Imperial 528's Starship Thread [No 56k]

[Stark]

If you can't come up with detail, just find areas to greeble or add antennae or whatever. That's how real modelmakers do it.

If someone was able to make the models in FS2 less box-barn you can do anything.

[Imperial528]

Here's a shot, with new details on the large side areas:


I also added a comm station behind the top ridge, it's a bit hard to see in the picture though.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

It's starting to look really good now, less and less like a sketchup model and more like something from Blender or 3D Studio. You might want to avoid too much mirroring though, and make some of the details slightly different on the underside. Too much and you cant tell which way up the model is supposed to be. I can see parts of the other comms station sticking up over the ridge, should look just fine there.

You might consider sticking a few large pole antennae here and there around the body and underside in various locations, just to add a bit of variety. Some large ones sticking straight out near the nose might look good, but make them asymmetric instead of just mirroring the left and right side.

[Imperial528]

Latest updates:

Iso-ish view:

Bow:


The two antenna groups are different in design and placement, although they're centered around the same area. I also added a second hangar group and some more deck recessions, and I made the area where the hull is thinner look better. And incase anyone is wondering what those ridges in the recesses are, they are part of the main shield's cooling system. The shape on top of the superstructure in between two turrets is one of the bridge shield generators.

Also, just in case this one is getting boring, here's a corvette I've been working on:

Front:

Side:

Top:

Bottom:

Rear:

For scale, it's ~800 feet long.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

The battleship is coming along nicely, could do with a little detail on those edges now.

The corvette is ok, looks like it came from the game Elite, of which I'm a fan. I think you need a better ruler though, I'd give that ship maybe 250 feet at most.

[Imperial528]

Here's something I just whipped up on the ridge, to give it a more "reinforced" look:


Also, with the corvette, do you mean make it smaller? Since the actual size of the model right now is 806 feet in length.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

Judging by the details on your corvette I'd put it at somewhere between 90-110m long. At 800+ feet long your 'corvette' is about the same length as the largest battleship ever built, and is significantly more massive. A corvette is supposed to be a small, agile ship a bit smaller than a frigate. It's an enlarged patrol ship which can stay at sea for a while, where yours is more a reduced Star Destroyer.

[Imperial528]

Ah, as I had based the length of the ship off of the Tartan Patrol Cruiser corvette, which is 820 feet. I think I'll scale it to 600-500 range, the length of the Rebel Blockade Runner.

[Imperial528]

As with any RL navy, what good is a battleship without support? Well, I recently whipped up a heavy cruiser and the hull of a light cruiser, tell me what you think.

Heavy Cruiser:





Light Cruiser:





PS: The HC is 5300 feet in length, and the LC is 3150 feet.

Also, Kenny, if you want the model file for the battleship (which I have named the Warlord-class), I can send it to you.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

Yeah, send over the warlord and I'll see what I can do with it. kenny(at)kennyscrap.com will get it to my website mail address. I really like the new designs, the first is really quite novel and the second is pretty nice too.

I always balk when people put up enormous stats for their ships, but I realise it doesn't bother the majority of people. When you stop to think about it however, the magnitude of building something like this is incredible. Your light cruiser would only be considered light if compared to something truly gigantic. A quite conservative estimate based on current warships would make your LC about 280,000 tons with a crew of perhaps 7,500 people.

That's light compared to your battleship of course, which would probably just sneak under 10,000,000 tons with a crew of 250,000 people, not including aircrews for fighters. In other words your ship would need the entire US Marine Corps + their reserves to man that one ship, and you'd have to melt down the entire US Navy + reserves to get close to enough metal to make it.

[Imperial528]

Well, in-universe the ships are quite heavily automated (as crewing them was, as you can tell, a problem), although even a skeleton crew is much larger than truly need be on the larger ships. Capital ships are supported by a high-level AI and several lower level ones to the point where if all the crew are dead the ship can still fight, of course if it is that damaged it most likely would be inoperable. And much of the bulk of the ships are armor, since in-universe, shielding is weird. (The main shield is electromagnetic in nature, and isn't able to block large energy weapons, only lessen them, since they pass through the shield so quickly.)

With the automation taken into account, the smaller ship's crew estimates could be halved, and the large ones reduced by around 55-70%, depending on the ship and how new it is.

I have sent you the file using my gmail (imperial528@gmail.com), if it bounces or something goes wrong I'll try again.

[Imperial528]

First e-mail bounced (apparently I made a typo in the address), so I just sent another one.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

Got it, I'll try and get it converted tomorrow.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

Did a quick conversion job on your mega battleship, one of the easiest to do yet. A very clean build, there wasn't a lot of repairing needed to get it presentable at all. Well done that man, you seem to be doing something right in Sketchup that few can do.

