FreeOrion

Hello everyone. Been very busy with my PhD. lab work. I finally got to designing a fish-inspired star ship. I have also finally found my way around Wings 3D and managed a mediocum of skill to texture my model. I am hoping to base a family of ships based on this work. Below is the inspiration for my ship.


Using state of the art and highly expensive softwares (NOT) of Wings 3D, Gimp and MS Paint(!), I present to you, the Sunfish Class frigate. About 100m in length and 130m in height, the Sunfish Class frigate is a dependable but increasingly outdated starship with adequate fire power for its mission profile. Armed with 4 x Modular Medium Beam weapons and two hyperspatial missille launchers, the frigate is usually found patroling the interstellar tradeways while keeping a sharp eye for smugglers and pirates. Although used mainly by System Guards and Customs units, in times of war, the Sunfish class frigates could act as the eyes of the fleet or provide escort for vulnerable freighters but will not survive long against most other warships.

Sunfish on Patrol (Background photo courtesy of NASA, composite made using GIMP).


Designed and Rendered using Wings 3D. Texture found on Internet.

Like the concept a lot

Could be good for an acquatic-race... after all you take inspiration for the things you make from your everyday life... seeing fishes all the day could lead to a fish-like fleet

(at this point a question: I didn't found anything about it on the forum. Is every race going to have a "proprietary form" for their ships?)

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Thanks Flatline. Hope everyone don't mind the fluff I have included. I like to flesh out my creations and explain where my ideas come from. My personal opinion is that a race should have a specific "style" of ships that you could group together at first glance. In this case, yes, it could be an aquatic race, though maybe still "humanoid", like the Mon-Calamari. A fully aquatic non-humanoid race would probably have a more exotic sleeker ship design, with aquaria and water tanks etc.

Looks nice

For an aquatic race, the ship doesn't look very aquatic. The extensions don't look like fins and the hull is made of metal plating.
This ship is 100m long, yet there is no indication of this in the texture or the mesh. It could be any size.
Why is the wire included in the texture? While you might think that it looks cool, it is an obvious thing to everyone slightly involved in this topic and doesn't make sense.
Explicit external parts like guns won't be shown on the hull. Some rudimentary functional indication is allowed though.

Btw, avoid using smoothing algorithms when doing low poly work or fix up poles at least.


Yes.

I think it's not so bad... perhaps the vertical wings should be a little less thick... but we're almost there

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The only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom is press coverage.
- Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

Ubuntu 7.10/Windows Vista/Windows XP (VMWare)/Windows NT 4 (VMWare) on Intel Centrino Duo T5500@1.66GHz with NVidia GeForce GO 7600

I'm afraid "not so bad" doesn't cut it for this project.
The proportions are quite different and besides this - as mentioned - the texture/material doesn't fit.

Just look at the mesh, trying to ignore, that you've seen the fish before. This ship could be manufactured by everyone, even humen.

Just because they're aquatic doesn't mean their ships have to actually resemble marine life, to use a real life example, how may working air vessels have humans created that actually look like birds? Jets: not particularly, biplanes: even less, Zeppelins? As for metal plates, there must be a dozen ways to explain how an underwater race ends up with metal based designs, ranging from temporary forages to the surface to being uplifted by aliens who conveniently provide airtight autofactories.



I fail to see why looking like it could have been made by humans is a particularly bad thing, the human designs we see out the window are in use because they work its not unreasonable to assume that aliens came to the same conclusion that those designs work well.

Discussion of this subject split to here

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Tortanick: Those are realism arguments. This game isn't realism. The ships are a main thing the player sees of an alien race. As such, they should convey the essence of the alien race as precise and unambiguous as as possible. It's a design decision. I'm providing critique in this direction and I don't care if others think this is looking nice.

I'd be extremely impressed if you are able to do that, I have never seen a game or tv-show where I could tell much about a species, group or individual by the way they or their technology looks (of course I may just be really bad at understanding designs) I can recognise clichés quite well, such as the metal plate human ships that seem to appear weather they're the American deep south in space (Starcraft), modern humans (Stargate) or the result of a melenia of peace and prosperity (sins of a solar empire) but that's not really understanding the society behind the design, just recognising a standard idiom of science fiction

Thanks for the constructive comments PD. The Sunfish was my first ever textured model. Again, I don't expect my models to be included into the game. If someone likes my ideas and have better skills, by all means, improve on the ships. This is an open source project, so I don't mind anyone copying my ideas. I included the wire because it looks like hull plating. I will try to tone done the wire to make it just visible later. Here is another fish-inspired ship. It is a fighter.

Inspiration

That's working much better. You could try varying the wing angles to add more interest.

Thanks PD. At least the texture matched better this time. The problem with the Sunfish was that I didn't know I could move the unfolded parts around in the texture map. I also have to learn how to cut the model up for texturing in the most optimum way. Right now, texturing takes twice the amount of time it needs to create the model itself. I have a lot of labwork coming up, so there probably won't be new ships this week unless I decide to procrastinate again. I am also trying to pick another cool looking fish to base a ship on. Everyone, feel free to post your fish-inspired ships in this thread in the mean time.

I'm not sure basing designs off of actual life is the thing to do here. First off, you're basing designs meant for alien races (i assume) off of lifeforms evolved on a single planet, earth. Why? Mimicking the shape of lifeforms on this planet doesn't necessarily add to aerodynamics or practicality (especially considering a good amount of FO ships are probably meant for space flight only and never encounter frictional substances like air or water). IMO, you should stay away from this kind of stuff. On the bright side, you can hash out a rough model with texturing well enough, so modeling your concepts doesn't seem like a problem you'd have to much trouble with.

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