with just the guns or in total?

The only thing I have to say about the guns is that they're all on top. Although very naval, it also means the belly has no strikecraft cover, unless the few there are supposedly enough.

Dunno if this is common of your models, but I would swear the other vessels have had better coverage (although I know in Sins the Z axis is not as big of an issue as RL).

There is a few on the bottom but I'm close to the poly limit and am too impatient to play around with them any further or bother optimizing it. I'd like to just leave it as it, hardpoint it, and move on with the project.

I mean, I may update it again before it goes in, but as my motivation is dying to keep this afloat again I'd rather try to push to finish the entire thing sooner than later.

/e

I stripped a few polies and added some lower guns but I'm literally at 24.4k right now. I can't add any more without massively butchering quality on everything. Also, I'm finding placing guns on this hull a bit hard as I try to avoid potential clipping issues. Wouldn't be an issue in an engine with turrets and arcs and such but in this it makes things a bit harder when it comes to placing PD.

Well, the sins engine limit is around the 50k triangles for a model... so, you have room for really make what you want...

Double you poly count will not be a huge problem for the game speed... capitalship are few onscreen ( not like these thousand fighter/bomber/tradeship/etc )... all is handle by the GPU via shader... and the memory used for a 50k or 25k model is not very huge ( texture not taken in account )...

Well, there is arcs... +- 90°... problem is that these arc are a constant... i am trying to put 160 turret on a model... was able to put 108 of them but for the remaining, i was obligate to remodel all the back of the model... well, i will not complain to much, the sins 3D engine seem to be relatively good...

By 24.4k I mean quads, so it's more or less around 49k tris right now. I model in quads and then perform the tri conversion right before it goes into the game. And, yeah, almost all Anahn ships are at 50k tris right now and I can have 400 of them onscreen without any frame loss.

I don't think I would call any part of sins engine "good".

50k polys and 400 ships onscreen? That's zoomed out, right? Because any engine that can display 20 million polygons without framerate loss can be considered not good, but probably something that accidentally strayed into our time via a quantum gate timeslip accident in the future.

Once they get the point cloud tech up and running for real, I think that will be right up your alley.

As for me, here's one of the Titan models I've been working on, 5766 polygons:

Zoomed in or out, they are fine - at least until they start fighting. Most semi-modern engines can handle a lot of polies, performance often depends on other factors which sins doesn't really have to deal with, like self-shadowing. I think if sins had self-shadowing and such the performance would be considerably worse. In that respect it performs very well for what I am throwing at it. But I am also running a dual GPU card, so that helps.

Homeworld 2, for example, has incredibly bad performance on ATI cards. Like, most mods were unplayable on an HD 2900xt. I had difficult recording even small parts of my mod in that game. Sins, once you remove mines, becomes quite playable in my mod.

I really like your edgeflow, btw. I wish I could model organics.

I don't know how ManSh00ter work but organic is not really difficult once you know how to use some tools... by example, in wings3d, you have some option who are only activated in expert mode ( need to modify your configuration )... one of these tool is called magnet... a very powerfull tool for sculpt organic shape... a little video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3E1KZ8ZhE8 ... have learn to use magnet with poser a long time ago, allowing me to make body shape that morph don't allow... I bet that your software have something like magnet too !!!

The real difficulty with organics is the UV... almost impossible to make a UV without any texture strech somewhere... well, it is a problem similar to these of sphere...

I can certainly see all of the above.

As for ATI and Homeworld 2, I dunno. I use to have an ATI card, but I can't remember if I got rid of that comp before or after playing Homeworld 2... hmmm, not sure. Don't matter as I can currently play it on max settings and the Complex mod and it runs smooth as butter. Man I wish they had a strategic version of that, even if only single player.

I played it on several ati cards/hardware setups and the performance was consistently bad across the board. I was told it was simply an nvidia-biased engine.

that is a part of the industry.

Redoing the cannons for the bEta capitals as it was my 1st attempt at texturing. Will also reference the model so other capitals that use it dont require separate changes. See Softimage|XSI - Referencing

I might get rid of the base and just have the rotator merging with the ship.

Now I just need to figure out how to make a good -da sheet. 

Started on another Undead ship, the Hysteria. I am using an experimental approach to creating the base hull in an effort to make something more organic in appearance, and then working off of that, aiming for something cathedral-like with different armaments than usual Undead ships.

Promising superstructure. I like where it's going. And yes, the Undead seem to be the right species for doing something Gothic. I always thought of the Anahn as your Baroque species.

Myfist, good looking textures. The guns are simple, but real naval cannons are. So it's looking good. Nice thing about Sins is that you don't have to do any real work with weapon animations.

