chrono

Well after a lengthy lack of an update here's what happened. Basically I had gotten to near this point in the models build about 3 weeks ago when I started getting errors with the mesh. Well after a week of trying to work with it I figured out just what was going on. The model had some how developed boolean stress and was corrupted. This really hurt because I then had to re-think how I was going to model the various details. Sadly the ONLY approach I had left was to hand draw/add everything and leave the large pieces simply in a heiarchial state(glued). So it's taken me awhile to get much done on her and I'm finally nearing where I was before the mesh got corrupted. The current mesh is now 559k and renders in about nine minutes under a fake GI light dome.

At first I thought it was an illusion because of the added wireframe overlay, but it IS sharp. So I'll adjust that. I'll also soften other areas too. Because I just checked the finished model and it's something like 1950 after triangulation.

I'm not sure what you mean Lestat. Are you referring to the little top and bottom fins on the larger engines or the appearant sharpness in the bend area of the large engines themselves? Not alot I can do with either without adding 10-30 faces and then I have to question whether it's actually worth doing because the game shader may be able to deal with that. I'm gonna try and finish the model today, or at least get it to pre-triangulation.

Yeah sure. Here you go it's a quickie screen capture and currently doesn't go more then 952 faces. Lots left to do yet. Gotta fix a few more things and hand triangulate this baby for it's best possible performance. I haven't worked on it since friday though, I've been working on it's older brother most of the weekend.

The creators of Macross, Studio Nue have specified these things. The Japanese text says rocket not missile. In Macross, the company is called Bifors, unlike the real life Bofors. Truth about designs and respect for the creators is something to care about. I really hate to say this, but please we don't need you going around and correcting each and every error on the models forum, especially if you don't build them. For the purpose of the kit It doesn't really matter especially if it goes by the line art. I don't mean to be an ass, but its kinda annoying. We are happy enough to get these kits made in the first place, and just because you can pick out an error in its name (which has little to do with the cast) is not a modeling problem per say.If you want to make a thread about it nanashi, do it in the Movie and TV series thread please. ______________________________________________________________________ To Noyhauser: Excuse me sir, but I have right to post in any forum I wish to as long as its on-topic. Also, I will correct misinformation as I see fit. If you get annoyed with me or my posts. That is a personal problem and you can leave if you choose to. ______________________________________________________________________ People should be glad that there are people out there that want correct and accurate information. The same information can be seen in Macross Perfect Memory and on Macross Compendium. There are such thing as guided rockets, even precision-guided rockets. Anyways, these rockets are selfed guided-apparently with an electro-optical system See: http://nanashino.macrossmecha.info/missile...ors_rocket.html Yes people should be happy that there are people out there that have the nessasary knownledge. However unless they ask for the critism do not casually walk up and resolutely state that 'they' are wrong and that 'you' are right. The people you want to help will ignore you and any information you impart because you were a totally pompus arrogant ass about it too begin with! Offer the information don't state it! Regardless how 'correct' you feel you are. Getting a person to really listen to you is an art everyone needs to learn. Ranger565, Man that's great stuff!! Maybe eventually the Macross fan built kits will get up to Gundam fan builds.

Avoid the 'Re-Mastered' RT like the plague/flu/old-folks home!!! The colors have been altered so badly that it looks positvely horrid! I mean the colors are so increased that they blur badly and they simply were not designed to be altered and it REALLY shows. Having the better sound isn't worth it. Well maybe if you just play the sound tracks and then you are better off renting it and then ripping those tracks off so you can play them on a cd player instead of wasting time with a tv & dvd player. Besides the 'Legacy' version is clearly superior even though it is bigger.

The_Woz, Aviod using the following because of various problems with their usage: - All NURBS functions. - They are near total garbage for anything. Use Rhino3D if you want good NURBS. - The Fillet/Chamfer tool. - A total waste of time to use even for the most basic of uses. MASSIVELY error prone. There is a 'workaround', but it's time consuming and requires good working knowledge of SubD to work well. - All Deforms. - They are completely too imprecise to be usable beyond quick organics. - Scaling tools. - They do not scale correctly. - All 3rd party plug-ins. - THEY WILL CAUSE YOUR TS6 TO CRASH! - All Spline tools. - They are infinatly better in TS4.3. - All animation tooling. - Some of it's 'ok', but it's not stable enough for animating without cutting up your animation scene into smaller chunks. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The ONLY 'PROS' I have for TS6 is it's SubD, and it's still somewhat bad because they removed TS5's version which was simply better to build with, and it's lowered rendering time compared to TS4.3. To be honest you should've spent your money on Rhino3D, because it's COMPLETELY superior to TS for building man-made objects.

