3D modeling thread #2 - re-render

[robkelk]

(blows dust off thread)

Just discovered that Renderosity's holding an actually-useful sale - if an item was on somebody's wishlist before the sale started earlier this week, then it's 50% off for everybody. Sale ends tonight.

So, yeah - five outfits for V4 by mamota, who usually doesn't take part in sales, are now off my wishlist and in my purchase history, and soon to be in my runtime.

[robkelk]

I've mentioned this a few times: The freebie wiki needs images.

Time to start making the "request for images" a fun thing – turn it into a party, with a gift.

I'm giving a $25 gift certificate from a 3D content store to ... somebody ... on August 1. If you want your name to be on the list that I'll pick one name from at random, join in on the image creation party.

See here for details.

(You need to be a confirmed user to upload an image to the wiki. As usual, create your account and let me know what the account name is by email or a note on my user talk page on the wiki, and I'll confirm your account.)

For legal reasons, this is not a contest. I am giving a gift to somebody at random.

Please spread the word!

EDIT: I mentioned this over on Fantasies Attic, and it's taking off. I think I've mentioned it in enough locations now.

[ECSNorway]

https://www.shapeways.com/shops/hyborea?...Museum&s=0

I have gone ahead and made the models from Masao Okazaki's Starfleet Museum available in my Shapeways store. Six ships - Okazaki-san's Amarillo, Krechet, Pioneer, Bison, and Olympus Mons; plus my own derivative Ashigara - available in each of four different scales suitable for gaming.

[robkelk]

I've mentioned this a few times: The freebie wiki needs images.

Time to start making the "request for images" a fun thing – turn it into a party, with a gift.

I'm giving a $25 gift certificate from a 3D content store to ... somebody ... on August 1. If you want your name to be on the list that I'll pick one name from at random, join in on the image creation party.

See here for details.

(You need to be a confirmed user to upload an image to the wiki. As usual, create your account and let me know what the account name is by email or a note on my user talk page on the wiki, and I'll confirm your account.)

For legal reasons, this is not a contest. I am giving a gift to somebody at random.

Please spread the word!

EDIT: I mentioned this over on Fantasies Attic, and it's taking off. I think I've mentioned it in enough locations now.

I knew this was a good idea - the wiki's received as many images in the last week as it usually gets in a month. I wish I could afford to do this every month.

Oh, and because of that "no uploads" period we had earlier this month, I've pushed the ending date back three days.

[robkelk]

I've mentioned this a few times: The freebie wiki needs images.

Time to start making the "request for images" a fun thing – turn it into a party, with a gift.

I'm giving a $25 gift certificate from a 3D content store to ... somebody ... on August 1. If you want your name to be on the list that I'll pick one name from at random, join in on the image creation party.

See here for details.

(You need to be a confirmed user to upload an image to the wiki. As usual, create your account and let me know what the account name is by email or a note on my user talk page on the wiki, and I'll confirm your account.)

For legal reasons, this is not a contest. I am giving a gift to somebody at random.

Please spread the word!

EDIT: I mentioned this over on Fantasies Attic, and it's taking off. I think I've mentioned it in enough locations now.

I knew this was a good idea - the wiki's received as many images in the last week as it usually gets in a month. I wish I could afford to do this every month.

Oh, and because of that "no uploads" period we had earlier this month, I've pushed the ending date back three days.

And it's done, and the freebie wiki received 52 image uploads. (Not the largest number in a month, but close; and we usually get in the neighbourhood of 20.) I've asked for an email from the person whose upload matched the number that random.org gave me.

I'll have to do this again... but not this month.

[robkelk]

PoserDirect and Sparkyworld are shutting down this weekend.

Get what you can, while you can. I just bought the "everything in the store" bundle, and have received the list of 228 individual download links... which doesn't include the tutorials or the freebies.

Sparkyworld freebies - page 1
PoserDirect freebies, and the page banner is now a link to the get-them-all sale.

