Finally, after a few days of trying to find the time to post i have done it. Here it is, the ship (mostly finalized) I have been working on for a while now. I say mostly because it always seems like I could keep tweaking something (which I probably will). When I set out to do this ship I thought a lot about what makes something like the Millenium Falcon and the Ebon Hawk cool (two very iconic Star Wars ships if your a fan, look these up if you don't know what I am talking about). So I set out to do something in that style but I also wanted it to be grounded in reality, Star Wars does a pretty good job but it never accounted for Newtonian Physics in space. That is why you will see thrusters all over the ship, placed strategically for quick maneuverability. Also the glowing blue devices around the ship I imagined as Shield emitters that bend the shield around the ship. I also thought about things like landing gear, where the loading ramp would be, how cargo would be moved in and out, the scale of the ship, and I even imagined how the interior might look. Anyway, there is my little nerd session.

Moving onto the model, you will notice that it now has the specular, glow, and normal maps. The armor itself also went through a few revisions. It was a little to heavy before so the armor now appears a little more subtle. It also has bigger chunks so it flows better (thanks to Michael for his awesome critique's!).

Finally I think I will post one more time after this to show the textures themselves. I may also post a montage picture of the different views of the ship (maybe). Someday, I may even post what the LOD models look like, If I find the time to get the texture reset for those. Well, this ship has been a blast from start to finish to work on, hopefully people enjoy looking at it as much as I enjoyed building it.

Updated progress

Another Update! This just shows some more progress that I have made with the texture. I have added rust and much more detail to the whole ship which should be obvious compared to the last post. I also spent a ton of time working out what I wanted to do with the armor I am not sure its final but it does look better than it did. You will also notice that I have added a normal map to give the ship a little more depth, that will also likely change as this was just to make sure the texture was set up to do it. The normal was generated with nDo which is a great plug-in tool for Photoshop. and I also have the start of my Emissive map although I like to just call it a glow map since that is exactly what it does, make things appear to glow it can also be used to create lights that cast across the texture.

Texture work in progress

Here is what I have been working on the past little while. As you can see it is still a work in progress. It is still lacking a specular map, reflective, glow, and a normal map. Much more detailed than my last texture which admittedly was kind of a mess. This time everything is easily changed and may still change as I continue to work on this. I am excited at how well it is turning out, its funny I started with a totally different approach to the modeling then I had in the past and I am doing the same with the texture. These screen-shots were taken in marmoset Tool-bag which renders in real time. The idea is to show what the model will look like in game. I plan to show the LOD models once I finish with the primary model. Then I will showcase all three in engine and hopefully the differences will be hard to spot.

So after what has seemed like forever I finally have a new update. So after my last post I still did not think the ship looked good enough. After some more feedback and a lot more work I have arrived at something I am more satisfied with. This will be the final update for this ship I think its time to move on to bigger challenges.

It has been a little longer than I thought it would take for me to post an update. Work on my latest model has been going well. I think I have managed to push it as far as I can with a 10k Tri count (at least that was the target budget I was going for). The actual Tri count sits about 150 Tri's above the 10k limit. The goal now is to set up the uv's and then Create two LOD models, one at 6k and another at 2k. From there I am going to create a high poly model to create a normal map.


This is the other project I have been working on. After I created the renders below, I got a bit of feedback and decided that I would try to improve it. So I did some studying online and found some reference and also did a bit of reading. I went back through the layers and made adjustments to the color of the main color, brightened up what used to be straight black and dialed back the dirt a bit. Once in Maya I switched the material to something better suited to metal. Using that material I loaded the color and diffuse back into the material. I also created a specular map, reflection map, glow map, and finally a bump map for some more detail. After going between maya and photoshop for quite a while, I finally got something that I thought was a big improvement over my previous attempt.

This is the new model I am working on. I started this one a little differently than the last. Instead of extruding from a box and building from there, I created the main shapes and placed them about where I wanted them. This way I could iron out the shape, scale, and overall silhouette. From there I welded everything together and started laying the proper topology out. It now consists of one object instead of many and I can now move forward with detail. I am considering building a high poly model so that I can use that as a normal map for the low poly model. If I don't, I will probably still put some detail in using a bump map created in photoshop. Hopefully I will have another update soon.