Yeah I agree. I'll do that.

Well I've got it partially finished it doesn't have any of the inset thrusters, all the various bumps and stuff are there though. Which sucks because after tesslation it's poly count is 1988! Ugh... I think the poly count will end-up at about 2200 the way things are going. I got a question on what format you want it in? TS is limited in what it can save to. Can you use DirectX?

I wasn't being sarcastic about the poly count 1500 IS alot to work with and lets face it we are not talking about a ship that will figure largely in both scale and senenios, so 1500-2000 is actually about right for a limited use ship that maybe used alot by the players. Anyways back to work! I do have a question though. What is the angle of the in-game shader?

The_Major, Just check out my WIP thread here. It has the images that you want. Lestat, 1500. Well that's ALOT to work with. I've reduced my current model down to roughly 620 before tesslating. Keeping most of the details intact(trench, launch bay). I still have to further adjust some things.

I'm a little pressed for time right now and don't have the time to go through the thread looking for an answer.... Are you placing a Zen Picket ship in the game? And if you want I can give you my low level version(about 1200 faces).

No Romero wasn't attached to the remake at all. Which is just yet another point against it by many Romero 'purists'. And what is has to do with the topic at hand is clear enough for anyone smart enough to pull out the subtle undertones of 60-70's anti-commericalism in the orginal movies. The point is that Romero is obviously following the current trend of "action is better" in monster movies. So if the 'fast' zombies and lack of Romero's name anywhere in the credits was a turn-off and stopped you from seeing the movie then why the hypocrisy with 'super-zombies' and his name attached to it? It's like saying that any new Macross without Shoji Kawamori isn't Macross. Radd your last piece of your post makes no sense what so ever, because Titanic WAS an excellent film based off of how much money it made. That's how ALL films are judged by and not how well they are written. Reality fact not classroom fact. But then again most movie purists are like Neon Evangelion fans. Excited about the story's depth, action, or just a single component of the movie but could care less about everything else including the storys conclusion. Does anyone know what Romero's done recently(within the last 5-10 years)?

No not yet. But there's this little problem with International Copyright and oh about 12 different other laws that protects ALL tv materials from being retransmitted or re-distrubted(spl).

hehe! Yeah forgot about that! But then again I wouldn't be taking my time writing this stuff if I wasn't a fan to begin with. Doktor Gonzo, Agreed that he used themes that were timeless. Nowadays they are so over used it's crazy. It also doesn't help that they are poorly written too! So they are dated, which is why I called them "cult hits" because few people rent movies that are so old. Just what movies has he directed or wrote in the last 5 years that given any indication of what his current ability is? Also if I remember correctly last years Dawn of the Dead was pretty nay-sayed because people couldn't get past the 'fast-zombies' part. Now that Romero's name is attached to a movie with 'super-zombies' this is ok?? All sins are forgiven?? What a joke.

Pretty much. The anime has too much fan service to be taken seriously. I'm not into fan service type anime anyways. As for the designs..... well they are taken from the game which is several years old, but it doesn't look like it's that old! I just think that people expect more from every single anime they seen then they really should.

You couldn't be MORE wrong. Well since you have nothing to prove me wrong with, other then Romero's past achievements, I'll politely disregard your claim then. The Dead Trilogy was good because it was the Alien of it's near brainless genre. A genre that had gone down hill for several decades and was a cult hit rather then a cash cow(ala Star Wars). Romero was good back in the day when he had something to rail against. Now he's just another hollywood director who didn't follow through on his own movies logic. Do yourself a favor and only look at the story and images instead of somebody's past skills. So far I've not seen anything that looks remotely appealing from neither the cast listing(do they have a real actor on that list?), story(super zombies? giant tanks? WTF!), to the pre-movie imagery. Lets just hope it's at least Shawn O the Dead level cause I just can't take another Resident Evil movie. Graham, Yeah it's gonna be an interesting movie season this year. No single movie is really standing out as a power house.

