XWA Upgrade

Hey guys, me again. Just wanted to share my newest creation and maybe get some feedback. (But for Force-sake, please only CONSTRUCTIVE criticism! None of this "You suck" stuff. I'm trying.) Anyway, here it is, the TIE Vindicator:


It's actually about 98% complete. I just need to add some engines and a few minor details. Now if only I knew how to texture it...

Seriously that looks pretty awesome! kinda reminds me of some sort of catamaran or speedboat. Did you consider making it some sort of atmospheric or even underwater craft?

Also, I am not sure but I seem to remember that the name "Vindicator" may be already taken. I may be wrong though.

Keep up the good work, I would like to see that baby textured and in action.

Officially the Vindicator name is not used (wookiepedia), but i remember too having heard it (it was a modification of the T/I, i think).
I'd rather call it Tie-Cata

Is this a kit bash made from my Tie Bomber or is it made from scratch?

I hope if you ever make textures for it your going to make those from scratch also!

Thanks guys.
An underwater vehicle, eh? Interesting. That's something you don't see a lot in Star Wars.

This isn't a kit bash. It's all scratch-built. I'd never use someone else's model and call it my own. Believe me, though, it was a pain trying to get the cockpit frame right, considering this is only my third model. I actually designed it in one of Dorian Cleavenger's fantasy art classes and he loved it, so I figured I'd try to model it.

The name "Vindicator" was the first thing that popped into my head and I kinda liked it, but it's just a name. I could change it if I really had too.

Unfortunately, I doubt if I'll texture it anytime soon. I could make textures no prob, but ACE, despite my best efforts, keeps giving me that palettized textures thing. For some strange reason, though, texture will SOMETIMES show up in OPTech, but it seems like ACE is the preferred program. Unless there's some easier way that I'm not aware of. If I ever get it worked out, though, I will definitely post some pics.

I like it!

Thanks, DTM!

By the way...The new site: Very cool. Love those ancient ships. And the R-22 Spearhead. Based of of McQuarrie's A-wing concept art, right? Pretty sweet.

I was poking around the other day and stumbled upon the Guillaume's UV texturing tutorial link on Darksaber's site. Uh, what is UV texturing and is it easier than doing it in ACE or OPTech? Some parts sounded like it would be easier, some parts sounded more complicated, but I kinda had a hard time understanding it.

Any help would, once again, be greatly appreciated. I'd love to bring one of these babies to completion so I can move on to some of my many other OPT ideas.

I've done VERY little texturing, so I can't say I know how ACE or OPTech's techniques work very well, but UV texturing is actually really easy to do. Basically you take a mesh, select the faces you want and apply the UV map. Then, you open the map up, apply the texture, and move verteces around to fit the texture. Assuming your texture makes sense when applied to your model, it's just a matter of small tweaks to get the texture applied right in most cases. I'd recommend looking further into it.

Thanks, Draco. Any idea where I might start looking? I'm still VERY new at this and in the "There must a tutorial somewhere, but I don't know where to find it" phase. Also, from what I managed to pound into my thick skull, it sounds like I need some kind of unwrapping program or something. I have a few good graphics programs and I use Rhinoceros (v4 if that matters) Do I need anything else?
Ahh, so many questions, so few people that want to listen to me whine!

FunkyFreshMan wrote:Thanks, Draco. Any idea where I might start looking? I'm still VERY new at this and in the "There must a tutorial somewhere, but I don't know where to find it" phase. Also, from what I managed to pound into my thick skull, it sounds like I need some kind of unwrapping program or something. I have a few good graphics programs and I use Rhinoceros (v4 if that matters) Do I need anything else?
Ahh, so many questions, so few people that want to listen to me whine!

AFAIK, Rhino doesn't allow for UV mapping. (I used 2.0 back in the day.) I like to use it for modeling because I'm still in the very inefficient face-by-face mode or using-nurbs-and-then-tracing-over-it-with-faces mode. But it was not made as a texturer.

However, there are free programs out there that you can import your model into and start the UV mapping process. I've heard Blender, though it has a high learning curve for modeling and the like, UV mapping isn't too bad. Check the following links out.

http://www.switchonthecode.com/tutorial ... uv-mapping
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D ... Map_Basics
You can download Blender from blender.org.
And a simple Google search for "UV mapping blender" may yield other results that you could find useful. Now you know a free tool that will get you where you need, so find the tutorial that works best for you.

