Project interplanetary cutter class vessel

[cottontail]

Just wanted to post some screenshots from blender of the current state of one of my projects. Right now it exports to a 19mb *.msh file, so feedback (positive or negative) is useful to see if it would be worth creating a vessel out of this for orbiter 2010.

Wireframe view of the x-y plane:

Shows the general shape and proportions of the vessel. Most of its mass is engines/thrusters with some room for crew and a cargo hold.


Front view:

Different sci-fi influences evident in the foreward section of the vessel.


3/4 front view:

Cargo hold:

Detailed hold so that you aren't just docking/loading a payload into an empty box.


Cargo hold airlock:

 

[jedidia]

a 19 mb mesh file? :blink:

I can only start to estimate how many polies this thing has. Might be a bit overkill for an average GPU...

It definitaley looks great, but I would suggest to make a low-poly mesh and use the high-poly model for texture baking (that's the way such things are generally done) if you don't want to risk turning orbiter into a slideshow on anything but high-end machines.

Combined with D3D9 features such as normal maps, a low-poly mesh with baked textures should look almost as good as the real thing and work significantly faster (ok, that was probably my top understatement of this year...)

 

[cottontail]

Thanks for the tip -- I'm still relatively new to blender so every piece of advice helps.

 

[francisdrake]

Hi, the main difference between high-polygon artwork like on http://www.scifi-meshes.com/ and a simulation game is the rendering engine of the game has to do the scene about 60 times per second, including other nearby vessels and planets in the background.

The magic to achive an acceptable graphical performance is low-poly modelling combined with clever texturing. If you are interested, search the web for "low poly modelling". It comes up with a lot of information, examples and tutorials. The Wikipedia entry is a very good introduction.

Practice a tutorial on a simple shape (like an airplane hull) and then return to your model looking what can be simplified, which unseen polys are safe to delete, etc.
Looking forward to see your work developing

 

[cottontail]

Thanks, I'll see what I can learn (found some tutorials on texture baking, etc).