Flashback 1942 Skull-1 Lightning transform test (WIP, no textures/hand

[dialNforNinja]

Edit 2013-03-26: Finally got my laptop back, and finished up the VP-38! Modeling anyhow, th8is is still just material colors with no actual texturing:

Old/development version (same transformation, high-contrast color patern makes it easier to see how it works)

The model is about 1320 polys as it stands. I also have a set of Super-Rockets for it, which attach to the top of the inner wing sections and on the bottom of the outermost (green) wing panels. Woke up this morning with the head and nacelle designs clear from a dream, and spent the rest of the day obsessing over the rest.I love the P-38. It's my favorite real-world fighter plane, and only the SR-71 beats it in "all aircraft"

- dNN Edited March 26, 2013 by dialNforNinja

[Benson13]

Love it bro. It looked like it transitioned really naturally. As for the SR-71, I think that would be hard to do because of the length of the "neck" of the plane. Those things are long as hell in real life.

[VF5SS]

The VF-14 and Fz-109 are of course based on the SR-71 and did manage to shorten the neck through a series of folding joints :3

Your P-38 is pretty neat, dial. Definitely several steps up from the old P-38 Gobot named Bolt.

[Knight26]

Very cool, and similar to the VF-4 in overal transformation scheme, well done

[David Hingtgen]

Love it, but I gotta wonder about how it could "fly" in battroid mode---most valks have their main engines as foot-thrusters. This does not. Or is battroid for ground use only?

[Mommar]

Such an interesting/cool design. The P-38 has been one of my favorites my entire life. How far are you going to take this model? Textures? Are you going to beef it up with more polys?

[dialNforNinja]

The props can also be used in Battroid with the nacelles tilted as in GERWALK, and assuming the (too big to fit anyway) original engines are replaced with fusion-turboprops and the coolant radiators in the knee/tail pods with mini-jets, there's probably enough thrust to at least hover and fly slowly in B. And yes, there's clearance for the head and SUPER-ROCKETS with the nacelles tilted and props awhirl, though I won't deny it's close.

As for the model itself, I won't be adding major amounts of polys - though getting those nacelles and the wings to look right with Smooth turned on has pushed it up over 2000, and probably will hit 3000+ by the time I finish with the arms as well, making this one a bit on the heavy side for my standard. It's all those Lockheed curves, they hate being turned into polyhedral figures instead of smooth curves. I suppose it could be subsurfaced but honestly I've never gotten the hang of making that look good - like the bumper sticker says, "I build my models the old fashioned way - one triangle at a time!"

I'll post an updated still before I go to sleep this morning. There's no animation at the moment because I had to move to a new save file and delete all of it because there's quite a bit of geometry nd positioning changes going on - I extended the nose and engines by about the length of the prop spinners to be closer to the actual outline of a P-38 (and that was only about half of the difference) and nudged the tails/legs a little longer as well for the same reason, And I still haven't gotten around to working on the arms at all, d'oh.

Current snapshot:

- dNN

[Mr March]

That's pretty damned cool. I like the color coding

[chillyche]

That's pretty damned cool. I like the color coding

Makes your transformation guide for the MMM much easier, huh?

[dialNforNinja]

I don't know about that, but it makes it so I can clearly see which part is which, when I'm not overly sure of teh design due to it changing to a greater or lesser degree with each session. I haven't actually done anything on it for the last couple of days due to finally having gotten copies of the Lego Harry Potter and Batman games - and probably won't for a couple more, because I like the Lego games a lot and expect to play them straight through one after the next.

Have no fear, though, I'll be back to this right quick. I very much want to see this one through to a finished model and at least a Skull-1 and RL P-38 texture sets. Probably not YIPPEE or the White Lightning racer, I'm waffling between bare metal with invasion stripes and one of the OD Green/Haze Grey camo patterns.

- dNN

[Mr March]

Makes your transformation guide for the MMM much easier, huh?

And now begins the long road to lobbying for this design as official

[dialNforNinja]

Pff, as if. However, I have decided on a craft name and nose art for the pseudo-RL color scheme: "Fork-Tailed Lucile" will be in curved text on the upper/rear (currently yellow) nose section which becomes the rear part of the cockpit armor in battroid mode, with a naked redhead sitting just aft of the gunbarrels so her legs trail back under the currently-hot-pink "eye" parts (due to be made more hexagonal and turned into sensor eyes as seen on most VFs designed since the YF-19 IRL) and holding a pitchfork that extends over them, thus ending up on the left side "ear" of the head when transformed. Under the name, in smaller letters will be the pilot and chief mechanic's names, Ivan Erikson and Loring Hardy unless someone has better ideas. (Please, give me better ideas than juvenile innuendo-based names!) I'm thinking seven or eight kill marks on the lower (currently tan) section. Those will be inverted in battroid mode, but for kill counts it hardly matters.

