So, I used Maya to go poking through the ship models in the C2 folders. ... I don't know where to start really, but I went ahead and rebuilt the Spearhead to be what I always interpreted it to be. I mean, the original model didn't even have a cockpit. I always figured that the black mark in the center was a canopy. Anywho, it's a work in progress with only placeholder textures.

Spearhead Revealed

The CopernicanWerks CX-1 Spearhead is the first ship to roll off the assembly line at the CW Factory. The cockpit is centered in the ship to minimize g-forces on the pilot while pulling tight maneuvers in combat. An air intake is positioned just behind the cockpit for extra cooling while flying through atmospheres. The ships low profile from the sides and front make it a difficult target to hit. Modifications can be continued to be made at the request of the Sonata Co. Director.

- CopernicanWerks Public Affairs Office

Cool.

A few notches in the side, like this, might be cool.

One thing i noted with the current Spearhead model is that its SOOO flat, and I'm sorry to say yours seems nearly as flat

I personally don't really mind the flat look of the Spearhead. It looks good when it banks. But we could definitely use a higher-poly version with more complexity that can catch the light better from the side when it's not banking.

Yea, the Spearhead is a fighter craft, so sleek with a thin profile is part of the design. If I were doing a bigger ship, you can bet your sweet bippy there'd be more depth. And yea, I'll get to adding more polys and some little notches into the side and see what it looks like. I'm also looking at fiddling with the Cadet (and many other ships later) a bit tonight as well.

I'll be honest about the models. In game I didn't really pay much attention to the design of each model since I was looking for bugs, but once I got them into Maya I came to find that many models are plagued with strange vertices sticking out in odd places, and that they are rife with triangles (in Maya, triangles are the devil, my instructor says [yes, I broke the rule a bit too, but as long as there are not tons of them...]) And to be blunt, I was half laughing and half cringing with a number of models that could be made simpler (many models are made of multiple sets of polygons grouped together, which is not the optimal way to do things) or just cleaner. Heck, the tail fins on the Blue Hunter and Prototype are not even attached to the hull, they just hover above it.

I'm pretty sure that in our engine, everything ends up as triangles anyway. There's no point in optimizing out triangles in Maya, and in fact, you probably need to triangulate the model as you export it in order for it to even load in the game.

Really? Huh. Maybe the triangle thing only pertains to when you animate the model in Maya... Oh well, I'll see what I can do about the triangulation then.

Well, you can export whatever you have as an obj and try it. If it works, it works.

I figured out how to triangulate in Maya at any rate. All should be compatible, but I'll check in the morning. Er, later in the morning. ... Might be about bed time at 4am... Oo

The problem isnt the triangles but its the intersects. If you have an intersect of more than four (or 8 if you talking triangles) polys things start to look pretty messy on the shading end. So dont worrry about triangles and try to only bring allot of polys together at one point if that point is actually a point. You may notice on many models I have done it dont actually bring things to a point either, I leave a dull end. This makes the end of the ship actually show at high zooms and AA doesnt clip off the front end. Not such an issue for the spear head but something to think about with the spikes on ships like the DS.

I'm pretty sure that in any 3d graphics engine, everything gets broken down into triangles eventually. At least that is what I learned in school, I don't know if there are exceptions to the rule but directx to the best of my knowledge deals only with triangles. When you convert to a format that can be interpreted by directx, a 4 sided poly becomes 2 triangles, a 5 sided poly becomes 3 triangles, etc.

Anyways I think that it doesn't matter too much, what we should worry about is what the finished product looks like in game.

The Cadet model is already triangle'd, so it should not be an issue. I'll try the Spearhead as a quadrangle first and see what the engine makes of it.

Well, here's the model pretty much finalized. Instead of adding any more polygons for details, I just made bump and specular maps to go with it. There's various little fiddly bits in the hull panels, stuff like a fuel valve on each wing and little vents, even landing bay doors and some sort of hold in the underside of the ship (for when you're making those hard-banking turns.) Also, I was iffy about cutting notches into the hull because I felt that it would hender the aerodynamic look, so I notched the pattern in the paint job instead, and I'm happy with the results.

Bellow are top and bottom views of the standard Spearhead and one pic of the Spearhead +, painted in rouge and white livery with a bit of brass-ish shading in the center. I'm not sure how much I'm going to detail the back of the ship, it just depends on how it looks in-game.

Dude I just shat a brick...

Painful much?

But hell, that looks awesome. Some bigger tails coming up at the back (like a fighter) would be nice, too.