Wednesday 10 April 2013

Remodelling the Suleiman 01

I'm slowly, very slowly remodelling the Suleiman Scout/Courier I modelled way back in about 2002-ish.








It's a ship from the Traveller RPG and at the time I was very proud of it.
I opened it up a year or so ago and was amazed at how poor it actually was on close inspection. Faceted, simplistic geometry and low res maps meant that it didn't bare close inspection at all! Even some of the modelling was futzed. It was an interesting lesson in what I've learned over the years but also made me want to improve it.

I've tidied the barrels and small crates in the cargo hold but I need to retexture them properly.
Today I have mostly been remodelling the afterburners.

You can see here the difference in the old and new.



The original was a fairly simple cylinder with depressingly few facets. On top of this I mapped a photoshopped photograph of the afterburner from a MIG fighter plane that a colleague had taken at an airshow. From that photo I also made a crude specular and bump map (I was still using bump maps instead of normal maps!!!).

It worked okay-ish in a reasonably small render, poor lighting and with heavy 'noise' over the top of the image as seen above, but as you can see from this render, stands absolutely no close scrutiny what so ever.

I hope that the new one, once textured will be far more convincing.

This image shows the Afterburners in place and also demonstrates how poor the texturing really was!




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