Hope this helps!

I'm not sold on the design but the model itself looks good. I wish you the best of luck and maybe my opinion will change when I see it textured.

EDIT: Are you anywhere near Altoona?

Your models are incredible.
Texturing is outright the most trickiest part of OPTing here...
You can use Ace - but I have nasty ATI cards that have compatiblity issues with it.

The main problem I had with Ace is that it won't tell you that your textures are incompatible ingame...actually it might even display non-standard 256 colour palettes quite well...even distorting the textures themselves and come out all pink/purple/reversed.

Now, Optech is a much different beast...a little less tempramental but it does the job.

You'll basically need to use a series of tools as mentioned above but at the end of the day its just a matter of perserverance and patience.

But General, Sir, this baby has quad laser cannons, dual ion cannons, a pair of high-capacity warhead launchers AND really big cup-holders! She'd look pretty sitting in your hangar bays.
I know, my design's a little...out there, but as long as you think the model looks good, that's all that matters. I'm also hoping some textures will make it look nicer. I'll probably end up either doing them in OPTech, (since ACE apparently doesn't like my graphics card either) or maybe trying to UV it. We'll see. I wish I had gotten into this stuff a lot sooner!

Altoona, PA, right? No, I'm more on the extreme western edge. Closer to Pittsburgh.

Yeah, Altoona, PA. But okay.

As far as the cup holders- good to hear! It's the little things in life that matter!

Well, you know how the Empire likes to build things big. Just taking into account those Imperial-sized drinks!

Is there something important going on in Altoona that I should be aware of? It's not necessarily THAT far, depending on what it is. It's about as far as Erie, and I've been there and back in less than a day. Just curious.

Not unless you're a fan of H. Beam Piper. He was a sf author and that was his hometown, there's a little memorial thing going on in a few days but since you don't know Altoona you're probably not a fan of HBP and thus it's irrelevant.

Ah, okay. Just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything this close to home. We don't get much excitement over here.

@Draco. Finally got around to reading those tutorials. I think I understand UV a lot better, now. I won't find out until I try it, though. Hopefully I'll be able to start playing with it this weekend if I get some free time. Thanks for the links!

Just want to make sure I have this right.
If you texture a model via UV mapping, it has to be saved as a 3ds file for it to work properly then converted to OPT format. I think I read that somewhere, but I can't find it again to make sure.

Thanks

AFAIK. Do a search on 3DS2OPZ. That'll convert your 3DS into the OPZ OPTech project format, and then you can add you engine glows, weapon hardpoints, etc. (Again, I think. I've never gotten that far personally. )

Okay, just an update. I tried OPTing the Vindicator (or whatever you prefer to call it) and I found some issues. First, parts of the missile pod triangulate to infinity. My models like doing that for some reason. I didn't I had that many faces in it (I'm assuming that's the problem) so I'll have to split it up or something. Also, the wing braces are disappearing at certain angles, I think for the same reason. One other thing. In-game, the ion cannons are listed as the primary weapons and the lasers are secondary. Uh, I have no idea how to fix that one.
Haven't tried texturing it because I wanted to test OPT it to root out these problems before I went through all that trouble. Other than that, it seems to work okay.

Sorry, you're outside my realm now. But good job getting it that far!

Thanks. It's really difficult trying to model texture and OPT something all by my little lonesome, especially when I really have no idea what I'm doing! But hey, like you said, I've made it this far. Just have to see how far I can go....

For you triangulation problem. check the face count of your meshes. any mesh that has more than 300 faces needs to be broken down. As for the Ion cannon problem make sure that your regular lasers are your first set of hard points and ion cannons second. this is what I do and it has always worked for me.

Ah, that explains so much now! I knew a single mesh couldn't have too many faces, but I didn't realize how relatively low a number it was.
I actually realized what I did wrong with the lasers soon after I posted that. (Boy, do I feel dumb!) I could have sworn I set the lasers first, but I guess not. Oops.
Thanks for the help.