Topic: atheorhaven's WIP and release thread (re: TARDIS v3r released.. :)

[atheorhaven]

... All Alone in the Night.

Nice.

 
Mudd.

Yeah, the mesh itself is low poly, and the textures were as well (256 or 512's in some cases). If I were to simply upscale them, especially as the size of the Station (scaled ingame at 5 miles), then every pixel will be blocky. So, I'm reworking them as I upscale and when it's all done will be 1024 or 2048 respectively. The SFC1 version will downscaled back to 512/1024 respectively simply because I'm expecting those will be seen in VM's more likely than not.

Still WIP (of course), but here's a difference on the level of detail, and the amount this is getting reworked. Docking bay, same texture and a before/after where I'm at at the moment.

[atheorhaven]

HA! I thought that I'd be able to do this, and I can...  now I can do a before and after comparison to see WIPs. Awesome.

I renamed the stock Taldren MODViewer as ModviewerSD.exe and then copied D4v1ks Modviewer into the same directory named as ModviewerHD.exe and Modviewer.exe so NOW by default, Modviewer opens as a full screen resolution view of the mesh. But if I want PiP, I can also open ModviewerSD and open the original mesh for comparison. How cool is that?

Just checking the differences on my flagship from original to where it is now to get an idea of what to change. Pretty happy with where it is at the moment, but more to do.

(ps: I'll archive those up and put them onto my Box share so you all can do this as well.)

[atheorhaven]

BTW, just so you're not feeling left out. I've incorporated all my flagship ideas into the ship I was planning to release, so you guys will get to play with it as well.

So, this is the "Theorhaven's Folly". Going to release it in SFC 1, 2, and 3.. and am thinking this will give you guys a pirate to play with. Will include the MODs for both nacelle sets, so that you can play with the one that you like the best.

Only restriction I'm going to put on it. I don't want to ever see it ported to Bridge Commander and released to that scene. I don't mind it being used anywhere else, at all. But not Bridge Commander. I don't mind it being converted into BC if you guys are going to play with it in your own local games, that's fine. But not released to the BC scene. Reason being.. I went through Gamespot the other day and found about 30 ships that I've worked on over the years released without a "by your leave", a screenshot, or even credit for the work that I've done getting the ship to where they could port it to BC. Three, maybe four major culprits as well. And all I've ever asked for porting the work I do is to say,"Hey, I'd like to do this, and here's a screenie" and include me in the credits. If it gets converted and released to Bridge Commander, I'd like to do that myself.

That's the only restriction on it's use.  Otherwise, enjoy.. she shoar looks purty.

[atheorhaven]

Finishing off the "Folly" and have finished off my flagship today. Still have the underside of the "Folly" to complete, but I wanted to show you some of the differences. So, understand, this is exactly the same ship with a few cosmetic differences for release. For the "Folly", I wanted to release a pirate cruiser that took all the same design elements of my flagship, but looks a bit different. That way, you guys can enjoy the ship, but my flagship will be unique.

And I'll release the two mod differences in the archive, the original nacelles and the LN-68 nacelles. This front right shot shows the LN-69 nacelles, the "Folly" is in the back with the yellow deflector.

Second image is upper back right, original nacelles, again the "Folly" is in the back. You can see how much cleaner the "Folly" saucer is than my flagship, I know what it is and why, so am okay with it, but I wanted to clean up the top and bottom wings for you guys on the "Folly"

Third image, I did some work to the hanger I was quite excited by, love how that looked when it was completed. Gave it a more "B5/BSG" type feel with the landing lights.

Anyways, will finish off the "Folly" saucer tonight, and it should be out by morning. All of this is WZ45's meshes, I just kitbashed and played with moving my original textures over from the v1 Lethality to a new mesh.

[atheorhaven]

Werkin on da glows.. basically, ready to release for SFC 1 and SFC 2.

[Panzergranate]

In the UK, on construction sites, portable chemical toilets are called "The Turdis"......

Obviously, a "Turdis" contains about the same amount of crap as the current BBC leftist PC Woke Doctor Who Tardis.

[Tulwar]

These "Leftist" are being funded by big business interests.  Their messaging isn't slick.  We are reacting to it exactly as they intend us to.  These sci-fi franchises are being destroyed very deliberately.  Who does it serve?  Certainly, the white men who wield power don't want step onto the trap door with a rope around their necks, so who is in back of this messaging?  The only people I can think of are the people who control Chinese investments.  They are the only people with both the means and reason to destroy Western cultural exports.  Marx might have been a leftist, but from Lenin to Jinping, the so-called "Left" has been making Hitler look like pussy.

[atheorhaven]

In the UK, on construction sites, portable chemical toilets are called "The Turdis"......

Obviously, a "Turdis" contains about the same amount of crap as the current BBC leftist PC Woke Doctor Who Tardis.

