My Blender Render! (Kororra Class)

[Teaos]

What would be cool is if you took a screen shot from the same point of view every step so you could flick through them and see the design grow and progress, would make a cool gif or youtube clip.

[Teaos]

What would be cool is if you took a screen shot from the same point of view every step so you could flick through them and see the design grow and progress, would make a cool gif or youtube clip.

[Graham Kennedy]

Too late now!

What I am finding really hard is matching up all the pieces. Like all that terraced lower hull detail, it's all a bunch of different cubes put next to one another. But it's incredibly hard to match up the pieces exactly... it looks okay on the render, mostly, but if you zoom in close a lot of edges and corners are just a little off. Like the little seam you can see on the bottom of the ship. Half of me says as long as it looks good it's fine, and this is really just an experiment after all. But dammit, it offends my eye for detail! The photoshop pic I have of this thing has it more than 15,000 pixels long, and it's pixel-perfect accurate at every point - getting it that perfect is part of the point of the exercise for me, it's a way to exercise my brain on a massively detail-oriented task.

Anyway, for now I'm pressing on with this whilst researching better ways of doing it for the future. But geez, reading tutorials and wikis is no way to learn something. I need somebody who knows this stuff next to me so I can ask questions!

Right now I'm cutting out the corners of the terraces, which is proving to be very hard and fiddly to get right. Maybe I should have started on something simpler after all!

[Graham Kennedy]

Corner cuts done, and also added the sublight propulsors at the rear. Those actually proved quite easy to do, just a bunch of modified cylinders. I would like to make the glow effect yellow in the middle fading to red around the edges, but I can't find a way to do it as yet.



ETA : Just noticed that the lower propulsor housing pokes out over the back now. Funnily, I had trouble getting that to fit when I drew this in photoshop. Will be ab easy fix though.

[Graham Kennedy]

Added most of the rifters. I love how they came out! Working on the nose complex next... housing might be a bit fiddly.

[Graham Kennedy]

Nose complex turned out to be easier than expected... only took an hour.

[Graham Kennedy]

Thought I'd put the AMP cannon on and see how it looked in place. Amusingly, the model of the turret turned out to be significantly bigger than the entire ship! But like I said, scaling seems to be very easy so it was no problem zooming it down and planting a bunch on the hull. They look quite badass, though I do say so myself...

I've mentioned the rifters a few times, but not what they are. FTL in this universe works kind of like B5's hyperspace, where you have to open a "rift" to go in and out of "midspace" (so called because it's not another universe so much as it is the space in-between universes). A "rifter" opens up such a rift. The very large rifter in the nose opens the rift the ship uses to go through into midspace itself. If you want to be able to shoot from midspace into normal space or vice versa, then your gun also needs a rifter to make small rifts for the beam to go through.

Smaller weapons have their own rifter on mount - that's what the small red glows are on the cannon in these pics. But beyond a certain size the rifter is considered too big to put on the turret, so they are mounted separately on the ship. One downside of this is that rifters have a limited oxx-axis capability, no more than about 50 degrees or so. Which means to give your cannon all around capability, you need multiple rifters pointing in different directions. On the Kororra, there are 21 main AMP cannon - and so there are 21 rifters on each side, six aft, and fifteen forward. A cheaper/simple design might have fewer rifters, but would then need the cannon to take turns using them.

The real world inspiration for all that was the use of searchlights to light a target for cannon to fire at them, and more recently the need for radar illuminators to allow a surface to air missile to home in on a target. I wanted to give the ships these kinds of practical limitations and complexity as a way to avoid the "just stick guns on ever square meter of hull" philosophy.

[Graham Kennedy]

Ventral Mk 2 AMP cannon. Purely coincidentally, the "Mark" number of a cannon equates to the calibre of a present day naval gun in inches. So a Mark 2 is equivalent to a 2-inch gun. Frigates and destroyers mount Mark 5-6, cruisers Mark 8-12, Battleships up to Mark 21. Yeah, the high end have gone further than the 18 inchers that the Yamato carried. I figure if battleships had retained their supremacy we'd quite possible be building 20+ inch cannon by now.



Incidentally, the mesh for the entire ship was only about 600 kB. Adding in all these Mk 2's has taken it to 9.9 MB. The finished product is probably gonna be huge... but the photoshop pic of this ship is 276 MB already. But then that has a great deal of internal detail on it, too.

Incidentally you can see one of those errors I was talking about before in this shot - that sloped surface is supposed to be one seamless flat plane, but as you can see a chunk of hull is poking out a bit. It's surprisingly difficult to match these things up, as blender doesn't seem to be able to snap points on one object to points/edges on another.

[Captain Seafort]

I figure if battleships had retained their supremacy we'd quite possible be building 20+ inch cannon by now.

If it hadn't been for Washington we'd probably have had them by the late thirties, given that most navies were looking to build 18"-armed ships in the early twenties, the Admiralty had to tell Hadfield to shut up about 20 and 21 APC shells, and the Japanese built a couple of test guns for the A-150 Super Yamatos in the early forties.

[Graham Kennedy]

Knocked up a Mark 6 turret for the secondaries. I came up with a much better way of handling the sloped side this time. Not sure if it would work for something as complex as the big ship though.

[Teaos]

I am shocked at how fast this has come together, I though I'd see this come together over 3 months. In one night you have added so much detail it looks like weeks of render.

I love the eye for detail and that each piece is actually in a position for a reason.

[Graham Kennedy]

Mark 6 in place on the dorsal hull...



Need to lighten these turrets, I think. Not sure if I can do that easily, though. Might mean modifying the original model and then re-importing them all over again...

[Graham Kennedy]

An element of the power system - essentially a safety device, if bad things happen underneath and there's an explosion, it blasts out through these caps. There's two on the top and a matching pair on the bottom of the hull. The basic shape was easy - more cylinders, and the domes are a hemisphere squished on the Z axis. But it was a pain in the ass to cut all those holes in them! Cutting holes through a shape isn't hard but it's kind of long winded, which gets old when you have to do it over and over. I worked out a short cut after the first couple, but it still took a while. Once the holes were done I stuck a cylinder hidden underneath and made it glow violet. Once again, I wish I could shade from the center outwards. Must learn how to do that!

[Graham Kennedy]

So as an experiment I thought I'd try doubling the hull over and see how it looks completed. As you can see, it's a less than perfect union between the two halves - you either get gaps or bits overlapping that shouldn't. That's a side effect of one of the annoying things about blender, there just doesn't seem to be a way to snap points to specific coordinates properly. There are a couple of workarounds I have in mind, but it might come down to going through doing many fiddly bits in the end. This is just a rough and ready attempt, I will go back to the half-hull to keep working on it.

Anyway, that aside I think this is looking pretty awesome!

[Teaos]

The one thing I'll say now is certain parts look very busy and others not at all. Might having the guns spread out a little more add better survive ability. Now a few good shots could take out a good portion of your weapons.