I think Kenneth has a 19-year-old daughter, so I know he's not in his 20s... not sure about anyone else.

Yes, me too in early 20's. Interesting, all people in range from 1983-1986(7)... with one exception, our shepard Kenneth

Tadaaa! i have found this one online in some wierd format, divided in thousand pieces but i managed to put all parts in right place

Malon Garbage Scow:

Nice.

Regards Wolfe

Ooh yes, that does look like a ship designed to carry toxic waste and garbage. Nice one, Zeleni!

Very nice - I have a fondness for that race and hazardous waste in general.

Along those lines here is a concept for the Romulan Science Ship I. Science Ship I is at Tech level 0. This "cabbage" look I take to be early Romulan. The download model is low poly with a primitive texture. When I or someone gets the time we can improve on this.

The next generation of Romulan Science Ship can be this model by ModelsPlease.

Hell yeah it can, that little ship looks friggin cool.

I think Modelsplease made it but not sure.

Nice one Kenneth, is it better to label her as colony or transport ship, looks to big for science ship!

This is what we have in the Romulan Transport Ship I slot for now. (It also needs work)



This is what we have in the Romulan Colonyship I slot for now. (It needs at least some re-texturing)

Uhh...are you really sure you want that as the Romulan colony ship, Kenneth? That ship is very similar to the United Earth Ship Yorktown, which was a pre-Warp ship that the Humans used during the 100-year war with the Romulans...

The "Cabbage" was the heaviest ship the Romulans had at the time, and roughly outnumbered the Human ships by about 2.5-to-1. The Romulans thought they could overwhelm the humans with sheer numbers and firepower, but ultimately the Human ships were capable of producing equivalent power levels in a smaller hull, making them faster and more maneouverable. The Humans then developed Warp capability for these combat designs a year later, but the Romulans failed to acquire the same technology. The Romulan war ended soon after, yet the humans still did not have any idea what the Romulans looked like because the Romulans self-destructed before allowing themselves to be captured.

Starfleet Museum

I see you have this one as Romulan Tranpost III ... it is very very non romulan:



this one one too:



Why not use this one as Transport I, II and III you will save your time and result looks 100% better :



and this one for colony ship I, II and III :




I know that according to dafedz shiplist there are 3 differnt types of colony and transport ship but Kenneth you are alone in such big task so use shortcuts!!!

Check out Botf main forum, this will help you http://www.armadafleetcommand.com/botf/ ... pic&t=1745

I've got pictures but not models for the 3 Colony ships and transports.
There from battleclinic.

Regards Wolfe

I would rather not use the same ship model across multiple ships, multiple tech levels and hundreds of years. Even the long lived Klingon Bird of Pray changes it's appearance with the upgrades. Our models reflect that. I feel the game will look better if we can tell them appart by the way they look. The museum link is very helpful. I could not find an example of a Romulan Colonyship other than BOTF. The current Colonyship models and most of the others are indented as a starting point. They need to be rebuilt and retextured. I do not intend most of them to go into the game the way they look now. I already have specific plans for that Romulan Transport III (unless someone comes up with a better model before then.)

I hope that I have helped Ken a little by finishing the Vulcan D'kyr, it took ages to do I got quite fed up when I couldn't work out how to unwrap onto a single texture, after many hours of trial and error I got it in the end

On the whole it was fun, especially painting the model at the end, but I wish the learning curve wasn't as steep.Now that I've some experience instead of being a total noob, hopefully the next model I make I'll be able to do it in half the time.

@Kenneth, then change texture a bit and leave model

@Strings, you helped me actually, please zip me models with textures of Surak and D'Kyr (D'Kyr looks great)

You help us all. It looks nice. Both all these models and the combat engine need work.

I am currently working on the Klingon Transport III and will get back to the Romulans in time.

Here it is, I've put a copy of the 270x255 pic in the folders.

Nice, had a look, for some reason lighting doesn't want to work on it though.