Anyway, I figured you cant hide a ship this size in space, so i figured what the hell, I'll give it a cool tiger stripe instead of battleship grey. I still need to do a little work on it, and then add lights and windows & stuff, but that will have to wait till Monday. I'll do a flypast with it once its complete. If you dont like the tiger stripe just say so, I just thought it would be a bit different.

[Imperial528]

If you have any textures similar to the color scheme of the Saturn V (white and black, with maybe some red bars thrown in one some edges), that'd be nice, since I feel like it would look good with mainly white and some black bars and red bars thrown in.

Damn nice renders, especially the top one.

Also, do you think you could make a render with blue engine glow?

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

Something like the Saturn V paintjob would need to be custom made, and I doubt I could do it for something this big and make it look good. I cant think how I'd do it and make it look good on this shape of model. Have a bash at drawing it and see. I tried it first in light grey/white like a star destroyer, but it just looked all wrong as well. In the end I just went all Chris Foss on it, and it's getting compliments on Flickr already. I'll play aorund with the colour on Monday though. It already has blue engine glows, I'll do a render so you can see.

[Eternal_Freedom]

That looks kickass, it really does. Kinda SINS/HW Taiidan lineage. Awesome!

[Imperial528]

I was thinking of this:



I know it's not like the Saturn V, but it has the almost overwhelming white with the black and red details which come to mind when I think of the Saturn V.

Also, Kenny, does your rendering software support texture imports along with the model? Since I'm sure it would be much easier to simply import the war paint version I just made rather than making the texture yourself.

And as you can tell, I did not draw it. This is simply because I suck at drawing, hence why my conceptualizing is done in the modeling software, so much easier to think and work in 3D at the same time.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

I can do your red/white/black repaint no problem, I thought you were after something more complex. I can do it, but I think it's going to look rather odd in those primary colours.

In order to get from Sketchup (not a genuine 3D modeler) to Lightwave I have to export from Sketchup Pro using .skp to .3DS and then to .LWO. The textures do not usually survive the process intact, and come out looking very odd if they come across at all. Lightwave also uses a lot of fractal generated procedural textures which require no image maps (the tiger stripe is one use of it), as do several packages, and this makes object translation a real minefield.

[Imperial528]

Well, there's not much one can do with textures in sketchup. Although, I am trying to figure out where to put things such as vessel name, number, and class designation, along with either a nation flag or a fleet flag.

Although, with your permission, I'd like to use the tiger stripe renders as well. See, I designed the ship for an RPG (so much easier to simply show a ship than describe it), and such a paint job would defiantly make the ship worthy of holding a flag officer. The red-black-white version was designed for the same purpose, since the standard paint job is black-white.

[Imperial528]

Updates on the Light Cruiser:

Added details!

Front:

Side:

Top:

Bottom:

Back:

[ShadowDragon8685]

You might want to consider going with some kind of flashy and unique/semi-unique paint-jobs. For a ship in space camouflage is no concern, and depending on how much leeway individual captains and crews have over that kind of thing, I'd think they might paint their ships in morale-boosting patterns - tiger-stripes are a good one. So would be a shark's-teeth and eyes on the prow of that bad-ass light cruiser - think Curtiss P-40 Warhawk.

Depending on the culture involved, you might also have captains, admirals, and even political personages who have family coats of arms and family crests and colors that might look good on the sides of the vessels that carry them, or they might be painted up to look like tribal war-paint, such as Trudy's gunship during the Assault on the Tree of Souls at the end of Avatar.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

I think it would be fun to just that, rather than going for an overall battleship grey that makes no sense in space. The last sensor to pick up a ship would be the visual ones anyway, so why not have some fun with it and personalise your ship? In the late 1800's Captains used to paint their own ships at their own expense and had quite a bit of leeway, until they were forced to adopt the overall grey scheme to try and screw up long range visual rangefinders in poor light or sea mist.

When subs became the major threat they went to the amazing dazzle camouflage, which made estimating speed and direction difficult. That only faded out when aircraft became the major threat, and dazzle was no use against top down sighting. Nowadays with radar, sonar and IR being the long range sensors, colour doesn't matter one bit and it's all about the shape and materials. If modern Admirals had any balls they'd go with something cool for a colour scheme rather than grey, inspire a bit more pride and panache among the fleet.

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

Bugger, double post.

[Imperial528]

Here's one which I whipped up last night, it's a simple paint scheme, but it's quite bright:


If I could draw I would be able to make a nice custom texture faster, but I'll try despite the time it will take.