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Complete Projects December 2020

Day 20 – Shadowhawk Missile

12/23/2020 – Well! After getting my feet wet with the Spectre missile yesterday, today I decided to try and do the other, heavier missile mounted on the Achilles fighter. Substance is an absolute joy to use – I wish I could export certain types of configurations from one project to another, but I’m still learning the program.

My previous warnings of updating less frequently while traveling are likely to come into effect from here on in – but if I finish things I’ll be sure to post them as long as I am able. Click the screenshot below to take a look at the completed missile in p3d!

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December 2020

Day 19 – Spectre Missile

12/22/2020 – I’ve gotten less done than I’d like over the weekend due to a health issue that I expect to be resolved in a few weeks – I still intend to work over the holiday but I expect to make one post a week instead of two as I previously targeted. My apologies. To shake things up a bit, I decided to take one of the remodeled missiles on the last p3d link and explore texturing with Substance.

The below link is the result of about six hours of work or so – Substance is perfectly good at painting detail lines in normal maps but I decided to make a (relatively) high poly version of the missile instead and bake its details onto the texture. The resulting model is not flawless – this wouldn’t work on the big screen for example, not without a higher resolution to reduce some of the weirdness with the way the unwrapping.

But, after all is said and done, Substance is a simply awesome tool that allows for some really, really gorgeous work to be done in a big hurry. I wish it had rectangular and polygonal marquee tools so I could precisely apply materials to fixed regions, but that’s not a big problem. Click the screenshot below to take a look at the p3d model of the missile with the new texture:

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December 2020

Day 18 – GTF Achilles Part IV

12/18/2020 – Was out of commission for the vast majority of yesterday so I didn’t get as much done this week as I wanted. Nevertheless, the direct fire weapons have been modeled and placed onto the model, and I remodeled the older missile models. There wasn’t really anything wrong with the older missiles, they were just fairly poly intensive for details that could be easily implemented with Substance painter. I also modeled up a heavy anti-ship missile and used a more intelligent technique to unwrap the fighter.

On the previous SF Shahraba project I manually unwrapped the ship. While discussing it with other Freespace fans, they mentioned my hand packing of the ship was not as efficient and that for any modern texturing process using Substance, I’d need a tool to automatically unwrap it. Something I’ve been doing on this current project is whipping up quick p3d models that nonetheless have efficient texture mapping. Today I realized the method I’d been using for automatic unwrapping was highly inefficient: I was mirroring the fighter, then telling Maya to automatically unwrap and pack everything. This resulted in no stacked identical details, so the top of both wings had to share the same texture sheet. This time I reversed the steps: I unwrapped everything, arranged the pieces, then mirrored the symmetrical details. The results speak for themselves in the p3d model linked below: the texture detail around the gun muzzles and on the deferred lighting in particular is a lot better quality. Since I haven’t split the fuselage in half nor the belly gunpod, it’s not quite double quality – but it’s a huge improvement. Click the render below to go to the p3d file to check it out.

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December 2020

Day 17 – GTF Achilles Pt III

12/14/2020 – I think the rhythm this blog will fall into is likely two updates per week in general as a minimum.

The focus has remained on the Freespace fighter, the GTF Achilles. With heavy inspiration from Tron: Legacy and of course Macross, the thing is taking shape. Last time I showed off some nice, Tron style emissive textures on some engine modules. I’ve since gotten those a bit further along, as well as extended that styling to the main body and ventral fin. Challenges remain in integrating the whole lower main body assembly with the heavy gunpod into the ship, and of course animating it within the Freespace engine will be an adventure. Maya’s built in keyframing makes exploring animation of the winglets and the wings extremely easy, which is nice. Currently the canopy also can be retracted, though the canopy mesh in particular is a monster which needs heavy cleanup.

Click the image to see the model in p3d format and spin it around for yourself! This link will let you see the render in full resolution.