Quick question - can missiles fire from side hardpoints to forward targets or are they identical to every other weapon type? What happens if I point hardpoints in weird directions? (Say, on the axis of those diamonds, facing upwards and at an angle.)

Yes, you can have them fire to the side and then veer off to hit targets in front of the ship, as you can see here:

But you have to be careful how you position your hardpoints (I've found that it is best to us 15 degree steps when rotating). If you place them incorrectly, then most likely result is the ship firing its weapons from the center point (inside the hull). Depending on how you've set up your weapons in the .entity file, the ship may also be unable to fire in the desired direction at all.

@Thoumsin, the technique I use is simple strip modelling to set up main edgeflows, then tweaking those, extruding edges, welding points etc. I do use Softimage's tweak tool, but mostly for point manipulation and to smooth out edgeflows. I always wrap it up with Relax and Smooth to create an even, smooth wireframe, then conclude with some more tweaking where necessary and that's it.

The thing with the way its done in that video is that the model is either using smooth subdivision or NURBS and is actually useless for games. I prefer to always work with non-smoothed out models because that way I get a clear perception on how the model will look in game and I can easily spot problem areas.

Also, with strip modelling you have a great degree of precision when it comes to controlling your polygon count, so you can have more polygons in detailed areas and skip them in less detailed ones.

As for setting up UV's, these days I use automatic tools for that (used to be a lot of work, but now its done in five minutes), and just spend time arranging my UV islands so that I maximize texture coverage for areas which need a lot of detail/visibility. With organic models, using a polypainting app, such as ZBrush, eliminates texture stretching since the textures get auto-distorted to counter any UV stretching. In fact, I use ZBrush exclusively now when it comes to texturing, I don't even touch the textures in Photoshop until it's time to do some channel editing and prep them for import into the game.

Hmm. I'll have to play around a bit with the hardpoints for this ship, then. I'd like the missiles to curve around a bit and hit front targets from the side much like yours, since there won't be much room for forward-facing missile launchers on it.

I've wanted to get into Zbrush but every time I ever looked at it the interface was too much. Do you have any specific tutorials you'd recommend for starting off with it?

Almost all of my ships start off as a box. Just a box. I then extrude like crazy and manually vertex edit to bring them to what you see. Some Undead ships start off as Spheres. The Hysteria started off as a single cone. Some of the more complex ships, like the Xy cruiser and the Ruin, are a series of symmetries on models to form complex shapes. After I do the symmetry, though, the model is often too complex for me to control very easily due to my inexperience. From there it's a gamble if I can make it worth the effort.

When designing models for a game, one should always follow the "less is more" rule of thumb. That means that you start simple (as you do with box modeling) and keep it simple for as long as possible. Your ships are quite complex, but I'd like to see some wireframe shots to see where those extra polygons build up - my guess would be at those little crevices and surface detail. However, adding new edges, faces and vertices should be done only when geometry is required - which it usually isn't for the majority of fine detail. Usually you want to add geometry detail only in obvious situations.

That way you always have a nice, relatively simple mesh to work with. You add fine detail by either having a simple base mesh and building a more complex detailed mesh on top of it, then baking normal maps, OR you can again use an app like Zbrush to add insane surface detail to your meshes without actually messing with base geometry.

Personally, I usually add some geometry detail where it is needed, but only at a basic level. For example, I might model a simple hole in the hull, but texture it in ZBrush so that it has all sorts of stuff in it - it looks just as good as if I modeled all that detail right in, but only at a fraction of the polygon count.

As for ZBrush itself, a good resource to check out is the Digital Tutors tutorials on the subject - they cover everything from polypainting to actual scuplting (which is actually what ZBrush is designed for). The app might seem really complex at first, but once you get the hang of basics, the rest is pretty intuitive.

Well, as I've never been UV to texture, I've become accustomed to modeling detail. Except I can't really model high detail, so all of my stuff is still really low detail. My ships have thousands of turrets but I can't model that kind of detail, or I would try to.

Almost all of the polies in my models go into turrets. I don't like having overly simple stuff. If I can add detail and justify it, I will. I am more than willing to sacrifice a few polies to make stuff look prettier. I've always designed for top of the line hardware. When it comes to my UDK project I will be aiming for polycounts much higher than that in sins. If sins had a poly limit of 100k I'd gladly use that for every single Anahn ship, and I doubt the performance hit would be very noticeable.

Here's the wire of one of the WIP's I posted a while ago. I doubt I will be finishing it, though.

... I just discovered I somehow overwrote the sins rigged version of my Bishop for some reason. Okay. Either I'm completely retarded or I'm completely retarded. I hope I don't ever need to change something in that model...

Those are both shown in Quads, but I only convert to tri right before I export to XSI. Also, even though I could optimize these a little bit, the gains aren't worth the effort of antagonizing my CTS even further.

