WIP: F-14 B/D
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hello stingray … i love F-14 and if you want help to color the skin finished his work count on me
regards WL
Roger that. Thanks man. Like I mentioned in first post textures are mostly done and since I come from the skinners side of the game I’ll take the pleasure of skinning it myself. If I run into any bottlenecks later on I’ll give a heads up.
Tomcat fan note #1: Note external antennas and you’ll know which variant is depicted here :D.
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@ neystratiou, Chuckles, Turkeydriver:
Guys, cool it :D. It’s a long way to dealing with luxury problems such as ‘which skins are we gonna need’.
What I can say now is that the modelling/skinning will go in the order of D > B and maybe just maybe eventually A.
The late F-14 as the premier fighter-bomber-interceptor is the machine with the most use cases in any campaign staged between '99-'06 (for USN that is, IIRAF Tomcat surely is one of the most intriguing issues in modern mil aviation).
That being said as some of you may know I have quite the stencil collection for more than 45 Tomcat squadrons going back more than 8 years so skin variation shouldn’t be a problem.
And neystratiou rest assured I won’t forget about everyone’s fav pirate…
Jolly Rogers Tomcats (B only) active until 2004 so well in the target timeframe.
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And neystratiou rest assured I won’t forget about everyone’s fav pirate…
Jolly Rogers Tomcats (B only) active until 2004 so well in the target timeframe.
Haha, THANK YOU dear friend!
You can’t imagine how many people are you gonna highly satisfy with this specific skin… I guarantee this!
Nikos. -
Facking Beautiful!! My girl, she’s back !
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Jolly Rogers lo-viz oh my god… Stingray 6-2 you’re awesome !!
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only one world wow, beautifull work sir
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Filled the hole on the back. I first rebuilt the top part of the glovebox so it can attach to the front fuselage. The rear part of the canopy was built separately so the line flow is authentic. Then adapted the part you almost never see, the connector between the front fuselage and the inner intake frame.
Gettin’ close to having all the main parts roughly done.
Pink Matcap, Baby.
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Keep creating THE baby… :drink:
Nikos. -
Amazing model. Congratulations stingray_SIX_TWO, outstanding work.
Best compliments and regards.Note: F-14 very difficult model. I’ve tried a few years ago (Rafale and F-18 ). But very hard work. Therefore I give up.
Some previews my old works:
F-18 –> http://sta.sh/0ihfc490xim
http://sta.sh/01bs168paopl
http://sta.sh/01kvzfq2161cRafale –> http://sta.sh/0ccdz1upfmd
http://sta.sh/01uiwxsqle62
http://sta.sh/02fznkzaer8g
http://sta.sh/02ci4do5n7n0 -
Thanks a lot man! I think you’re right that the Tomcat is exceptionally shall we say ‘complex’ when it comes to the surfaces and parts so I’m trying my best.
You’re Superbug looks like a beautiful base for further development! The proportions look spot on!
Amazing model. Congratulations stingray_SIX_TWO, outstanding work.
Best compliments and regards.Note: F-14 very difficult model. I’ve tried a few years ago (Rafale and F-18 ). But very hard work. Therefore I give up.
Some previews my old works:
F-18 –> http://sta.sh/0ihfc490xim
http://sta.sh/01bs168paopl
http://sta.sh/01kvzfq2161cRafale –> http://sta.sh/0ccdz1upfmd
http://sta.sh/01uiwxsqle62
http://sta.sh/02fznkzaer8g
http://sta.sh/02ci4do5n7n0 -
Assigned some materials and fixed some things like mirror settings on the rudder actuator housing and sharp edge assignments. Moving on to the vertical stabs and wings…last two images show correctly sharpened angle on the rear deck near engine housing.
I’m sure this isn’t best practice and goes against some modeling rule cuz it’s thinking too much in terms of texture instead of form but it’s amazing to see that you can apply the late Lo-Vis Navy camo almost accurately just by assigning material to the faces…underside not done yet obviously.
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is FANTASTIC !!!
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Keep creating THE baby… :drink:
Nikos.Agree in full!
Keep on straight, Stingray, just can’t await to fly it, will be another wonderful experience.With best regards,
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I’m sure this isn’t best practice and goes against some modeling rule cuz it’s thinking too much in terms of texture instead of form but it’s amazing to see that you can apply the late Lo-Vis Navy camo almost accurately just by assigning material to the faces…underside not done yet obviously.