The name refers to the German pilots' nickname for the P-38, "fork-tailed devil," naturally.

This brings up a matter for which I want to solicit opinions, should the kill marks be swastikas or the Zentreadi V-thing? Swastikas have the bonus of not being obvious if they're upside down, so I lean tentatively toward them myself.

- dNN

[Lobizon]

This brings up a matter for which I want to solicit opinions, should the kill marks be swastikas or the Zentreadi V-thing? Swastikas have the bonus of not being obvious if they're upside down, so I lean tentatively toward them myself.

little regult white silhouette!?

[Mommar]

(Please, give me better ideas than juvenile innuendo-based names!)

I guess Bigger Johnson is out of the question then?

[Variable_Queadlunn]

Wow!

I like the design! The P-38 has always been my favorite WWII era aircraft!

I toyed with a variable version of it some years ago and played arround with a few other designs as well

F-4U Corsair TBF Avenger and the Japenese Shinden are the only ones I got even roughly finalized

I hope you won't think I'm trying to steal your thunder-( & Lightning ) if I post my designs to this thread as well

I am so envious of your modeling/animation skills since I can only do my mecha designs the old fashioned way

I hope you all enjoy my take on the venerable P-38 as a variable fighter

VP-38 Battroid.pdf

VP-38 Gerwalk.pdf

[chillyche]

That signature looks suspiciously like the SMS squad logo, except that it's dated 2003, making it older than any known reference to SMS I've ever heard of. What the what?!

[Variable_Queadlunn]

The letters correspond to the initials of my legal name- I worked them into a 3 hex pattern becuase my cursive signature wasn't "pretty" enough to sign my artworks with- I've been using that logo as my signature for better than 20 years so it pre-dates SMS by quite a bit

[chillyche]

That's fun. That means, as far as I'm concerned, that Frontier was totally giving you props when they designed the SMS logo. Even if they didn't know they were giving you props. Props were given.

[dialNforNinja]

Project suspended for a bit - some damn fool elseforum reminded me of Carmageddon, and I reinstalled it and... well, let's just say there's a whole lot of crashing going on.

- dNN, will get back to this but it may be a while

[dialNforNinja]

I'm back! And I brought my awesome.

I did not, unfortunately, bring my variable P-38, because the laptop I was working on it with had the CPU fan die. (All hpoe is not yet lost, I'm getting a replacement fan shipped right now)

I do, however, have a variable J7W1 Shinden ("Magnificent Lightning") the last Japanese fighter design from the war, even if it never went into production to match the IJN's order.

Check it out!

Aside from making the vertical fins about 20% larger, the small intakes being squared off, and a very slight hump in the fairing behind the cockpit it's almost an exact match for the real Shinden. Well, discounting the wacky color scheme of course, that's just for visualization purposes.

It only has 4 guns to the p-38's five, but carries nearly twice as many missiles with the optional equipment.

- dNN

[the white drew carey]

I like how the propeller sits in Battroid mode. As opposed to the P-38, this one can still use it for propulsion.

Excellent work!

[dialNforNinja]

Thanks! The P-38 can still use the props for battroid, though, just like in GERWALK - there's actually more clearance between them and the head than there is from the nose in plane mode, and even with the engine nacelles at 0 tilt the upper arms are long enough to not be cutting off its own elbows. I just hope I can successfully rez the dead lappie, that model would be the least of the data loss since the optical drive died something like a year and a half ago and I haven't been able to make backups...

- dNN

Edited May 22, 2012 by dialNforNinja

[paramat]

These designs are excellent.

[dialNforNinja]

Got some time on the real computer instead of just web browsing on my PSP... figured I should give some sign that this project is still twitching. So, textures! The pearl white will eventually become a Skull-1 scheme, but I've been mainly working on the RL Shinden paints and getting the big, pretty poster-style starscape to align across the various seams - the goal being that if someone wants a skin like the Sheryl and Ranka custom VF-25s & 29s, it's easy. The skin is mapped to two 512x512 images, though internal parts will have a third and/or a number of smaller ones adding up to a total of no more than 1024x1024 for all of them (including the current two.) That's probably still too big for actual game use on older hardware, but while the image maps still look okay at half that size they do get some obvious jaggies on the panel lines and such. Anyway, behold!

