as well as the inspiration behind the design, so please, leave it as is. I was posting about hatches as a more FYI kind of thing.
From time to time I am working on a ship from the Perry Rhodan universe and some of these ships have quite a few large hangars.
And while the cutaways in the magazines show sliding doors on those (at least in the early years) I have my problems with that.
If you have to make room for a sliding door 100 m high and 120 m wide (the hangar for a 60 m pinasse on ships upward of 500 m diameter) that door has to go somewhere when it is opened. That means that a hull segment of equal size is weakened by the cutout for the sliding door and in a military ship I would think twice about that.
I sometimes use sliding doors for small openings though.
Paint job #2.
I decided I had to do one in a kind of aluminum finish and candy apple red. I thought about yellow/gold with it, but I didn’t want it to have an Iron Man vibe, so I went with black for the trim. This is probably going to be the one with the tail number KAPV 015824ST, I’ll probably do something else for the Trident. Now I need to come up with a name for this one.
And as for the where do they slide into thing. That is exactly what I meant.
A door is always a weak spot in the hull. So why weaken another 125000 square feet of hull to let that weak point slide away?
(single person airlocks I usually do with sliding doors as well)
@Kilminster: Yeah, doors and windows are weak points. An A-Wing through one of the bridge windows killed the Executor. That's one thing that kills me about Star Trek ships. They put windows all over them, creating lots of weak points. The only exception is the Defiant. One thing that's smart about the original BSG, they had that shield that slid over the command center view ports during combat. That almost makes up for that door that I mentioned that slid outside of the hull.
I prefer the red/silver paint scheme.
I decided that I didnAât like any of the fonts that I had for the hull, so I went and got some cool retro ones. (all with free or public domain licenses
To clarify, I didn't replace the blue with the red. The red is an alternative. The blue version still exists in a separate file:
Both versions will be finished. IAâll probably finish the modeling with the red version and then copy and repaint the parts into the blue version.
(Black letters on black background, black lights telling me to do something ...
I don't have the exact wording in my memory (especially since I read the bok in German) but that remind's me of the Band Desaster Area from Douglas Adams