Well, nobody know the real limit of the sins engine... the 50k limit is more the limit from the little piece of software who convert the xsi file to the sins .mesh ...

There is maybe ( need to be tested ) a work around... by example, cut your 100k or over model in section... back, middle, front... save each of them like a individual model but, by example, add 2 hardpoint on the center section who call particle effect for render the front and back section...

Well, it is not the perfect work around since in the shipyard, only the middle section will be build... particle effect are only activated when the ship is launch... and i am not sure that collision detection will work on the part generated via particle... but i think that it is worth a try...

The problem would be the collision detection for me - my video won't show stuff getting built, so that's not an issue. I toyed with the idea of trying to make a composite mesh for a while but haven't been able to justify it yet. Maybe for the Emperor-class, if I try to model it, I'll give that a shot.

/e I would absolutely need to make particle meshes for a Battlestation if I ever tried to make one.

My idea to cut up a mesh would be to split the turrets into groups, and keep cutting turrets off until you end up with two meshes slightly under 50k. Then, export those grouped components as individual meshes, keeping the main body as the main mesh to maintain collision and impact points from projectiles. Then, spawn the extra turrets and such as a particle. I haven't been able to try it yet though.

The thing is, its really a shame to tie up so many polys into turrets - your hull meshes look just fine to me, ie. what you would expect for a game model, but turrets are over detailed, again, for a game model - that kind of geometry detail would be perfectly justified if you were building the models for straight up CGI animation, when you would need closeup shots etc.

But for a game, you have to think also of what the player will actually notice. And I can guarantee you that 99% of people will not notice the exquisite detail you put on the underside of the turret barrel. My advice would be, have a simple turret mesh, and bake the normal map onto it from the super-detailed meshes you have built. Voila, problem solved and it will look just as good.

But, you have to UV map the meshes for that first.

Having particles represent parts of your ship is not that good of an idea, because particles kick in only when you zoom in on the action, and that means parts of your ship are going to pop in and out of existence from time to time. And yeah, collision detection doesn't work with particles.

I have to agree with Manshooter. Unless it's a game like Homeworld 2 where there are fewer ships and more special effects via lighting, I would say it's a waste, at least with strategy games.

So as it stands with Sins, make most of the turret detail part of a skin and then use those fromm polys to either speed up performance or add fun fun to the hull. Personally, I think you should go for performance since fighters and trade ships will later become a factor.

I'll be trying to aim for a lot of up close shots on the turrets if I can manage. The camera system in sins is rather difficult. I made the turrets as low poly as I could - some are only around 150 - but I am not willing to butcher their quality completely. I may use the models in another engine in the future, upon which case I'd probably end up remodeling them and increasing their detail much further.

As long as the performance doesn't impact my recording conditions I will keep adding detail if it's possible. I didn't know particles vanished from a distance, though...

If I wanted to use these models in CGI I would need a lot more detail than what I can model.

Well, the B5 mod use the method of particle for the rotating part of the Omega destroyer ( http://babylon5ins.blogspot.com/2009/11/ea-omega-tex-wip4-update-ingame-mesh_10.html )... until now, i have never see the rotating part disappear... maybe because the particle effect use the gs_ship.fx shader code who is in fact the same shader that for usual ship render...

In fact, i think it is more related to the particle file code... have use a similar method for one of my vorlon ship ( http://babylon5ins.blogspot.com/2010/04/vorlon-dreadnought-modelmoving-tex-by.html )... all blue light emitting section section are a secondary mesh using only a rgb cl texture map with the sun shader code... only way that i have found for have light to be enough realistic ( can be projected on the hull of the ship or other ship )...

Maybe particle effect are like mesh, they vanish with zoom only when they are very small on screen, smaller that a pixel... or when your max particle count is too small in your sins .ini ( normally 6000 but mine is on 16000 since several years )

For the collision problem, maybe simply use notepad for edit your .mesh and modify the bounding data at the begin of the file... these bounding data are usually used for collision detection in game... extend the .mesh value for include part who will be generated by particle will resolve the problem...

Well, on the model that i work now, i have over 150 turret... have just recently reduce the tri count from 164 tri to 140 tri... but 150 turret at 140 tri is directly 21k tri !!! So, i understand your problem... and your solution of main mesh and a mesh for weapons is a good one...

In fact, you can have one for the hull, one for weapons and one for detail ( thing who are sometime called nurnies in 3D who can eat a lot of poly due to their amount )...

Try the dev.exe... camera zoom work differently with the dev.exe... take a look at http://soase.weebly.com/developer-exes.html#g ... "Does allow you to ignore the minimum zoom distances, so can be used for screenshots"... i think that it is what you need !!!

Interesting, I didn't know the dev exe had camera controls. I am definitely going to be checking those out really soon.