KJCs Work

[Majestic]

She's coming along beautifully mate.

 

[kjc733]

Thank you.
In todays news, I've got bored making textures and have started work on a low poly version. Bad news, so far my reducing has taken it down to 14k polygons... more work required!

 

[Sqweloookle]

Lookie what i found.
Did the artist steal your intrepid refit design??

 

[kjc733]

No there have been a number of attempts over the years. I believe that is the cover art for the German edition.
The nacelles are an obvious thing to change when redesigning a ship. Once those have changed the pylons need to change to accommodate (and those pylons are terrible). Voyager has pylon mounted impulse engines so if the pylons change then those have to change. The obvious place to reposition the impulse engines are on the back of the saucer (as with most Trek ships) - but a Voyager doesn't have a distinctive end to its saucer it's hard to find a place to locate them. Here they've added structure to the back, whereas I grew the underside to retain the same saucer silhouette.
So all Voyager refits will have certain similarities - the differences will be in the detail. Mine has "my" nacelles. The bigger difference is that I've also changed the hull around the deflector and lower saucer, whereas most people keep the front end of their refits the same.
If Rademaker had ever completed his design it would have been the most extensive one (except of course for STOs Pathfinder - there are a number of similarities in concept).

 

[Sqweloookle]

Wait wait! Intrepid saucer separation! That's stupid! And what is with that Shield emitter on the top? Looks silly lol.

Well the pylons could be a little curver in the pic I posted. I like the nacelles though.

The added impulse engines look ok, as the structure is curvy like the saucer so they are bearable though I know any modeller here could do better!

Of course refits will be similar, have you seen that particular refit before?

 

[kjc733]

I had seen it before when I was doing research for my own... and it's why I decided not to put impulse engines on the back of the saucer like I had originally conceived.

As for saucer separation... in one of the Voyager relaunch novels the ship separates. Basically the author builds up a situation so impossible they have to - sloppy writing. I think the author also struggles to understand the relative sizes of these ships. Voyager can separate and the Vesta can land on a planet...
To be fair to Beyer some of the novels are quite good, but things like that just break the immersion.

 

[Sqweloookle]

How the hell could Voyager separate?

 

[kjc733]

Anything can be made to separate with the right degree of imagination (there's even a Vesta separation animation on the web). On the stock intrepid I'd cut round the secondary hull and then back to the spine so that the saucer has a scooped out hollow in the lower aft (like the Galaxy). I marked separation lines on my Intrepid II to that effect and that's originally why I had secondary impulse drives on the saucer.
For Flight III I'm not bothering. The internal infrastructure to do so would waste a lot of volume which the Intrepid just doesn't have to spare. It's one of the things that annoys me about Trekyards, they always push separation on all ships, even if it's clearly silly. The Intrepid party trick is that it can land - deal with it.

 

[Majestic]

It's one of the things that annoys me about Trekyards, they always push separation on all ships, even if it's clearly silly. The Intrepid party trick is that it can land - deal with it.

Same here, those guys aren't as knowledgeable in ship design as they pretend. I have stopped watching their episodes due to this. I spend have the episode shaking my head like in one episode the younger bloke was sating a Neghvar was a refit of the Vorcha *facepalm*

 

[kjc733]

What's a shame is when they do stuff like that while interviewing the artists...
Anyway, todays update takes us down to about 7k polygons. This requires the removal of the escape pods and the deflector overlay sooooo... back to the textures again. But I've got further reductions to make, I figure the sensor arrays on the saucer rim cost a lot
Progress has been a little limited this weekend as I caved and bought a T61 for World of Warships. So of course I had to figure out how to play it...

 

[Majestic]

I agree. It's a shame they don't educate themselves a lot more. They don't seem to do a lot of research on particular designs either which is a shame.

Get her to 5k and she'll be useable in Fleet Ops.

