Daily Mini-Ships

#61

Really cool models. Fun to see.

@toastie: A community space scene of these kind of ships would be fun :stuck_out_tongue:

#62

I think that sounds like a pretty cool idea! You know I’d be down :slight_smile: I think it would be cool to have it separated into maybe each person’s daily mini-models and then also have a daily or weekly theme category too. Also, maybe a section for how to do certain things with as few pixels as possible? Rivets, guns, jets, railing, paneling, etc? Working at this level of detail is really a mix of low-poly modeling and sprite painting skills, and there are very few (if any) sites or resources dedicated to getting a comfortable grip on both of them. I think Omita would be able to contribute lots of good information as well, he has some good portable graphics tutorials available here on CGTalk already.

#63

Sweet,

I’ll throw some stuff together then. The only problem is that i cant really afford to host another domain. I have a shared server on mediatemple, but its shared, so i can really only host the one domain i already have. I would be happy to at least temporarily host it in a subfolder on my site though.

#64

Excellent work! This keeps getting better and better.

I think you should put a small render of each ship you do in your first post, so we have a nicee overview at a glance.

Keep it up!

Maximum stars for perseverance!

#65

Supervlieg - thanks! I thougth about that but I think there is a limit to how many images I can put in a single post. What I will probably do is build a web page on my site to host these pics in one place and then link to that from the first post, so that way people can check them all out if they don’t want to click and scroll and click and scroll. Whenever i get tired of mini ships I will probably do one big-ass render of all the ships, either in a scene or at the very least in nice neat rows like they are micromachines or something.

#66

This stuff almost makes me miss my legos… You can makes a nice ship universe with this stuff lol

#67

the colors ended up reminding me of submarines, not sure where that came from! also, that is tuesday’s ship, i’m doin today’s before bed still.

EDIT - Also, I’ve made a simple page that shows all the ships: Daily Mini Ships

#68

Awesome!

Adam strikes again. :slight_smile:
Keep at it, man.

Btw, Ive been working on loading models into Processing. (http://www.processing.org/). I wrote a mesh system and a an importer for the mesh format used by the OGRE engine (http://www.ogre3d.org/). It’s definately a way cool way to show models, and if you (or anyone else) is interested, you can get a copy of the Processing IDE from their site and ill send you the mesh code.

here’s that robot base mesh loaded into it (click and drag on the object to rotate it):

http://www.ivansafrin.com/meshview/

#69

that’s really cool! does it support 32-bit textures? That’s a great way to show off these small models in a web format. It wouldn’t take much to “convince” me to write an .obj importer for it this weekend…I will definitely be looking into this! Did you write the modeler or just edit it to accept Ogre3D meshes?

#70

Processing already has an .obj importer actually, the reason i wrote my own for .mesh is cause a) the .obj one is kind of buggy, and b) i wanted to add skeletal animation too (currently in progress) and c) the .mesh format is (optionally) XML-based so its simple to work with and d) it has some kickass exporting tools for Blender.

Im not sure what you mean by the modeler, if you’re talking about the viewer applet, yes i wrote it myself, but it’s really trivial with processing. it’s like 10 lines of code, if that, not including the Mesh classes.

#71

ah gotcha, awesome! how does the applet work? i haven’t put java (beyond simple js) into a webpage in years. If you wanted to, say, post a tutorial about how to set up the viewer (with the html and js and all that) I think a LOT of people would like to see that! (including me of course) - i will check out Processing more this weekend when I have extra free time.

#72

Processing is basically a java API that provides a REALLY easy way to draw stuff in real time and do other stuff (thers libs for sound, hardware input, etc.) geared towards experimental graphics. it has a basic opengl-like 3d API that can either use OpenGL (though that disables it from running in a web applet) or use their own software renderer thats pretty limited.

Anyway, it comes with its own IDE, so you dont really need anything else if you already have java installed.

As for the viewer applet, it loads the mesh from an external OGRE mesh XML file, though this is just a test and the URL is hardcoded in, but theres no reason why you couldnt dynamically load it.
Once i get animation to work properly, ill post it on the processing site and maybe update the editor and post it on CGTalk.

#73

The cruiser is 88 triangles, the figher is 6, so I guess I probably could have crammed another fighter in there. ah well! Ship design is a mix of the airships from Warhawk for PS1 and your classic star destroyer, while the colors are inspired mainly by the Alliance cruisers from Firefly. 32 colors used.

#74

Looking good! (as usual)

I did my first model last night, and i’m going to texture it up tonight, I’m at work right now so I can’t show anything, i’ll get a picture up later though.

It’s a petrol (gas?) station, 256 polys, with a 256x256 texture, i’m pretty pleased with it so far, and it seems to be having the desired effect of getting me working again! Viva la Mini-Models! :slight_smile:

#75

beeglebug - thanks!

Just! Got! Motivated!

:slight_smile: I’m glad that you are modeling again!

#76

Some kind of space tanker type thingy. The tanks are separate to save polys but also so they could be individually destroyed in a shooter type game, or they could be dropped off like powerups or something.

EDIT - almost forgot, 14 colors here

#77

I think this one is a bit too saturated. Maybe an additional Color could help to support the form a bit more (color seperation of Ship and Tanks or something).

#78

MK2 - I actually toned down the saturation quite a bit before finishing the texture, but it may still be overdoing it a bit. Mostly I just wanted to make a bright red ship! With lighting turned on the division between the ship and the tanks is much more clear, so I’m not too worried about that. Extra colors would put a hit on the palette as well. However, thanks for the crit, saturation has been a bit of a problem on multiple ships so far, most notably #2 and #7, so it is something I have to keep an eye on. Thanks for the feedback!

#79

Adam,
Hey there. New here but I just had to post to say that your ships are a great idea. I’m mostly doing 3D modeling these days but I used to be a big practicer of pixel art (not that I was any good) and these are the perfect blend.

Makes me want to do a ‘MicroMachines’ Homeworld or soemthing :wink: Actually, cars along these lines would be perfect for a computer remake of SJG’s Car Wars :slight_smile:

Keep going, watching with interest!
Best,
Michael

#80

Man Adam, these things are looking awesome. I might’ve missed it, but how much time are you spending on these things?

Also, toastie, you might want to check your model…using your model viewer I was getting weird shading on the front two triangles with the kanji on them, I’m going to guess you have an extra 2 triangles on the front and they’re z-fighting/have goofy normals.