[simpits-chat] Mmmm, sexy....

[Brian Sikkema]

 > Actually it looks pretty good.
Thanks. I'll be a lot better when it's done.


> Question: why are you doing the inside
> skeleton? Isn't that going to be covered up?
Answer: I'm not. It's rather hard to explain how I'm going about it, but
I'll try. I guess for starters take a look at the picture here:
http://www.ninfinger.org/~sven/models/mercury/ma10_21.html
See how it has a lot of ridged shingles, with flat "rails" in between? The
model you see so far is of all those flat spots. You see, to save myself
boatloads of time texturing, I did this: rather than making one big cone
shape, and then having to texture it with a rectangular texture (which takes
a while to get right, as the distortion is pretty bad), I'm modelling a
whole bunch of little parts, and using a whole bunch of little textures.
Soon I will have all of those holes in the model filled up, and that is
where the shingle textures go. Everything you see so far will have various
metal and screw textures. Doing it this way I only have to make one 32x64
(and that's being generous) texture of a "ridge" in the shingle, and then
repeat it several times over the peices where it needs to be. This is also a
big help because a lot of the shingles are different sizes, and therefore
need a different amount of ridges. This way I just apply the texture to all
of them, and set the tile count to however many ridges that particular
shingle has. And it also saves a lot on texture memory - my main texture map
from my last model was a 512x256 bohemoth. The tradeoff is this is probably
going to end up being a lot larger polycount than my last model. But I think
I can save some poly's in my antenna housing and escape tower meshes, those
were a bit over the top in my last version.

Now, depending on how things go, I might actually model some of the interior
of the capsule as well, and make the window transparent. That would be quite
cool, if I can do it without really bulking up the file size too bad. We
shall see, I guess. Anyway, like I said, that model is nothing compared to
where it will end up. But I think with a little work I can make it better
than my old one. We'll see.

Brian