At a general glance, your model is nice. its more smoother, has more details, and generally looks neater. but dont forget, the RM cruiser is a vanilla ship. the reason why the mesh is so messy is because of the explosion fuses. when the ship blows up, it splits up, and unless you can manage this with your ship, i would strongly suggest you avoid something like this. the general reason why vanilla ships arent touched is because, they're made with alot more advanced stuff that DA had available to them which we dont, which prevents us to mimic their effects, even if we try to optimize their extremely messy mesh designs.
' Wrote:I would like you send me your model if you could, in OBJ format.
you can email me at thill02@gmail.com, I would like to take a closer inspection of it.
Done.
' Wrote:At a general glance, your model is nice. its more smoother, has more details, and generally looks neater. but dont forget, the RM cruiser is a vanilla ship. the reason why the mesh is so messy is because of the explosion fuses. when the ship blows up, it splits up, and unless you can manage this with your ship, i would strongly suggest you avoid something like this. the general reason why vanilla ships arent touched is because, they're made with alot more advanced stuff that DA had available to them which we dont, which prevents us to mimic their effects, even if we try to optimize their extremely messy mesh designs.
Thanks! And I see, I thought the debris was handled in a similar method to the way they are handled in FreeSpace, where it's modeled separately and a subobject that appears when the ship explodes.
Yep, the debris is made from parts of the model. Only so called "damage caps" are in separate models. That's the mangled remains that are placed on the model in place of a severed component. You can check them in the RMC directory. You'll need those too.
One reason why the vanilla ship has more parts (although 50 sounds really a lot) is because it has 7 components - root + 6 separable
about uv mapping... it's possible, I've seen a FL model with it. Let me ask one question, though: Is it still more efficient when texturing a ship line that could otherwise share textures?
Quote:about uv mapping... it's possible, I've seen a FL model with it. Let me ask one question, though: Is it still more efficient when texturing a ship line that could otherwise share textures?
Depends. On a hard drive level, not as efficient since you'll have a texture for each ship instead of several ships using unified texture sets. As for a shipline? It depends on how FreeLancer parses textures. If you have a RM Cruiser and gunboat in the same area, and FreeLancer parses the textures they they share twice, then no, uvmaps are more efficient in that regard. If FreeLancer parses a texture once when there are multiple ships on screen with it, then yes, tiling would be more efficient than uvmapping on a shipline basis, but uvmapping is usually always better looking and more efficient on a single ship basis.
Quote:Yep, the debris is made from parts of the model. Only so called "damage caps" are in separate models. That's the mangled remains that are placed on the model in place of a severed component. You can check them in the RMC directory. You'll need those too.
One reason why the vanilla ship has more parts (although 50 sounds really a lot) is because it has 7 components - root + 6 separable
Ah, I see. I'll look into finding those.
Also, I went back to make sure, and the RMC cruiser actually has over 1500 seperate little parts in the mesh. Scary.
I'm sorry, but I see no reason why any of the vanilla ships should be replaced. They define the original Freelancer style and are what you should orientate your models on. They have a lot of nice stuff about them - like the slow exploding caps - and look fine as they are. That is, texture-wise and model-wise.
So, it's a bit of waste work here. Your model might be very nice, but it's not needed.
I'm strongly against replacing the original ships.