Agreed, fully. These ships would accompany each large fleet, a massive sight at the back of the lines.

The Cards will be able to build other light cruisers that are more advanced than Galor and Keldon also.

Here's my partial redesign fo the Hutet so far. It's now lower and thinner. The front image doesn't have the shorter hull yet but it does have the shorter blade. The tail still needs work, I'm going to lengthen it a little and shortern the rear blades a bit. I'll do the starboard blades next.

The idea behind it is to have a dedicated warship more powerful than the Ambasador, that's the intended era. Then I want to base larger ships off of the Hideki, with its smooth rather than hard angles. The Hideki will be the basis for the more TNG like ships, that are comparable to the Galaxy, Vor'Cha, and D'Deridex.

That's a fairly good redesign. Probably woth speaking to jig and seeing what the intention is. Hutet does tend to fit well as an Ambassador equivalent. And the Hideki does tend to look a little more advanced and therefore designs based on that could be quite nice.

The side look is intimidating. I realy like it

I`m sorry but why are you talking about a hutet style ship at the same time as an ambassador ? the hutet will be the unions most advanced warship, with the hidiki class as an escort vessel, which is what it is after all.

when this is done it will be a match for the ambassador class.

Diarr felt the Hutet looked less advanced due to it's similarity to the Galor and Keldon in terms of design era. The Hideki seems to be a slightly newer design, he wanted to design larger cruisers that shared certain features with the Hideki and therefore look more advanced than a Hutet.

The ship pictured looks cool, with extra detail that could be a great Ambassador equivalent.

While I see Diarr's point about the design of the Hutet, I kinda like it being the biggest and baddest. It looks super mean and any new design would have a hard time looking more intimidating.

What SonOfMogh said. The basic idea is that in Star Trek the Cardassians are in a gameplay situation of being behind the Federation in the tech tree due to not having expanded early in the game. Going by that, the idea is the Galor is actualy comparable, in tech level, to that of the Ambassador Class.

I plan on making a Hutet like ship based on the smooth lines of the Hideki. It'll be really difficult coming up with that though.

With my shorty Hutet a normal Hutet could still be used but I would want to make changes to it so it isn't the equivilant of a direct scale up of the shorty Hutet. I would make the bridge structure at the top much smaller, shrink the forked tail making it more like the Keldon's set up, remove the docking structure at the bottom, add more main weapons arrays to the front or make one big custome one, I would also add the weapons systems DS9 had such as the torpedo turret. That would rock.

What program do you use, Jigalypuff?

3d studio max. is this what you have in mind?

Wow

Nice work, fast too. It's almost right. The tail is still ugly as sin, the blades too pointy, in fact I think I've seen that before, and the back looks like it'll break if you spit at it. She also looks pregnant and not in a sexy way, I want her to be rotund. These problems really are inherent with the design it self. Here is your render over my drawing to show the difference in dimensions.

I don't personally think the Hutet Jig showed looks flimsy in the least!

If a plan is approved to make a large and small version, please please please go to great lengths to make them as different as possible. The windows are another thing that should reflect size.

It's too long and tapering and the tail reminds me too much of a parasite. I want it to be more like a set of inverse steps and to be over all more substantial. That doesn't even include the small things like the windows you mentioned. There is also the concern of secondary weapons, the main weapons, impulse engines, warp engine grills, sensor pallets, the bridge modual shape, shuttle/landing bay, and reenforced landing keel.

Good stuff, as long as all that's being thought through it should work well.

Which reminds me...
I remember reading the max poly count for ship models will be on the order of 2000 triangles. Is this accurate? Obviously, the less the better (as long as it still looks good) for the sake of having large fleets without slow-down. But what'll the max poly-count?

Also, will the rendering engine support quads? IE, must all a models' polys be three sided or can they be four? (Did that question make sense?)

How many texture images will we get? What kind of maps? Specular? Bump? Glow? Just ambient? ... What formats? (For the maps, I mean. I know the models will be... um... from the free max modeler... what ever its name is...) Will transparencies be supported? (IE, alpha-channel?)

Can I assume there'll be no "damage" modeled in geometry? That is, when a ship gets hit, chunks wont be flying off or sections suddenly become missing from the hull... If anything at all happens, I assume it will only be a texture change: a chard surface, or something... Right? (I think I read this is the case, but I want to check.)

Will there be a max file-size limit for the model as a whole? (500KB? 256MB?) Or the textures? (256x256? 8192x8192?) ... I know that can also be a question of computer performance, but I want to know if the *engine* will have a set limit.

Anything a mod modeler should know about the 3d engines' limitations and features that I forgot to ask?

I don't mean to pester (much), I just have some ideas I want to start get into geometry; but I don't want to cut myself off by not knowing the engines' limitations or features.

I can't answer all these questions, some things, as far as I know, are yet to be decided, such as the requirements/limitations of the graphics engine/3d environment. gturfrey and Jig may be able to enlighten further on this.

I would have thought the poly count would be a perfectly adequate 200 - 500, and quads would certainly be supported. (yet to be confirmed as I am not responsible for making these decisions).

Textures I haven't heard about yet. The ships I'm making are so far using the single texture surface with UV mapping, as with the first game. Multilayer texturing and alpha channels I think it's safe to say won't be used, there's no need for that level of detail. I should imagine that damage effects would be billboard textures superimposed, as with the first game.

