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Been busy lately, so not much time for blender fun. But I've been working on this and it's finally ready. One or two little flaws in the model, but it's come out quite nicely. This is a Hatchet class heavy cruiser, another contemporary of the Kororra class.

So after learning some stuff about smoothing surfaces for the fighters, I've been going back and smoothing out some of the more obviously faceted surfaces on the warships. The down side of this kind of thing is that it increases the number of facets on the model, which increases rendering time. The changes here aren't too bad in that respect, about a 10% increase in the number of faces. This model has 1.77 million points making 1.03 million faces. Rendering a single frame takes about eight minutes on my ye olde iMac (2009 vintage 2 core intel 2.93 GHz).

Before smoothing :



After :



Before smoothing :



After :



Before smoothing :



After :

Wow. Totes worth it. BTW, love the shadows of the gun barrels... nice touch.

Heh, thanks but there's not much credit to me on the shadow front really. I light all the ships by sticking a bunch of big flat glowing panels around them, and the shadows fall where they will - blender just fills them in when you render the pic.

Second animation attempt. This was somewhat fiddly - the hard part was making the beams appear and disappear. Took 2 or 3 hours of messing about getting it to work, and then about three hours to render.

So the turret barrels fire in sets of two? Are they separated too? Kinda like three sets of twin turrets merged together?

McAvoy wrote:So the turret barrels fire in sets of two? Are they separated too? Kinda like three sets of twin turrets merged together?

They are AMP weapons - Antimatter/Matter Particle weapons. A single weapon comprises two cannon, one firing a matter beam and one an antimatter beam, with the beams set to converge on the target. Thus each turret has three cannon, with each cannon having two barrels.

I'm currently rendering an updated version of this scene... should be ready by tomorrow.

What happens if the antimatter beam comes into contact with very small amounts of matter like dust?

Then the very small amounts of matter would go POP, just like any other matter that was hit by antimatter.

Those pops would be nuclear level explosions though.

McAvoy wrote:Those pops would be nuclear level explosions though.

Not at the densities of interstellar space they wouldn't - we're talking about micrograms, if that, so it would be no bigger than a normal artillery round.

Improved video :

Now with added ship movement and a torpedo salvo.

Graham Kennedy wrote:Now with added ship movement and a torpedo salvo.

Very cool but the scanner on the bottom isn't moving

Um, it's down for maintanence.

The problem with doing this is that every time you think "well I'll change that slightly", it's another six or seven hours of rendering to try again. I need a supercomputer, dammit!