The Stegodon

[eyvind]

hmkay. Good first try. But you put too much poly for a ship lacking immensely in detail. Reduce poly, add up more significant details, such as bridge, armor plating, exhausts.

What poly count should I be aiming for? Currently it's about 2700 triangles.

looks very good. - just add some modelled window / observation parts - and you re done, imo. ( except that you ll still need to texture it, which will be fun to do ) ... but its an excellent model. very liberty-ish - very elegant.

edit: - about the windows - maybe make the ones you got there a bit smaller. they are large enough so that the whole ship would only be like half the size of a current lux liner.

By windows do you mean the extruded glass pane part or including the entire mount? I have split several of the mounts into 2 and some into 4 and on some of those I have also split just the pane part.

It's a bit difficult to guage scale on these Freelancer ships. Scaling is horrifically inaccurate in general in FL, but there seems to be some ship-class groupings that scale reasonably well between each other. Fighters tend to be more or less correctly scaled with each other, but not with larger ships, though some larger ships still scale correctly with each other. Should I bring up the Luxury Liner in Blender and use it to determine the size of things on my model?

Adorable liner model. However, I would like to see more play around engines and rear of the ship. Looks very plain compared to flashy front.

Yea, several people have pointed that out, and I've tried several suggestions. I'm still working on it, but I could use some more ideas.

I might add some antennas and solar panels and such to the back. Most of the backside and core of the ship is comprised primarily of machinery -- gotta put it somewhere, right? -- so anything flashy would have to be either purely cosmetic (which wouldn't be approved by the DSE Financial Department, considering the shortage of material resources in Liberty and hostilities with Rheinland) or operationally utilitarian. Additional living/office/person space wouldn't fit, and there's more than enough of that in the middle and front of the ship.

Perhaps some tubing, antennas, and such. One idea that came to mind early on that I threw out at the time was to build rings around the body of the ship (something like the undercarriage of the Sabre, but much slimmer and going all the way around). They would be part of a sensitive sensor system, picking up data from all around the ship in order to filter out uninteresting readings and noise. Perhaps I could put one of those around the engines, to let the ship computers filter out noise created by the engines and exhaust. On a less sophisticated level, it could be enlarged to shield the protruding living compartments from radiation. Light, heat, as well as more harmful radiation are likely to emanate from the engines. We wouldn't want the people onboard be distracted as they look out the windows by the light from the engines, or have their rooms overheated, their bodies irradiated, etc. Granted, the ship likely already has ample protection against such things, but redundancy is good, especially when such redundancy is less sophisticated and more independent.

It would certainly be economically viable, and will likely take less time to do than this rambling has.

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