I am proud to announce that in the SDF Ship Contest, Arolte emerged as the winner with his "Raven" fighter with 3 votes and 6pts.

Arolte claimed first though by a close margin with Skyfox's "Wolverine" that rallied late in the voting to a 5pt 2nd place finish.


Congradulations to Arolte AND to Skyfox, since I have decided I will endorse BOTH craft to Guildsoftware, Raven as the Judges vote, and Wolverine as the popular vote.

Congraw'tu'waytjons!

I lost :( :P

'Grats.

Thank you.

=)

congratulations Arolte and Skyfox ...

I love the Raven ... did it always have wheels? **scratches head**

I'm not a particular fan of the Wolvie .. but uh oh opinions differ :P ... still congrats :D

if anyones interested I've uploaded the .blend file and stuff of my designs here:

http://home.arcor.de/famscheffler/sd/maf/maf.tar.bz2
and
http://home.arcor.de/famscheffler/sd/lcv92/freightdesign5.blend.bz2

of the lcv only the .blend file, the rest is on my dead computer :/

have fun :P

Nah, it didn't before. I'm going to keep adding on to it and tweaking it until I'm 100% satisfied. That includes making landing gears, visible weapon loadouts, an isometric view, etc. I'm looking to eventually make a 3D render of it as well. Same goes for the Pelican. I dig doing this kind of stuff and it helps improve my portfolio. I'm hoping to do something that doesn't involve advertising within the field of graphic design--magazine art, game art, web design, etc.

What's this .blend format? For Blender 3D I assume? I tried to learn how to use it but I gave up after a while. I didn't like the interface too much--it looks like it's running under some type of emulation in OS X. Still I'm curious, is the main body of your ship a custom mesh where you moved around and added vertices to the edges of your polygons? Can you explain how you did that or whether you can point me to an online tutorial that does? Thanks.

=)

EDIT: Found tutorials at http://blender3d.org/cms/Tutorials.243.0.html#806 , if anyone else is interested.

Take a peak at www.evermotion.org for some good tutorials on modeling and the like. Most is for 3ds Max, but the ideas work with most poly modelers. You'll need to register to access the forums and most of their content.

Arolte: Blender renders its own interface in opengl, rather than use the widgets that the system provides. It's actually pretty cool, once you get used to it. It can be really confusing, though, since the interface conventions are different from what you normally use.

I still say it looks like the Arwing in Starfox64

AROLTE and SKYFOX, please check the "Please Read Devs: The SDF Ships" thread. Waylon has asked for several items so he can better determine if he can/will place them ingame (he said that if he does decide yes then it would be post-release).

Check the thread please.

Mr_spuck, I still have your LCV you sent me if you want to have a copy of that?

Pyroman_Ace: nope ... if i can get my computer running again i can access them :D

Arolte:
blender documentation:

http://www.blender.org/modules/documentation/ the "Blender Guide" covers most features of blender

http://elysiun.com/
many tutorials, forum ... great site

and you already found blender3d.org :D

I'm more of learning by experimenting type of person so I usually only look into tutorials when I want sth specific or absolutely can't figure it out on my own. ( And thats probably also why after like 3 years of playing with blender I still don't know how most stuff works :P)

about how I made the them ... uh .. gah ... I'm terrible when it comes to explaining things (see countless of utterly confused newbies after /me tried to show them the way to hidden sectors :P)

okay lets try: the maf ... I started out with the top. basically all you can see from the view from above is "extruded" ( mark a few vertices press "e" ... move mouse ... click ... press "s" ... move mouse .. click .. repeat :P) from a single square ... you can still see it in wireframe view.

then modeled the profile of the rest of the ship as seen from the side ... in other words connected the nose with the rear of the model but this time on the bottom and in 2D :D ....

at last connected the "profile bottom" with the top ... a few days of finetuning, subdividing, cutting, turrets and and antenna adding, texturing (if had an idea how to do it properly they would actually look good :P) ... and I had a maf :P

if you can understand what I just explained you get a virtual cookie :D


In other news: I tried rendering the maf with blenders new internal raytracer thing ... and wow it looks cool :D ... thats how the ship is actually supposed to look ... I never got the ligtning right with the default rendering.
If you want to try it: ship1.blend in maf.tar.bz2 should have the right settings ... just load it into blender and press f12.

ahh, uhhh, oops, sent it after posting that note, sry.