Intially it both looks like and sounds like complete and utter crap. This sounds SOOOOooooooooooo Resident evil!

Hell it IS! Seriously F'd up though.

Hmmm.... That's a good point, but it only really applies to human ways of thinking. It also doesn't take into consideration the size of the ship itself. 495 meters is alot of smooth surface! Which is just fine for some visual shots, but becomes lacking at other distances. It also doesn't take into consideration the design age of the ships, any lack of upkeep, and the fact that the designs were made by aliens. *sighs* I'll have to do somemore detail testing to find an equalibrium for the overall design.

Just abit of a general question about surface detailing for the Zentraedi. I've already made several small detail items, and plan to make several more, to add extra surface detail and visual depth, but since this is a 'small' ship should I give the hull a rough bumpy look by modeling those irregular areas OR should I just have a 'smooth' hull with some bumpmaps to give it a slightly rough surface? All the reference I have is pretty long distance shots of low resolution, but with today's technology I can easly render this ship at high resolutions(8k*8k). So I'm in a bind. I've been modeling at a multi-purpose level(600k-1.5m) so I can do both close and distance imagery, and animate if I wished too. It's a pain because I've done some prelim testing on both ideas and with the idea merged together and it works out well enough, but I'm concerned about the scale issue and whether it actually fits the design. I can easly see using this method for the larger ships like the Thuverl Salan because if applied to them those areas would look small. I just dunno.....

If anything, the Borg from Star Trek are very blatant rip-offs of the Cybermen, and possibly the Daleks, from the British sci-fi series Doctor Who. If you were to put the two races together side by side, their modus operandi would exactly match.That aside. I really don't expect the new BSG series to go very far. Not much more longer then Space Above and Beyond did. People are tired of ship based material. Why do you think Stargate was so popular!!!!! VERY unlikely that it came from Doctor Who, though I won't deny it's influence. Fred Saberhagen's Berserker book series started in 1969 and Issac Asimov's materials started in the 1940's. It was the time period between 1940's-1980's was ruled by the giants of fiction where the question of "What makes us human?" was explored in the early days of mass market electronics. That's where they most likely got their ideas from.

Oh well. Can't win them all. Info Update: Well I couldn't wait for feedback and went ahead extracted all of the final surfaces and booleaned all, but the lower nacelle(i've gotten to edit that area before I do that). So this places the current poly count at 189,042 and 236,930 with the lower nacelle, sans weapons. Now the real fun begins! Surface detailing.

Umm the manga's not even at chapter 200 yet. And the story's are better then Intial D's book long races. But I agree the story is getting flat, though he did say the 'L' word to her. My only problem is that while the author has really developed the surrounding characters he really hasn't given the main characters much at all. It's starting to feel like he's coming to an ending though. I've seen enough of the new animes artwork to say that it's really good and they've done a decent job slightly mimicing the current artwork style but also retaining it's own style. I really hope that they also capture some of the old OVA's and newer movies visual softness.

Actually, they also don't use them because they're disk-space hogs. And in some games they have trouble maintaining continuity(example: Parasite Eve 2. Every FMV with a weapon shows Aya wielding her starting pistol, regardless of what you have equipped, or in storage). As for the too much either way argument... Metroid Prime and Prime 2 are raw game engine. And I wouldn't have it any other way. Same for PN3's (very rare) cutscenes. If the game engine is high-enough resolution, FMV is just a waste of disk space. It's the cost and NOT the disc space that actually matters to the game developers. The disc space reasoning is just another additive reason, not the true reason. Anyways any time you don't control your character and the story is advanced that's a cutscene, but it's also an FMV because it's been pre-scripted into the engine. Place the blame where it's really needs to be placed... On lousy game design. Not the tooling. People will be having this debate for years to come, because the game poly counts aren't gonna be near the same level for a long while after Unreal 3 has been released. Maybe by then somebody will have actually made a decent RT/Macross game!!!