High-poly Star Destroyer, Update 29-09-07

Artwork Works in Progress
1

Is it the one from episode 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6? Nope, none of those.

I’ve mostly made it up as i’ve gone along, but its based on the Venator star destroyer from episode 3.

http://img524.imageshack.us/img524/8306/shiptest1fl4.jpg

At the mo, its about 2/3 modelled, ive done the top, bottom and engines and now i need to do the sides, at the minute its about 3.5 million verts/2.5 million faces, which is alot less than yesterday, but it looks better now.

Ive got a couple more pics and a small video fly around but the internet is being unreliable right now.

Edit: Here’s another, so that its obvious the sides are missing.
http://img260.imageshack.us/img260/107/shiptest2eg2.th.jpg

Edit2: Here’s another, close up of the superstructure, those are windows to give you a sense of scale.
http://img250.imageshack.us/img250/538/shiptest3fj6.th.jpg

2

You have overdone this. Its nice, but i can’t imagine texturing of that thing. You should be able to do not same good, but even better carving in hull with use of normal maps, and texture it smoothly in meantime. Now, it is good-looking, but if you’ll have patience to good uv unwrap this, you are my master. Also, hand painted normal map should make it less repeatable and more original. Think about that.

Still, it can be very good model without texturing :wink:

3

you know, at first I thought you used mainly bumpmaps… but after viewing the close-up, it seems you really didn’t… i admire your patience if so

It’s nice but I think you might actually have a bit too much detail… I myself would imagine even such a huge ship to have some “clean” areas… On the other hand, ignoring the detail, it seems a bit too flat and uniform. (in the mid-front area)

4

I’ve finnished the back now.

http://img242.imageshack.us/img242/1898/shiptest5yc1.jpg

5

Overall, this is stunningly good, but I see a few places where the detail seems to have been achieved simply by subdividing/triangulating a face, and then extruding the smaller faces. This adds detail, but it’s noticeably regular and, IMO, doesn’t fit in with the incredible work you’ve done on the other sections.

The back end of the Star Destroyer is absolutely amazing! What are you planning to do with this when it’s done?

6

Once the modelling is done, im going to texture it, something that is going to take a while, then make some kind of scene out of it, perhaps with two or three angles, because the amount of detail ive put into the whole thing cannot be seen from any one side.

7

Right… An Update.

http://img406.imageshack.us/img406/4296/shiptest13dx3.jpg
http://img519.imageshack.us/img519/7049/shiptest14hh8.jpg
Second pic is supposed to have ore stars but i forgot to adjust the camera veiw distance.

Texturing and rendering of this thing is turning out to be a nightmare, i’m at the limit of my PC’s memory, its using 1.47Gigs of RAM and i only have 1.5.
On top of that, its just not turning out as good as i had hoped, there are quite alot of errors evident all over the place, bad bits of texturing and lighting.
I think once small bits here and there have been sorted out i cna add alot more windows and self lighting, make the direct star light alot less powerful, i think it will look more interesting and moody then.
My original intention was to render it at 2560 x 1440 and either scale it down to 1080 HD or 720 HD, this would have fixed some of the AA issues and other texture and rendering bugs, or made them less noticable. However - blender it seems is not relible enough for that, its just within my ram limit, but its having none of it. I now know better than to even think about using vector blur.

Render times were 6 mins and 11 mins, OSA at 11 and AO at 5 with distance of 1. I’ve used soem SSS for the engines, the mesh of which is far more complex than you can see in these renders, but it does give and interesting effect.

8

Holy awesomeness, Lord Vader!!! As Clean3d said, it’s noticeable that much detail was added by extruding/scaling (especially on the wings), but it just looks so amazing! My advice: don’t texture it. It already looks awesome and doesn’t need texturing. Just change the materials for glowing windows and such. Afterwards, I would attempt making a cleaner, texturable version with more hand-made details.

“I myself would imagine even such a huge ship to have some “clean” areas…”

I take it you have never seen a canonical Star Destroyer (especially the Super Star Destroyer; google it). :slight_smile:

9

Yes i have, but i have DVD refrence to the newer ones, i think imay have to make a more low poly version, ultimately and super texture it, i want to do an extreem closeup flyby, you see, so the textures would have to be supersized where as here the textures are smaller and sewn together a bit like a patchwork quilt, with the modelling showing off the detail.

10

Sorry for the confusion; I was talking to the poster I quoted, not you. I know you’ve spent plenty of time looking at them. :slight_smile:

11

…This reminds me of the Stargate model Lord of the Rings Junkie has made for insane high poly detail levels. Seriously, I have no idea where you guys get the self motivation to spend this much time on one piece.

Keep it up, I’m going to have to keep looking at this now I’ve seen it just to see how you get on with texturing something so detailed and huge. Good luck with getting it finished!

12

Wow… that is too cool. Very well-detailed and modeled. I love it.

13

Hi again. I’ve made quite alot of progress. Sorry if these pictures are quite dark, my blender computer monitor is quite bright.

http://img517.imageshack.us/img517/2457/shiptest17ut7.jpg
http://img517.imageshack.us/img517/50/shiptest18zv1.jpg

I’ve shaved off about 800,000 verts by altering the flaps and the engines, i like the new engines, despite a small rendering error in them, but they make up for having no SSS in them, whic speeds things up. I’ve also made quite alot of mesh error correction, and there were dozens of those.
I’ve aslo made the detail texture colour more subtle, whilst adding a simple dirt layer to the texture, which was easy, one musgrave texture was all that was needed.

I’ve learnt a couple of new things about cameras and rendering. Firstly, CatRom was the filter i needed to use, i’ve never really understood which OSA filters were best for whatever situations but 16 x OSA on CatRom gace sutable results. I have also come to realise that that i’ve been pushing blenders accuracy too hard. I’ve got details and mesh layers of 0.01 thickess, and when i place a camera 50 to a hundred blender spaces away, it doesn’t have the necessary accuracy to render them as separate layers, thus i get small edge layer problems, but never mind, i’ll get round this.

As you can see it has got a bit of bling now, with side lights and a bit of a self luminating glow here or there, i am going to tweak it, and add some extra windows and sources for the glow until it looks like a living ship.

All of this has meant that i now am using only 1.1 gigs of RAM rendering it at HD, the rendertimes vary between 5 and 15 minutes, which is very good IMO. However the .blend file size is 123 megabites! i’ve never had a blender file so large! So i think the second shiip will be in a separate file, and composited for the final render. It’ll be quite a space battle once i figure out how to do good explosion.

Here is a screenie of my light setup, its getting quite detailed now. :eek:

http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/3685/lightsac3.th.jpg

C&C welcome.

14

insanity… complete insanity. but in a good way! :D:evilgrin:

15

Wow! Just imagine ten of thoes star destroyers approaching your location and it would be enough to make even Yoda reconsider his loyalty!

16

SOB you are my hero starts worshpping theANIMAL

17

Very inspiring … the texturing in the back i like best , the rest is a bit twitchy … The modeling will be an inspiration for me when i restart the Asgaard …

18

Wow, this is so AWESOME! The new engines are much better, the lights are perfect, the new texturing is great. My only criticism is that the bridge just looks a little too simple of a shape.

19

Pretty cool… ya got a wireframe?

20

This is amazing! I can’t believe you modelled all those details in!

From what I can see, it looks almost the same quality as the models in the movies!