 

[kjc733]

Update for tonight, I've managed to get the whole thing down to 5300 polygons. Of course that means that all the nice cutout sensor arrays and some of the windows are now gone
To put it in perspective, the primary and secondary hull alone on the base mesh had 8300 whereas Aads Intrepid model has 1455 (how he does it I have no idea)!.
It also means we've lost the deflector overlay (which was 2240 polygons but I had been a bit lazy there) and the shuttle door has been vastly simplified, down to 80 from 554.
I think I can lose some more from the pylons, bridge and sensor array, but I don't anticipate getting much below 5000 without removing the rest of the cutouts and the secondary impulse drives.
And of course I'm also going to need to remap parts of the hull again and make some bespoke A2 textures to replace the physical details I've removed.

EDIT - 4995

 

[Majestic]

Usually it's best to make a low poly model from scratch to get them low in poly count. A lot of the non ms3d programs are terrible at making low poly models. I've found ms3d it exceptionally good at it, as it was designed for it and doesn't have all those advanced cut out tools you need to do all that manually which does take a lot of time but the results allow for a much lower poly count.

 

[Chiletrek]

Hello:
I agree with Majestic as I used to get ships to lower poly-counts so I know all the effort that means .

 

[Majestic]

That said 5,000 is still a good poly count for today's standards in games. Even Fo can handle a moderately mass produced ship at 5,000 poly;s.

 

[TUB_Husker]

That said 5,000 is still a good poly count for today's standards in games. Even Fo can handle a moderately mass produced ship at 5,000 poly;s.

FO: look at the borg, cube with 10000 polies, a little more

 

[Majestic]

FO: look at the borg, cube with 10000 polies, a little more

Exactly. While the cube isn't mass produced like other units does show what the FO game/mod/engine etc can do.

 

[Chiletrek]

So true and so promising! Imagine we couldn't really get battlestars with turrets in normal A2 without risking serious lags.

 

[kjc733]

I agree, if I had wanted this to be a low poly model I would have started there. However
a.) This wasn't a scratch build (thank the Gods), it is a rebuild of my existing Intrepid II base mesh which was designed for high poly work.
b.) I've found that when making models for beauty shots and A2 release it is far easier to build the base mesh with high poly in mind then cut it down, rather than build an ultra low poly version then have to build in all the extra stuff needed to upscale. Usually I manage to reduce it further than this, unfortunately the Intrepid is very curved and I'm loath to remove too much of that.

EDIT - 4611 and that's as low as I'm going. Remapping is complete. Now to make the custom textures.

 

[kjc733]

So this is what a 4611 polygon Intrepid III looks like...
Yes I got lazy and used Aads Deflector - I'm hopeless with the Voyager style arrays.

 

[CABAL]

It looks great! And FO should be able to handle a good number of those without issue, too.

 

[Majestic]

Well done mate, awesome reduction.

 

[Chiletrek]

Hello:
The reduction looks good as I see no distortions or stretches, not to mention those annoying mesh errors and gaps, well done!

 

[Archonon]

I think you did a terrific job with the reduction kjc, the ship looks great.

 

[kjc733]

A test image by Jetfreak.

EDIT - I was going to take the day off this, but instead I've put together the pack and uploaded it.

 

[Majestic]

She looks beautiful

 

[kjc733]

Thank you. Now to get back to work on the big one.

 

[kjc733]

Well after many tedious hours of work she looks... pretty much the same as before
I've pretty much finished remapping the high poly hull against the base mesh maps so the texture distortions are almost all gone. Next up is to start adding some more physical detailing, like phasers. The other thing to do is decide what to do about the deflector. Do I go back to the Voyager style, or my Intrepid II style, or go for something different again... Decisions decisions.

 

[Majestic]

I really loved your Intrepid 3 deflector personally.

 

[Jetfreak]

I keep beating this dead horse, but golden sovereign dish.

Is it possible to transplant the ver 2 deflector into the new mesh? Could work.