My Blender Render! (Kororra Class)

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Graham Kennedy
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Re: My Blender Render! (Kororra Class)

Post by Graham Kennedy »

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And a go at panelling the Kororra class.
Give a man a fire, and you keep him warm for a day. SET a man on fire, and you will keep him warm for the rest of his life...
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Re: My Blender Render! (Kororra Class)

Post by Graham Kennedy »

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And a closer view.

Panelling is interesting. First I had to draw a large image of the black panel lines in photoshop - 2500x2500 pixels. By hand. Then you colour the panels grey, apply a noise filter to give them some speckle effect.

You set a material in blender, but instead of saying "Make it this colour", you say "Use this image as if it were a colour". Then you have to select all the faces on the hull and say "Unwrap these". Which opens up the shape and lays it flat over the image. That maps the image onto the faces.

Problem is, doing that distorts the image. It's the same problem map makers have faced forever, in mapping a spherical Earth onto a flat map - the only way to do it is to distort the shapes of everything. But that messes up the shape of your panels, which is annoying as hell. Especially when you have a complex shape with a combination of big flat faces, small flat faces, curved faces, etc.

Fortunately there is a "smart unwrap" option, which does a pretty fair job of minimising the distortions. And you can reduce them further by breaking the hull into smaller sections. It's still far from perfect, but I think it's come out pretty decent. Certainly a huge improvement on the flat featureless solid colours of previous versions.
Give a man a fire, and you keep him warm for a day. SET a man on fire, and you will keep him warm for the rest of his life...
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Re: My Blender Render! (Kororra Class)

Post by Graham Kennedy »

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The nebula is the Veil Nebula, a real photo taken through the Hubble Space Telescope. It's about 1,470 light years from Earth, which would be a 12 day trip for a Kororra class at their maximum cruise speed of 45,000 x c (45 kc, as they write it). Since the Kororras have a 24 day endurance at that speed, one could cruise there and back on a single tank of gas.
Give a man a fire, and you keep him warm for a day. SET a man on fire, and you will keep him warm for the rest of his life...
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