I always make tons of materials, sometimes even wasteful duplicate materials, when I model something. The extra color contrast can help alert you to misshapen body lines, or even bad normals, that would be hard to see otherwise!
I guess you’re going to have to push it into 3ds first, then out to bms. Back on page 2, Radium mentioned needing 3ds for ptypes (no idea what that is) and materials. Just looking at the python file for the .3ds exporter, and it has a section for materials. I guess though, if it actually does causes any trouble on export, you can just delete them all in blender before you export.
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I’ve had no problems with textures exporting from Blender to .3ds and then importing into 3dsMax.
pTypes are various polygon characteristics used by the sim engine (i.e. transparent, vertex shaded, poly shaded, etc…)
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Good point about the body lines! I noticed that too. You said it, if all fails I can just remove them, I’m doing it mainly for the fun of it and learning blender further. I actually only stumbled about it while looking into how to properly render the model.
One thing that I’m stuck on is the smoothing and subdivision. I get that in Blender I can add the subdivision modifier and I’ve done that. I also understand that you should never apply it cuz it renders the model uneditable and drives up the tris to insaine levels. I also understand that I can use the general face mode between smooth and flat. But is there a way to have Blender smooth out the model by actually moving the vertices or is this only possible by increasing mesh density by sudivision in the end? If I subdivide the model as is it goes from 13K to 42K tris, without AB, wings and gear so that is obviously a no go. Or do I smooth it out as far as possible and the textures take care of the rest?
Also I’m not clear on what the face setting flat <> smooth actually does with the model.
I did figure out the edge split and sharp edges tool and your description on that a couple of pages back now makes perfect sense to me so thanks again for that man!
I always make tons of materials, sometimes even wasteful duplicate materials, when I model something. The extra color contrast can help alert you to misshapen body lines, or even bad normals, that would be hard to see otherwise!
I guess you’re going to have to push it into 3ds first, then out to bms. Back on page 2, Radium mentioned needing 3ds for ptypes (no idea what that is) and materials. Just looking at the python file for the .3ds exporter, and it has a section for materials. I guess though, if it actually does causes any trouble on export, you can just delete them all in blender before you export.
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Good to know and thanks for clearing up the ptypes I was unsure on what that was meant to be as well.
I figure that I can do all hard surface modeling in Blender and then move the model to 3ds for rigging and animation.
One question I have is you mentioned Blender to .3ds but as far as I see 3Ds Max (at least the 2015 version I have) is unable to open .3ds files. I get a bad file notification. It only opens .max (which Blender cannot export to) or .fbx which I was able to export to and open in 3Ds.
I’ve had no problems with textures exporting from Blender to .3ds and then importing into 3dsMax.
pTypes are various polygon characteristics used by the sim engine (i.e. transparent, vertex shaded, poly shaded, etc…)
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Way to have Blender smooth out the model by actually moving the vertices: YES!!! Select a bunch of vertexes, press ‘w’, select “smooth” !! Remember you can undo if you don’t like what it does.
Face setting flat <> smooth
As I understand it: Flat doesn’t apply the vertex normals for lighting, just draws the face, using the face normal, for each vertex in that face. So everything looks chiseled/faceted. The smooth setting uses the vertex normals for shading, where the vertex normal will be the average of all connected face normals. So it creates a smoothed effect. When you use edge_split it duplicates the vertexes along marked edges or edges that exceed a certain degree measure. You can get good visuals just adding the edge_plit modifier, but if you apply the modifier it will add extra vertexes where it needs to in your original mesh to let smooth work in anything that takes vertex normals into consideration (3ds, BMS). I think this because 3D modelers think of vertexes, uv_coords, and vertex normals in a very freeform way; because it’s better for the artist. The graphics cards, internally, want each vertex to have a uv_coord and a normal.
Hmmm, that’s a little bit thick… just let me know if it doesn’t make much sense.I’m glad I’ve been able to help. There’s a F-14D parked at an aviation museum across town. I’ve wanted to offer to try to get some pictures for you if you need them, but I only have a cell phone camera at the moment (and the front cam lens is cracked too).