[valky-001]

Love the designs, that p-48 remind mi more of the transformer I posted. I like WWll and WW 1 planes and would love to see them in Valkyrie Fighter style, one that I would love to see would be the BF-109 with a real good impressive mecha transformation.

[dialNforNinja]

I have that little biplane guy - being a bipe was cool enough to overcome the Bayformer-gobots aesthetic of the robot mode like with the corvette "Sideswipe" and orange FSW Terradive, though I think those are the only three movieverse style TFs I own... no, there was the movie 1 tow truck, but that was in the house that burned down. Thank the Matrix for the TF Classics and Universe line, or there wouldn't have been any I wanted up until the War for Cybertron and Prime toys came out. I dearly wish I could

get the forthcoming Yamato VF-4, but it's about an order of magnitude outside my budget.

[dialNforNinja]

Hey, good news! It looks like the computer with the vp38 model on it is going to get rezzed soon!

Bad news: I'n not going to be doing a Skull-1style skin for either one, or anything Macross related.

Good news: that's because I'm making an original alt-WWII mecha game of my own, currently titled Astro Cross: Flashback 1942! The design document is underway, as are visual designs for enemy mecha, though the German VV-2 Kreigerakete is familiar too-

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/828/plumbatahead.jpg

[dialNforNinja]

RE variable Bf-109:Sadly, no. The Fw-190 is possible but would look kinda goofy (as would any tractor prop single engine plane - you either have propchest or it becomes a big humpback taller than the head) but the Ho-229 might happen, and the Me-262 is as much of a lock as anything can be without doing the model. It likely won't show up until the very end, though, the jet powered Shinden variant and captured alien mecha (risking freindly fire, and hard to maintain) being the faster options up until then.

[dialNforNinja]

See new video in first post!

The final model is a kinda hefty 2500 polys, but the P-38 is a curvy beauty and it would be a crime to not do her justice. It'll only be seen when close up anyway, simpler, blockier versions will suffice when the size of the unit on the screen is less, and I've planned all along for agressive LOD handling to accomodate large numbers of units active at once.

[paramat]

That's excellent.

[dialNforNinja]

Thanks! I've decided on a slight modification of my original idea for nose art scheme for the "default skin" when I get around to texturing it - the left side ahead of the cockpit (rear armor cover in B) will have "TWO DEVILS" in block text then "one pilot" in smaller script, and the outsides of the engine cowls will be redheaded Luci on one side and black haired Lili on the other, both with little horns and a spade tail, hearkening to both the German and Japanese pilot's nicknames for the craft ("Fork-tailed Devil" and "Two planes one pilot" respectively.) Right now I'm just trying to get the damn Shinden off the machine I was borrowing sometimes, since it was made in Blender 2.63, which I hate because of the n-gons, and the same rewrite that implemented them means it stores the faces in a way that earlier versions don't understand. Sure, it's "only" about 2500 polygons, but I still don't want to hang every one back on the wireframe manually, not to mention all the hassle spent getting that starfield skin to line up as my first time project in UV mapping. If the sky is particularly blue today, you know I'm doing my part to help...

[dialNforNinja]

A few stills of the unit, with option parts and a few tweaks

Just these crappy trim bits add 12,000 polygons - mostly in the font. There'll be simple decal geometry to add a transparent .png onto for the game version, but it suffices for the render.

Note that the last is of a Block 1 unit, with a single-shot brow laser and lacking the ear guns entirely due to difficulty producing the energy weapons it was designed for, and the gunpods which they were delivered with to make up for the lack. Each has a 20mm autocannon and two .50 cal machineguns (as in the OTL P-38) with 150 and 500 rounds each respectively, but each one also holds three of each caliber ammo bins (the .50s are combined into a single unit with two spools that feed into opposite sides) with only the ones closest to the grip actually being used at any one time, as the unit has hands and can switch them like a soldier with rifle clips and the gunpods have to occupy a hardpoint anyway, it was thought that the weapon might as well make use of the full carrying capacity. When occupying the inboard, "armpit" hardpoint, the guns are within the plane of the propeller, therefore they are equipped with an electro-optical interrupter system to prevent shooting off the plane's own propellers. When handheld or one the outboard hardpoints they enjoy their full rate of fire, a truly terrifying concept if all six are filled and fire-linked for a ground attack mission. The pilot's telekinesis is responsible for moving them to and from the hands when transforming.

[dialNforNinja]

One more: How the decorations end up in B mode

[MechTech]

Nice work! I love the smooth animations into the various modes. - MT