Deus on fire blog - Sp3ctre_1053

Hi all to modders and modelers, sci-fi fans and especially Homeworld fans!!

I've started the Ignus Dei taiidan ship project alone, wich consists in making this ship playable in Homeworld2, and wich requires the entire works of: designing missing parts, modeling, uv mapping, texturing, hardpoints setting, lod-ing, minor improvements and ship file defining.
Yes it is a single ship.
It takes a lot of work.
I will post here my progress, think it's funny or at least interesting for people, (either specialized personnel or curious ones) to watch how complex is creating a ship.
HW2 has dozens of ships complex like this.
Comments and critics are highly appreciated.

First steps:
Grabbed the only ship drawings as a reference, plus a lot of other Taiidan style ships on the web, Deviantart, shipyards.relicnews etc. Thanks especially to Talros.
Here is the orignial sketch.

My conviction is to leave the ship as it was drawn. But then I realized that the two large engines were too off from the design and functionality of the ship. So I've finally decided to replace them with different ones, but keeping the same style.
I made some drawings, right on the previous drawing too, erasing the old engines. I won't show it because they are very bad drawings...
A lot of shapes were added or modified during modeling. this is a bad thing, but it's a consequence of my constant lack of initial definition of the details.
What this ship will feature is:
-two 3-barreled turrets, kinetic
-a frontal missile rack
-three or four smal fast tracking turrets
- a defensive shield (?). If present, the subsystem will be placed in the nose or in the upper bridge
-an hangar for fighters and corvettes, if dock path definings turns out not too difficult for me. It will be placed in the tail, where usual ships have their engine.
The two engines will look in the game as a single subsystem, if you want to destroy it just shoot at one of them. This has sense since the ship can't proceed with a single engine..

Modeling:
This is were I'm good at. I use Lightwave, it fits in the pipeline once the ship geometry is exported as obj into the required .ma format for exporting into the game.
It will lose all info about layers and surfaces, but not about 'part' definition, and uv mapping. Once imported the .obj in maya, in a moment i will be able to assign the different bones to the propers meshes (bones are the invisible vectors wich can be linked and nested together to make the mesh hierarchy).
This is the work after some days:

I tried also to mix the image of the new engine over the rendering of and old model of this ship that i already started two years ago but then abandoned and lost:

The side radiator wil be modified to better fit the hull once constructed.
I started also a bit of UV MAPPING
because knew it is an hard task. After a lot of effort and tries, found an useful way to do it in Lightwave, wich allows you to define the projections and once done, you can re-build all uv maps for future revisons in a single click.
This is how looks my first-attempt uv map for this engine part:

More days spent, and this shows how a cool herring pattern fits on the main shapes with little or no distortions:

Added in these days more detals and the so called goblins:

Goblins are those details that will show only in the nearest fields of view, and necessitate to be mapped by a plugin wich defines its uv maps, it has to be done once the ship's geometry is done. So they will remain grey and untextured until the end, and will possibly fail to map and necessitate to be modified :).
In truth, they need to be mapped BEFORE texturing because texture details are based on them,too. Details on the textures like panels, vents, lights... are not randomly placed but have relations with them. So i need to have them on the uv map template to draw things on it with a criteria.

Lastly, here is the turret. The shape is almost definitive, again my thanks go to Talros for the inspiration

See you here for the next updates!

Leave comments!