Regards Wolfe

Just as explanation - model master Zeleni has taken charge of the minor race ships. I will leave it to the master of the minors to upload the .rar. With the two of us being the hardest working model guys it has been easier to split the work up by minor race and major race. I work the major races except to help out master Zeleni.

The odd lighting appearance may be the settings used in the material (textures). In your Ultimate Unwrap expand the materials on the right, highlight the texture, right click and take properties. I am thinking we should set some common standard for these properties on the hulls in all models. These properties likely should all be the same in our game. The default in Ultimate Unwrap is Diffuse white, Ambient black, emissions black, spectral black. I was thinking all that for the hulls except spectral gray and shininess 96 and transparency 1? Or what? Does anyone know better?

We can use whatever looks cool for windows, warp thingies and whatever glows in the dark.

I'm not a modeller so not 100% sure what it means, but Fireball has been using bump maps and other things to make his models look for more detailed than they actually are. Are these sorts of things being included with the models or will they be added later?

...

Nice model, Strings. Obviously you're part Vulcan engineer.

@MOE - I would be adding bump maps and hard points and whatever else later on. Given the scope of the project just getting all the models working in basic form is my first goal. (see above) I hope that can be done before the end of 2008. It would be nice if we would go live around the release of the new Star Trek film. For me that means not a lot of extra bells and whistles on the 300 or so models. Am I dreaming? We will see.

@Strings - It is good you are getting a working knowledge of models. It sure will help us all when you code the combat engine. I can kind of do the former but would be starting from dirt on the later.

You're right, one of the things I wanted to understand better was the different names for textures maps and how they can help our ships look like they do in Star Trek. I've found that we'll eventually need at least 4 different types of textures maps! (But I agree with Ken that we should aim for the basics first, functionality is more important than looks at this stage.) Anyway here are the different texture maps and what they can contribute:

Diffuse- This map is the most basic and is what we generally think of when someone says texture. It indicates the diffuse color to return when lit. Colors and texture details are put in this map.
Self-Illumination – This map indicates areas that should have bright colors regardless of lighting conditions; even in dark or no lighting, all non-black pixels will show up on the model. This can give star ships the bright windows/glowing nacelles effect.
Specular - This map indicates specular highlights, which are reflected when the object is lit to give a “shiny” appearance. Some ships only look right when they have specular lighting, especially the ones in newer shows, ie. most of the designs in Enterprise.
Bump – As the name suggests, this map gives textures a less flat apperance. It can also be used to increase detail without adding extra polygons (by using normal maps from high poly meshes on low poly ones). The bump mapping variant I suggest we use is normal mapping as it suits our needs in terms of a good quality/performance trade off.

@Strings if you wish you can texture Malon Garabage Ship i' m to busy with Kreetassan Command Ship, let me know if you are interested and i ll send you .3ds



Here you can find textures :
http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/scans ... -color.jpg

Does it still need texturing?

Model+blueprints+textures

http://files-upload.com/files/661703/MalonShip.zip

Cool, I'll do it now.

Edit: The first thing I noticed was that it was a nice detailed model but when I checked the poly and vertex counts, to my horror, there were 16k vertices , so I went and merged every vertex with its nearest neighbours within a small threshold, now there are just under 2k, everything looks the same.

Another thing, which I found this hilarious, it turns out the model's spherical liquid tanks have double hulls,

I'm gonna breach some Malon safety regulations and remove their inner hulls now (should knock off about 500 polys)

Lol, the ship was modeled in wierd application and then was converted by homemade tool to lightwave format... double hull isn' t much of surprise, afterall i guess we can learn something from Malon Safety Regulations down here on Earth

One note , Malon have 2 types od garbage ship, one with 3 liquid tanks and other with 6 or 8 ? We have also two types in our shiplist but if don' t want to bother just rehue texture

Variety is the spice of life


Regard Wolfe