I'll say this. I don't really have a problem with the character of "Missy" because the actress did an outstanding job in the role. I thought that rather than the character being "The Master" though I thought that the better choice would have been "The Rani" or even Romana or Jennie because you get more mileage out of it with them being underserved.  Being another Master was actually a poorer choice story wise. And to compound on that, they flipped back to whatever is going on with the current guy, who is just a whackamole.

My problem with Whittaker's Doctor though is Whittaker isn't strong enough to carry the lead of the show, and the writers are shovelling messages out that have little to do with scifi. I've watched maybe three episodes with Whittaker, and most of those were Harkness episodes. When your guest star (Barrowman) steals each episode he's in, you have a series problem with your lead because Barrowman isn't playing the character any different than he did with Eccleston, Tennant, or in his own series. The problem is that Whittaker can't carry the lead where Eccleston and Tennant could and the Barrowman stores prove that. When the Doctor is a secondary character drawing chalk lines and is literally a damsel in distress, your writing staff has failed.

My honest plan is when Whittaker's regen scene is filmed and released, I'll grab a clip of it and if the new person can carry the show, will splice in Capaldi's regen at the beginning with the new one at the end. I am willing to walk out on a ledge far enough to maybe accept a gender swap for the character in a scifi show, but Whittaker isn't someone to make me walk out on the ledge.  Alex Kingston, Karen Gillian, even Jenna Coleman to a degree can show that you can follow the show with a strong female lead, and when you compare those actresses to Whittaker? You can see where she lacks.

[atheorhaven]

These "Leftist" are being funded by big business interests.  Their messaging isn't slick.  We are reacting to it exactly as they intend us to.  These sci-fi franchises are being destroyed very deliberately.  Who does it serve?  Certainly, the white men who wield power don't want step onto the trap door with a rope around their necks, so who is in back of this messaging?  The only people I can think of are the people who control Chinese investments.  They are the only people with both the means and reason to destroy Western cultural exports.  Marx might have been a leftist, but from Lenin to Jinping, the so-called "Left" has been making Hitler look like pussy.

My belief here is that "the left" and "the right" are shadow puppets. The ruler of the world is currency, and the BBC (among other media) is losing money as tax writeoffs. More money you lose, the bigger the writeoff and the more money gets laundered. But I wouldn't say that it's just "white men", because it's not just white men in the World's Richest lists. I think that money opens all the right doors at the country clubs and hooker & blow parties.

But BBC is simply a sign of the changing media from "The Big Three" in the US and BBC in the UK to the more decentralized model with Netflix/Amazon. Unless/until they change their model, the BBC is on a long slide.

Back to topic though... I found Brad Bowerman's B5 mesh the other day again, but had lost the textures. Fortunately however, I found someone had converted it to BC of all things, so I have the base textures. Doesn't help for illums though too much, so I'll have to create those and then apply them through 3dsmax.  Attached a screenie of that WIP, plus also an example of the difference between the two meshes. I've done a bit of work on Brad's textures, the solar panels are changed and I'm working on the hangers and docks. You can see that on the Modviewer and in my screenie of PSP.. So given a choice, I'd do a kitbash of these two. The first mesh has the arms, Brad's has better definition for the mapping and the cylinder body is less poly chopped.

Again, I like to work on multiples at a time, so the "Folly" and "Hope" are complete for SFC 2, I need to back convert to SFC 1 and finish the extras for SFC 3 to release that. Working on the changes to Brad's textures and will release that, then will use those to fix some glaring issues with the old textures on the old mesh.  This weekend, expecting to do a bit of work on the TOS Jupiter Station.. namely if I'm going to and where if I do, put in a hanger for shuttles to land at. And what to add to the lower assembly.

(edit: Just showing you my SFC XP VM, this is what I have for my copy of 3dsmax r3.1 these days. Lost the CD a while back now along with the dongle in a move, so had to patch my installed 3dsmax r3.1 to get it to run in the VM. Good thing as well, because that machine went belly up after I created the VM from it. Here's a shot of me starting to apply the illum textures to the mesh. I'm also working on doing up a Windows 2000 VM for this, depends on if I can get a program installed under both Windows 2000 and XP to retrofit the W2K version. Otherwise, I need to export the Musicmatch Jukebox into the XP version. That's what should let me start trying to play around with working on SFCSound.zip for the SFCDemo to put in my own custom music.

Did I mention that I'm doing all of this so that I could run these under Zorin?)

[atheorhaven]

Playing around with spec and bump mapping.. the Folly and Hope look pretty good like this, yes?
(edit: just finished damage textures for the ships, trying to think if there's anything else I need for an SFC3 release now).

Also, using the new Babylon 5 mesh to fix some flaws in the old textures. The original textures were *teeny* compared to the ones on the new mesh. So, I scaled up the originals, and used the new ones to help build up the old ones. You can see a bit of the difference in meshes here between the new and old, the old is blockier and designed for lower end systems, where the new ones.. I'm not such a fan of those textures. (Lighting where the show didn't have them, etc). That can be a good thing sometimes (I've been known to do it), but I'd like to have a pretty show accurate Babylon 5 in my game if possible. Or at least have it look really really similar. Also, the old mesh has the arms, with the new mesh having them textured. So, potato/potatoe.