[robkelk]

PoserDirect and Sparkyworld are shutting down this weekend.

Get what you can, while you can. I just bought the "everything in the store" bundle, and have received the list of 228 individual download links... which doesn't include the tutorials or the freebies.

Sparkyworld freebies - page 1
PoserDirect freebies, and the page banner is now a link to the get-them-all sale.

I spent more of this weekend than I would have preferred making sure all of the Sparkyworld and PoserDirect freebies are in the Wayback Machine... so even if you missed getting something on the "free" list, you should be able to get a copy from archive.org. The paid stuff... you'll have to wait until they're listed on other stores.

[robkelk]

(blows dust off thread)

It's June of an odd-numbered year... which usually means a new version of Victoria is coming. For now, the base figures for Victoria 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 are free. Probably just this weekend.

[ECSNorway]

Anyone remember Masao Okazaki's "Starfleet Museum" website?

With his permission, I've made digital models of a number of ships he designed there and have made them available for sale via Shapeways: https://www.shapeways.com/shops/hyborea?...Museum&s=0

[robkelk]

"Hey, Vegeta, how many freebie wiki pages need images?"

"Over Nine Thousand!"

"Better ask for help, then."

Anybody want to make some images for the freebie wiki? As of this posting, 9,247 pages have no renders on them. And I'm in the process of making more pages, so I don't have time to make images as well... The wiki doesn't need anything fancy, just "clip art" style renders. (Of course, if you want to do fancy renders that show off the freebies, feel free!)

Uploading to the freebie wiki required a wiki account - no anonymous uploads allowed.

[robkelk]

Daz Studio 4.11 is out! New in this release: DS finally supports stranded hair.

Lots of store deals, lots of deep-discounts on Daz Originals. (And the Platinum Club discounts and coupons stack with the sale prices. As I type this, I have an order in progress for seven items - list price $73.69, my price $0.25.)

And gift cards are 11% off (or 22% off for a gift card of $300 or more) - but you can only buy one card at the discount.

[robkelk]

(gets out thread-dust off-blower)

Anybody want a chance at a $50 Daz gift certificate? The freebie wiki needs images.

[robkelk]

(gets out thread-dust off-blower)

Anybody want a chance at a $50 Daz gift certificate? The freebie wiki needs images.

And a $25 GC at the recipient's choice of 3D-art-content vendors has been donated as a second gift-for-a-random-draw.

This has been going for a day and a half, and we already have almost as many images as we got the entire month of last year's party. I guess more gifts equals more interest...

[robkelk]

Half a week (one-twelfth of the way through) and there's 50 entries. That's a lot of enthusiasm... so I've tossed another $25 GC into the pot, for three draws out of the hat instead of two.

If anybody wants to render something for the freebie wiki, now's the perfect time.

[classicdrogn]

Hop it's alright if I post this here, Rob? It's just more of my noodling about in Blender, but after a bit more work on them the models themselves might go on Trekmeshes.ch if there's any interest.

Anyway, while playing around with my collection of interesting-looking parts that didn't get used in the model I was making at the time, I slapped together a starship just for giggles. But it looked SOOO slick! So I made a few more parts specifically for the purpose.... then rearranged them into some other hull styles... and then made them silver and gold instead of white and black, because they couldn't be more Art Deco if Jean Després had designed them himself.


(non-embedded)

Note, that part where the ship flies down for a close up and spins around to fly back out of the top of the screen? It looks horrible and makes people dizzy. Never do that. The correct shot would be to have all the ships fly in at the top of the screen and off camera in the same direction, then cut to another angle to have them fly in from the side and out the other, and only then, still going on a diagonal that follows the same horizontal direction as the previous two shots, in from below and out the top to show the aft aspect.

But this has already been rendered so we're all stuck with it as it is. After I make the other four or five configurations I thought about adding while sitting and watching Blender work, I'll do that with the next one.