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Day 16 – GTF Achilles Pt II

12/11/2020: By the end of this week I’ve worked a fair bit on this fighter – a mix of working on materials and doing sketches to try to figure out how I want to complete the model. There will be viewable 3d models on p3d in the next update, but for now have this 4k render of the work I’ve been doing on the engines and winglets. The aim is to mix up Tron Legacy and Macross aesthetics. You be the judge if it has worked out:

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December 2020

Day 15 – GTF Achilles Pt I

12/07/2020 – Today we’ll start with a bit of relatively dry opining, then transition into the cool p3d link. So, the previous Shivan fighter, the SF Shahraba, made some stir in the Freespace community and I got to talking with other modelers there. One of them actually volunteered to texture the Sharabha. This was part of why I spent over a week unwrapping the thing, and led to a number of important discussions about workflow – Maya has a built in utility for packing UV shells on the sheet which will also automatically put them all on a consistent scale. Unlike some of the other Maya UV utilities, this one will not undo any manual work you’ve done stitching things together. A great example of this is the giant glowing vent on the SF Sharabha, which I manually projected from an angle where everything could be flat on the sheet without any overlaps or distortions. So in addition to the lessons from last time (UV finalized details early, always be saving, etc), the first step should be identifying troublesome regions and stitching them together, then using the automatic packing utility, then stacking similar shells as needed.

On to the cool p3d link! The SF Sharabha is meant to fit into the Freespace universe and is an antagonist. So what better to make than a protagonist fighter to oppose it? Enter the GTF Achilles. This ship is more than a little inspired by the VF-2 from Macross II, but a fair bit of its shapes are inspired by other Freespace units. Click the render below to be taken to a p3d link of the model as it stands right now! It’s still a WIP but is making rapid progress:

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Complete Projects December 2020

Day 14 – SF Sharabha unwrapped

12/02/2020 – I’ve gotten the Shivan fighter, the “Sharabha”, to a spot where I’m pretty darn pleased with it. Click the link below to view a p3d of the ship.

The big task that consumed much of the last two weeks was a lot of learning the old fashioned way, by making lots of mistakes. I’ve always wanted to combine my models down to a single mesh – as if I was going to 3d print it. This was an opportunity to learn a whole lot about Maya in a big hurry. I had to spend a fair amount of time going back through my incremental saves to rebuild parts of the geometry as the unwrapping had gotten too complicated where the components had intersected one another. A key part of unwrapping is trying to group like components so that the same texture can be painted onto all of them – but I’d made it much harder for myself.

The next big task was shaking the rust off of my UVing skills and tactics. Maya has a number of useful tools for this but its tendancy to remember the full history of what has been done to an object meant that I’d bring my computer to a halt by having it remember 40 hours of continuous UV work. Regularly deleting history is important.

Crashes also claimed more than their fair share of my time, so a summary of lessons learned:

  • Do not boolean any meshes together unless necessary
  • When sub meshes are complete (gun muzzles, wings, aerials, small repeating details) they should be unwrapped. Then they can be duplicated at will across the mesh without disturbing any of the unwrapping
  • If lights are going to be baked into the textures, then any of these sub meshes are going to be affected by the lighting need to have their own dedicated unwrapping. Imagine a row of identical houses, some in the shadow of a mountain and some not.
  • Always Be Saving

Of the other November projects I worked a good deal on a pair of detail modules for the big Shivan worldship, meant to be an eldritch alien crystal and an industrial facility. Renders to be posted below – clicking should show nice big 2048 renders. These two objects also are their own tales of woe – they’re designed to be tiled out, but the method I was intending to use for duplicating this geometry across the worldship will not duplicate lights – so just like with the fighter, these will need to be unwrapped (at least somewhat) and textured to get the sparkling lights visible.

The objective with these modules is to use a common rectangular baseplate that will tile nicely and provide a variety of recognizable and alien shapes and lights. I have planned a few more variants – shipyards and major docking bays and residential modules. Due to the sheer size of the worldship, it’d also be good if the geometry was compelling enough to be a setpiece for a level, so that’s another reason to ensure that they’re interesting to look at.