The station with the notable lights on the ends of the collector/dissipaters is the old mesh, btw..

[atheorhaven]

Okay guys, the Folly and the Hope are up.

I used install creators to extract the ships to their own subdirectory under your Downloads folder so you can rename the .MOD files to something like fca.mod etc before you put them into your game.

Also, if you do go to install the ship, someone looking to port is going to get a big nasty blurb not to port the ship to Bridge Commander. At all. Poked around  Gamefront and have found 30 ships from 4 or 5 different people all ported over without letting me know. It's not terribly difficult to say,"Hey.. I'm porting your ship to Bridge Commander, and here are some screenies." Then, I can go, "Oooo, ahhh.. thnaks! Looks good!" Or "Hey, why do you have it flying upside down?"

But 30 ships ported without credit (including the one named after my wife) is too much. Obviously, the Bridge Commander porters don't really respect the work we do here, it's just raw material. And stripping credit is *NOT* cool. Not just my name, but a good number others. So, no ports to Bridge Commander for this ship. No ports for the textures (other than WZ45's included textures, those are his to determine what he does with them) for this ship. If it is to get ported, I'll do it. I've basically got that done already. I just don't know how to test it ingame. I know how to create the BCMod install, the ship is in a NIF, and the textures are ported. Opens fine in the viewer I have, just don't have an install of BC to try it in. If there's a demo of BC floating around somewhere, I'll try it and download Brex->Mackie at the same time.

Any rate, SFC 1, SFC 2, and SFC 3 installers are in my Box share in a buried Trek folder I am helpfully sharing here:
https://app.box.com/s/h7e8fqe0r8ftfosdg0w914a5jn7n4vgx

I also have some of my other Trek work that was in SFC3: Generations at War in that folder. So you might see some other ships that were ported over to BC in that folder. I didn't do that porting either.

[rant] Can you tell that porting and then claiming all credit for all the work annoys the crap out of me? I've ported lots and lots of work with others and the credits will always indicate the original author first, and a line stating I converted the ship to SFC (or their name/atheorhaven if I have to do texture work). I would have thought that the same held true for BC. But I guess that unless your name is P81/Rick Knox, they don't seem to know how to share credit. [/rant] Sorry, forgot to say "get off my lawn".

Anyways...

Okay, work continues on the new B5 mesh, scaled and HP'ed to the proper size, all the textures are applied and I just have to track down one texture reference to get rid of a white area. Then it should be about ready mesh wise. I'm going to further modify the textures to get it to approach how it looks more in the show. Because that was part of it in the first place.. to give us a station ingame that looked more like the show. When I'm finished, should have two.. this new mesh, and also the original one with better textures on it. Good for low and higher poly games.

And now that the Folly and Hope are out the door, I'll be doing some more work on the TOS Jupiter station (remembered I already had a hanger available, derp), and I'm starting to play with a Blue Midget for Red Dwarf. And the Centuri Station from Space 1999 is about ready. I've decided I'm going to create a few test beds for SFC.. a Who, Trek, RD, B5, and 1999 install of the Demo. That'll give me a quick way to try out the new stuff ingame and make sure that it works. And haven't forgotten about Mudd's stuff either. Finally toying around with the idea of sprucing up an old Lord Vader mesh I have (if there's interest) for his Daedelus class. Think I still have it at any rate. Vader and I were buds way back in the day, along with Pataflafla and Sandman, and we all were learning together. So, trying to get some texture on his mesh that are as close to photorealistic as possible is the goal for that. We'll see if I still have the original mesh (I should) and will go for it if I do. I used it as the basis for my Cletus, so I should have it floating around.

[atheorhaven]

Hey, we're back.

Couple updates.. starting on converting the Cletus back to a serious Daedelus mesh. Have some colour matching to do yet, but basic texture work has started. You can see the old rusty Cletus panel still on the back side of the primary hull. I mentioned this previously, this is an old Lord Vader mesh he gave me carte blanche to play around with. One of the ideas that gave me the idea for the Cletus was the Ptolemy tug idea.. space pickup with old ships. So I'm kitbashing a variant with Schtupp's Ptolemy tug attachment and container and Vader's Daedelus, I think it looks like a pretty good freighter personally. Sort of like a Starfleet kei truck.

Also, got 105 of the 106 textures mapped to the new B5 mesh and illumination textures added into the mesh as well..

[atheorhaven]

Spent a few hours last night because I knew I wasn't going to get much time on it today. Good thing, because I had to consolidate my office into the bedroom closet to move back the kid.

Cramped, but operational again.

So, playing with textures to get layouts and am using temp textures right now that are grabs from a CGI model. I'll use those to do up new ones that are original, but based off these CGI ones because they look pretty good. Front of the primary hull is the beginning of the new textures. I do like the frosted milkcan look of the secondary hull.. may try to keep that look.  Also, redid the nacelle swirlies, quite like how they look now..