This picture above was my old Ikazuchi Mesh that I did in Milkshape before I had any clue of what I was doing in that program. All the glows are in-game affects from the old Star Fleet Command 3 Game engine. Notice that tiny ship in the back ground, that is a to scale Garfish in game with it. Mean while, at the same time this was going on I was a play Tester for an Indy game called "Star Shatter". To this day it is a hell of a game engine and I quickly learned how to import some of my models into it.
This game engine was a blast just to fly around in, let alone shooting Invid Scouts and just flying around the big ships. I had huge hopes for Robotech Mod but the importing tool often caused more head aches than it was worth. Some faces of the model would just not show up and it had a limitation to the numbers of polys. Anyways, It would have been an awesome Mod if the right tools were in place. The picture above is an Ikazuchi trying to fight its way out of a hornets nest of Invid Scouts. I was piloting the Alpha when I noticed the ship was about to blow. All of the Turrets actually worked and would track a target which is why you have three of them firing up wards. With all of the Physics in this game, it was just simply a blast and I had a very hard time letting this mod go.
So at about the time I am about to give up. I find a group of fans that are wanting to do a Robotech MMO. I thought, this sounds interesting so I checked it out. The level of commitment to do this was there, we had a bare bone staff of artists, programmers, modelers and etc... This was by far the biggest group of people I worked with and they all brought the passion to create something that the fan's wanted to see. Everyone was easy to get along with that in it self is hard to find. Now since I just started playing with my new modeling program, Wings 3D. I quickly learned how under powered Milkshape was. What would take me a good hour to do in Milkshape, I was now doing it in half the time. Shadow Chronicles was just about to be released and I couldn't wait to see what the new ship designs would look like because they where using 3D animation. I saw the looks of the new Ikazuchi and I looked at my old model. I looked over the new look and looked back at my old work. I loved the very clean and crisp lines the ship now has, still while retaining it's classic look. Then I looked at my old Model again and realized how bad it now looked to me. This is the problem with what I do. Since I was not trained by any one to do 3D modeling. I learned by just playing around and trying things out to attempt to get the desired look I was wanting. So as I built more and more meshes I was improving. Then you add into account a more powerful 3D program like Wings3D and your model quality just improves quickly over night. By the end of the weekend when the Shadow Chronicles was released I had the bulk of the new REF Fleet done. The 1st of these ships was a the Ikazuchi.
This was not designed to be a high poly model since it was to be used in a game engine. We needed computers to be able to handle several of these on a screen with a bunch of fighters to boot.
No comments:
Post a Comment