Stardestroyer finishing.

Starfield texture for a skybox, used in my demo for my Star Destroyer.

 The three texture maps used for the side of the model, Diffuse, illumination and normals

World Building final-ish stretch

Very close to the end now, all that is left model wise is the rear engines, added the bank of turrets on either side, which have barrels that can rotate up and down. Poly count and model topology are frankly a mess. It got to a point a while back I probably should've spend the time and sorted out the topology, but instead I chose to work into it further and I'm not sure if it's in a suitably usable state. The model is about 8k polygons on the last count. This is comfortably within the 2-30k limit imposed, however I'm not sure it's the most efficient usage.

Worldbuilding Modelling Part Five(?)

Home stretch now in terms of modelling. All that I have left is some minor additions to the underside, the engines at the rear and some additional 'lips' on the upper portion.

Then I move onto texturing and UV unwraps.

Joy.

Worldbuilding Detailing #1

Work on adding in some details to the underside, namely a hilariously oversizes grabbing claw (That's actually there, I'm not making this up), Pipes and pillars to the inside of the bay and outer crenelations.

Actual visual proof that THE CLAW is a legitimate feature of the work.

Normal Mapping

After returning to Maya to reattempt to bake a texture map, I produced this. It's from a roundabout workflow including baking a height map in Xnormal and producing the normal map from that. It's not the best way to go about it but until I can get a refresher in making a normal map in Xnormal without the potentially useless middle step of making the height map.

Star Destroyer Texturing test

 After a terrible experience attempting to bake textures using both Xnormal and Maya's transfer Maps function, I roughed out some admittedly terrible placeholder textures. This is also in tandem with an automatic UV unwrap, in order to gauge the model's complexity better.

Modelling Update

Quick update on the work I've done today. Some minor cleaning up of the topology, attaching the top and bottom sides together, and adding in the basic details of the underside along with some placeholder turrets. These will need to be amended after merging them into one object killed the heirarchy that had been set up. Next up is to work on the rear of the ship.

Worldbuilding Developmental Sketches

Side profile sketch of Star Destroyer, used to initially map out where separate textures will go.

Detailed bridge study, with intent of using as a texture reference

Sketches and musings on shape and design. I also thought of using Detail Maps, however having looked at how they work in Unity, I have decided against this.

Worldbuilding - Modelling.

Current status of the Star Destroyer  model. The top of the main body is finished, with only the bridge and details left to do. Then I will flip this segment to form the underside, and trim it down as needed. Then once the model is done to a basic level, I will work onto it in subsequent passes.

After the work above was completed, as well as some major parts of the topology that I missed were added. Next is to build the middle, bottom and back.

World Building - January 16th

After finding a very comprehensive album of a person's attempt at a scratchbuild Star Destroyer, I used it as a reference to start drawing out ideas for how this model will fit together. The bridge is a curious part of the design, as it will be the only place on the ship with a dedicated texture map due to its specific place and nature.

To maintain consistency the texture used to make the bridge will be produced in the same way as the texture on the tiling maps, possibly even utilising elements of the tiling maps to further consistency.

To increase my library of references, I made a VLC playlist of the three original Star Wars films, and skipped through to find all the sequences containing them, and took screenshots.

Top Row, third on the left is a screencap of the Death Star's surface, but as the aesthetic is same across the two it is still useful for texture references.

World Building 2 - Notes Page One

The first of many sketch sheets for this project. Containing musings on the types of textures I will need to make, how to handle the engine glow, details such as the topology of the spheres and the turrets, and a rough outline of how I think the model's topology will fall.

world building Texture musing

After pondering how to assemble the tiling textures, I produced these very rough concepts. The central area was repeated around it, to allow for overrunning of the rough overlapping shapes. This was then neatened up and fixed using the Offset filter in photoshop.

After It was cleaned up, I made a quick and admittedly dirty bump map and tested the texture in Maya.

Apart from some rough edges on the edge of the texture, the process and concept works reasonably well, and will only be improved upon when the workflow is amended to work with Maya Modelling and baking texture maps.

Worldbuilding 2 - Model Sheet

I came across this whilst searching for reference pictures. This is going to simplify my workflow significantly.

Worldbuilding - Star Destroyer Planning

It's a big undertaking, I knew that when I thought about it. It only really hit me when I saw the abject horror on my tutors face when I said what I was going to do.

So to prepare, I'm going to plan out what and how I'm going to do this.

Modelling will be done in 3DSMax, much to several peoples chagrin. I chose this instead of Maya because the star destroyer is entirely symmetrical, and I am much more fluent in modelling with symmetry in Max than in Maya.

UV Mapping and Texturing will be done in Maya as I am more competent in how Maya handles unwrapping and texturing. As these are both Autodesk products it will be relatively pain free to move the model from one package to the next.

Due to the monolithic scale and size of the model, instead unwrapping how a normal vehicle would be done, I will treat this like a building and utilize tiling textures, this is a different skill set than normal texturing and I plan to make as many of the source textures as I can myself.

References and model sheets will be as follows


Model sheet will be lifted and tweaked from this poster which I personally own. The relevant section will be traced and then scanned. This will just be to get the ship silhouette correct. Details and such will be garnered from these photographs from Lifebuzz. Any further references will be in the form of screencaps of the unofficial Star Wars Despecialised.

As can be ascertained from these, the physical miniature used in filming was incredibly complicated. My final model will not be quite as detailed, even with the choice of platform. Instead the majority of this detail will be garnered from normal mapping on high-fidelity textures. The brief imposes a limitation of 2-30k triangles on the model.


As an additional bonus, I intend to create a small unity build showing off how I envisioned the asset to be used.

 From this desktop wallpaper of admittedly unknown source, one aspect in particular can be ascertained. The underside of the vehicle is much less detailed than the top. However from this screencap from Episode 4 The underside is revealed to be just as detailed, just smoother overall with small divots and trenches. This is suitable for normal mapping, which I intend to use liberally.

World building Project 2

So, to carry as I mean to go on I have decided to stop in-uni work on the first Worldbuilding project as that has over-run and as such any time I devote to it now will eat into time I could be devoting to the second project.

So it would make sense if I were to make a simple, easy game-ready model so that there's less chance of this second one over-running and putting me even further behind.

Some would even go as far as to say that it's the only sane option for someone in my position.

I'm not one to agree.

Star Wars is a big passion of mine, and I am eagerly waiting to see what J.J. Abrams is going do with it.

So I'm going to model a Star Destroyer.

ahaha.