As for the ships that are to be built, I don't have a full set list that's been established, and what modelling has been allocated to who. As far as I knew Jig and I would be taking on most of it. I've already started on Romulan and Cardassian ships, designing Ent era and pre-Tos design lineages that will reflect from ship to ship era to era. I'd also reckon that several of the models created for the first game will be used again in this one, there's no reason not to recycle when we can, quite easily. Many of the models are quite passable.

nice hearing from you dafedz! At least we know that it will be possible to implement already exciting models of others into the game with gmax.
(But please when putting the stuff online give the people of these models credit but also ask if they wouldn't object to it.)

With this program you can also create the hardpoints for where the phasers should be and stuff like that. At least this was said some months ago . I will be looking forward to see these ships of yours.

Cool, and yes no problem, when I have a few more finished I post some images. Gmax I know little about, I'll be making these models for the 3DS format, conversion shouldn't be a problem. I take it the final game format will be .Sod?

The models I'm talking about are some of the original ship models from BOTF I, but yeh I'm well aware of credits, no problem, any that need to be given will be given...

daf 3ds is fine as they can be imported into g-max, this is a free scaled down version of 3d studio max, i figured it best to use this format so then anyone will be able to mod ships in. poly count is of course keep it low keep game fast lol, so up to 500 should pose no probs whatsoever, you can of course go higher but the lower the count the quicker the game. quads will be supported as the majority of 3d engines support them. single texture maps are as always the best way to go. have you seen my card tos designs yet? i am also working on some ent era card ships and will post some pics of those soon.

Quads are good! In general I'm a minimalist. Most of the models I'd want to mod would fit well within the 500 mark � some by half � but only if quads are allowed. Obviously, triangulation close to doubles the poly-count without actually adding any geometry. *All* these models, including my most extravagant, fit within 2000 polys if triangulated.

I spend quite a lot of time taking other peoples models and cleaning them up for my own use � in-house, of course. (I use Wings3d for modeling work. Everything goes through it. It's a sub-div modeler and likes skins to be whole. That makes quite a bit of clean-up work for me!) I often shed many, many polys in the process. (A recent project lost 496 of its 4340 triangles and I'm not done yet.) Usually the model looks and runs better afterwards. (This includes all the models from BotF1... Not that that's much of an accomplishment.) So I *know* more is not always better.

Still, I was looking for engine limits. Not just suggestions, but limits. That's why I went to such extremes ... I *will* take your suggestions to heart, by the way. 500 quads sounds like a good rule of thumb; one 512x512x24, too. And I *do* appreciate your answers.

is Wings3d compatable with gmax?

it should export to 3ds, any 3ds model will go inot g-max

Not really, no. It can export 3ds and a few others, but not directly to gmax. I use several other programs for conversion: Ultimate Unwrap, Milkshape, Explorer 3D (the original Russian version) and Accutrans.

The wings modeling interface (a continuation of that of Mirai and Nendo) is by far superior to that of any of the above programs, IMHO. Its file support list is somewhat constricting. And its UV editor is still a bit limited � I use Unwrap for that... Its interface makes up for these limitations, however.

It's completely open source, though, so if you want to make plug-ins for gmax support your contribution will definitely be accepted and I'm sure several people will worship you as a god. It's written in Erlang. More info at: http://www.wings3d.com

For those actually interested, an excellent set of modeling tutorials describing what to expect from the Wings3d interface is here:

http://www.geocities.com/paulthepuzzles/aardvarks.html

puzzledpaul, as he's known on the wings forum, has a talent for finding ways of doing strange things; and, more importantly, a talent for explaining what he did.

Wings3D is the program I use too. It's the easiest one I know but some times its limitations bug me. Some times I would like to be able to just draw a line and extrude a shape from it. But I did find a good, although limited renderer for it. http://www.toxicengine.org/download.php
Here's an example of mine rendered in Toxic through Wings3D.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v334/ ... ps/T10.jpg

ive never used Wings3D, whats the difference between that and 3ds max

It's free.

And the interface is much less frustrating, IMHO. (Did I say that already?) ... Oh, yeah, and the programmers are willing to listen to user requests/input... The source code is available for personal modification... It's limited to making models: no animation tools, no bones, no serious rendering ability, not enough file support to act as a translator... Actually, they're completely different beasts, wings and max. The first is a quick and cheap, no frills modeler; the second, a high-end, high power, everything *and* the kitchen sink animator! ... Not really comparable.

Um... but isn't all this a bit off-topic? ... I know, I know: I started this line of discussion ... But I was getting so very excited at all the cool graphix being posted!

Speaking of which, Diarr: Neat model. What's its background story?

Some one requested a ship for a story they wanted to write and he provided some examples for the style. I was making it too spaceship like though, he wanted something more airplain like and less hard sci-fi, so I stopped working on it. He also said he wanted it to be sort of like the Planet Express, so I got stuck on that and made it green. These are my last renders of it. I never got around to really smoothing it out. The last part of the story is that when I was making this mesh it was also the first time I was experimenting with Toxic, it took me a week to get the hang of it.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v334/ ... ps/T16.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v334/ ... Gun04a.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v334/ ... ps/T14.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v334/ ... ps/T15.jpg

does anyone know of any sites that have star trek blue prints?