I am in fact intending to give these texture maps (diffuse, specular, bump and glow) for windows and a hull plate Aztec pattern, probably redo the secondary hull for the Fakecelsior and Fakurry, flipped/quad nacelles for the Fakeranda and Fakira, and already have the saucer cut into segments (as well as two, three, and four slice segments without dividing lines citing across them) and a few special segments with a pyramid complex that could be weird tech gadgets or VIP resort accommodations, a bunch of cylinders that could be material storage or on a bigger ship residential towers, and a couple of comes that could be liquid tanks or, again, extra habitable space, with bay doors on the pyramids and cylinder segments. There's two thicker saucers as well, one that has a flat underside and another that's just a slab-sided disk except for a couple of bevels at the rim, and while not done yet I have plans for doing some (working) cargo/bay doors, segments with TOS and TNG phasers, one for an xtra-smol single-deck version (too small for proper spelling!) with a single-segment that detaches directly as a shuttlecraft, possibly something that transforms in an unnecessarily elaborate fashion into an attack ship ala the Prometheus' MVAM only even more cool and impractical, and (I'm really attached to this one) a three-segment XL section that splits and opens up into a mobile drydock like the spider-arms one in TNG

Oh, yeah, and multiple sizes for at least Fakeranda and Fakira, because the debates over the actual size of the Akira were just so much fun.

And some better class names, even if it's just drawing a thin veil over it, like Excellent, Courageous, Reliable, and, uh, I dunno, Tetsuo? Kaneda? Canada? Axolotl? Accolade! Yes, silver saucer sister #4 is now Accolade class. 'Cause she's an elegant acco-lady and you'd better remember it if you don't want to be the filling in a photon torpedo sandwich. Also the only one with a removable segment directly aft instead of that being where the bridge/hub connects to the drive section.

Whether all that happens though, or at least before I run out of enthusiasm for a while and go back to mostly reading fanfiction like I usually do, is somewhat in question. In the interests of maintaining the necessary amount of excitement, would anyone actually be interested in some of these if they were available?

They're a little low-poly for more than filling out fleet scenes or in the background for a space station at the moment though only the tips of the nacelles really noticeably have sharp points (all four of the ships together are under 50k triangles!) but that much is easy to fix, and like I said the overall shapes are really sleek and (at least I think) beautiful. Of course, being able to throw a whole fleet on the screen and not take hours to render per frame has benefits of its own. I honestly have no idea how people like Mark Kingsnorth make those super-detailed models, this is me intentionally using lots of geometry... but then, my habits were formed working on a Mac Plus with a whopping MEGABYTE of RAM and a huge, 20mb hard drive, adding and moving one vertex at a time, and if you got up to a thousand triangles that was pretty big, you know? :lol:

[robkelk]

Hop it's alright if I post this here, Rob? It's just more of my noodling about in Blender, but after a bit more work on them the models themselves might go on Trekmeshes.ch if there's any interest.

No problem as far as I'm concerned.

Whether all that happens though, or at least before I run out of enthusiasm for a while and go back to mostly reading fanfiction like I usually do,  is somewhat in question. In the interests of maintaining the necessary amount of excitement, would anyone actually be interested in some of these if they were available?

For use in Daz Studio? Yes, I think I could use an OBJ or Poser-native format version of any of these.

[robkelk]

Half a week (one-twelfth of the way through) and there's 50 entries. That's a lot of enthusiasm... so I've tossed another $25 GC into the pot, for three draws out of the hat instead of two.

If anybody wants to render something for the freebie wiki, now's the perfect time.

One week, and 128 entries so far. If this momentum continues, the freebie wiki will get approximately one-tenth of the images it needs right now - which I will consider to be a resounding success.

[classicdrogn]

I don't know about Poser, but I should be able to do OBJ pretty easily. And include a preview image for each item for that matter. I've definitely got some more model tweaking to do even before making textures though - the Accolade tail pylons are still lazy-mode and the hull for each shape has quite a bit of things-inside-other-things going on still that wastes texture real estate and polycount, and also the bays and doors for them I mentioned.We'll see how it goes.

[ECSNorway]

One thing I've never gotten into is texturing and animation. My preferred modelling tool -- Sketchup -- doesn't really lend itself well to either, unfortunately, and I'm loathe to dig into the hell that is Blender or lay out money for commercial software.

I -think- I have a Hexagon license, along with Daz Studio, but I have no idea what I'm doing with either of those, so.

[robkelk]

You can get a free Hexagon license from Daz3D... if you really want one. It hasn't been updated in years.

[classicdrogn]

"hasn't been updated in years" also applies (as well as being 'doze only) but trueSpace was (officially) released for free download before the end, and is at least reputed to be an easier learning curve than Blender. I did try Daz a while back but was already beginning to approach being comfortable in Blender so I didn't find enough positive differences to go on with it. With MakeHuman now serving to give Blender dress-up dolls relatively easily I'm not really even tempted by Daz's (mostly for-pay as I understand it) human models, though I will note that the large library of clothing options for them already made does cross my mind form time to time, if usually as justification for why I didn't really want to include stinky monkeys in my images anyway and go back to spaceships, aircraft, and robots

[robkelk]

I'd be very interested in having some pages on the freebie wiki discussing how to use all that stuff in Blender, trueSpace, or other programs.

The wiki needs more "how to" articles to go along with the indexes.

[classicdrogn]

When I actually have occasion to try to import other people's models (mostly recently, of Trekmeshes) I've had a lot of trouble with the model parts appearing randomly translated and rotated, and while that much is fixed by finding all of the bits and returning them to 0,0,0 about three or four times out of five the texture maps will also be stripped off and give no hint of how to restore them. My guess is that it's an issue with 'doze versus *nix file path characters, but they don't seem to even have the slot where a map should be in the shader system, so I'm baffled.

If you meant MakeHuman, I've barely fiddled with it myself, but the one time I did have it export a model and brought it into Blender it just worked, rig and all. I'm still a bit groggy from waking up at the moment, but I can try documenting that much at least later on, I guess? Try anyway. Let me just see if I know how to take a screen grab...

...yes, but not with a menu open, so it's not nearly as useful. I'll come back to this when my brain has re0ascended the evolutionary ladder at least as far as multicellular organisms, right now all it wants me to do is engulf some food and wiggle away from lights or loud noises.

[classicdrogn]

Hm. MakeHuman appears to be aiming to misbehave. I'll try purging and reinstalling it, but if that doesn't fix whatever the problem is I have little chance of solving it. All I know is it was hassle-free when I tried five or ten years and maybe three computers ago.

[classicdrogn]

Progress(?)

I lost a couple days to watching TNG and DS9 episodes (ahem) "for reference material."

* not-ugly secondary hulls and thicker necks for Excelsior-likes, also shorter necks for down-celsior (Incorrigible?) and quad-celsior (Proactive?)
* fourth hull plan, even smaller Nacelles-down could be Rapid, but dunno for the other two
* improved nacelle shapes all around
* flipped and doubled nacelles for more variations
* modified Akira-likes' rollbars so the aft center saucer wedge can actually be removed without smacking into them
* NOT making any more ships until the existing parts are textured
* proper Starfleet white and black, no matter how cool the chrome and gold looked
* napkin sketches for all the saucer wedges & only two complicated ones left, the rest are shuttle/cargo bays and their doors
* learned to use new stuff in Blender
* actually feeling tired, maybe I'll beat the insomnia for once?

Didn't get back to MakeHuman, sorry. Mechanical designs are more my thing so it keeps slipping my mind.

edit: Names, front to back/left to right:
Reliable Rapid Keen
Incorrigible Proactive Excellent
Accolade Courageous Endurance
Accuracy Clairvoyant Intuition