High-Res Startrek ships

from GalCiv2 Forums
Hey folks.

There are some "ship designer" built startrek ships available, but I have yet to see any real modeled startrek hulls in the download section, so I thought I would put together some high res model conversions of popular startrek ships for GalCiv 2. I hope to cover all the classes from Tiny to Huge.

What I’ve done so far is the Magella class (because the curves are sooOOooo sexy), and I have a link to my progress thus far:

http://bhendel.splicedigital.com/galcivstartrek1.jpg

The model will run you about 260,000 triangles ( ! ), but I think that considering the poly count, the performance in GalCiv2 is incredible. Here you can see 10 of the things (2,600,000 faces in total) and as you can see from my frame rate that I am pulling about 10fps (from 60fps before the ships). This is with a Radeon 9800 pro and a P4 1.7. I think I can skim about 100,000 faces off the model with some more optimization.

http://bhendel.splicedigital.com/galcivstartrek2.jpg

I hope to cover the following ships, above Magella:

Some form of Runabout or shuttle for Tiny.
??? for small
Defiant for medium
Galaxy and Sovereign for Large
Promentheus for Huge.

Any requests? Suggestions? Cease and desist orders?

Let me know if anyone is interested in getting their hands on these models. My plan is to have them plug into GalCiv as normal ship hulls with mount points and all. Hopefully make use of the mod system soon enough.

-Brian
[email protected]
modding
82,829 views 64 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
nice work dude, but, you should do it with less frame rate dropping

Delta Flyer Class Runabout and/or shuttle for Tiny.
Defiant and Excelsior for Small
Intrepid and Magella for Medium
Galaxy and Nebula for Large
Prometheus and Sovereign for Huge.

Akira, Steamrunner, Cargo Ship, Colony Ship... found this on the web, plenty of ships here...
http://armada2.filefront.com/files/Armada_2/Ships;764
Offworld Trading Company
Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

Hey speeze! Thats a sweet looking ship! I definatly suggest getting that poly-count down, though  you're obviously spending alot of time on these, and to have users not use them due to frame-rate issues would be a MAJOR bummer. FYI, all hulls in the game were designed at 2000 polys or less, and jewelry was 600 polys or less...which is a LONG way off from the 260k tris that ship is kickin' right now, but just a helpful comparison is you want to shoot for performance over beauty

But yeah, GREAT looking ship..hope to see more!

Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
What an awesome creation.
I would love to follow this thread, but the watch feature never works on this forum

As I have a high end (ish) PC I would love to see ships that have a greater than average poly count. How many poly's before a big slow down would occur I am not sure but no doubt you will test that

Good luck
Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Erm, isn't the Galaxy the largest Federation ship? Slightly shorter but far more massive than the Sovereign? The Defiant is about 120m: that makes it smaller than pretty much everthing that isn't a Sabre or a shuttle. Just match model volume with 'size units', instead of trying to force some kind of RTS-style unit hierachy.
Reply #6 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
not basin on size but on the concept of hp and basic strength....also would like to see lower poly count...but why not do it like it is already set up wher eu just put a basic hull type in the game like the starship creator program and then use engines and saucer sections and pods all for different types of jewelry...like the idea glad to see someone working on it and showing some results....no with the long demise of microprose i dont think there will be a birth of the federation 2 anytime soon....great concepts from this game that would be nice to roll over if they did make botf2.....
Reply #7 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Have you got a job in graphical design? Because if not, you really should have. Wow. Any chance you could change them (when you've done any more) to basic hulls, like xzanon said? I'd love to fit phasors and some warp drive on there.

"Cap'n there's Drengin off the starboard bow"
"Mr scott, give me full power!"

Huh. I think I just made my geek rating skyrocket. Hey wait, this is a galciv2 forum, thats a good thing!
Reply #8 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
With effective normal mapping, you shouldnt need anywhere near that polycount to get great looking ships with smooth looking surfaces.

Bear in mind the "normal" maps generated natively in pshop with the nvidia plug in are really just glorified bump maps. If you generate the Normal maps from a high resolution of the model, the smooth curves and surfaces within the silhouette will be incorporated in, and then you only need enough geometry to get a resonably "curved" silhouette.

Great looking ships though!
Reply #9 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
when im playing in a huge galaxy in the end-game with hundreds of ships flying around my game bogs down badly, at thats with 3000 or so poly ships. Those designs look great, but man my computer can't handle that beaty:D
Reply #10 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Considering the size of the model in the game most of the time, you should be able to cut the polys on that down to under 2500, easy. You don't even need normal mapping: that's for stuff you're seeing large and in your face all the time.

This leads me to wonder how the LODing GalCiv2 works (if it even has a LOD system)
Reply #11 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
By mass, the galaxy is the largest official ship in the federation (if you do some math on the dimensions it has roughly 3x the internal volume of a soveriegn even though its official mass is only about 30% larger). But if you want to go by combat power then the defiant has to hit the top of the list (with the prometheus of course, and perhaps the soveriegn). The thing about federation ships that most people don't realize is they aren't warships. Look at the schematics, only about 5% of the internal volume of a galaxy class ship is dedicated to weapon or defense systems. So even if the defiant is 1/4 the length with 1/20 the volume, its 100% warship and can stand toe to toe with some of the largest meanest ships in the alpha quadrant.
Reply #13 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
GalCiv2 seems to display this model pretty quickly, compared with DirectX Viewer, ir even in max viewports (Kudos to Stardock team). Also, if you are running a huge galaxy, remember that once you zoom out, ships appear as icons, so only a limited number of these should appear on the screen. However you are right, the poly count is just a tad ( ! ) too high for real game play. I am going to see what I can do. I already have a sovereign at half this face-count, unoptimized, This model was particularly curvy, and the ass of the thing is pretty high detail as well.

I am going to see what I can do about that poly count though.

-Brian
Reply #14 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Got the poly count down to 98,000 !! Whoo... From 260,000, thats not bad : ) Had to remove some detail from the ventral areas though.

Link

-Brian
Reply #15 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Very nice stuff.

Have you checked out some of the star trek ships at scifi3d.theforce.net?

I tried getting some of those to work in the game with very little luck. Would love to see ships like USS Defiant and Voyager in game, unfortunally im not much of a 3d modeler; otherwise I am looking foward to your ship releases.

Reply #16 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Spleeze, i'd like to congratulate you on your effort. The ships look realy beautifull and it's nice to see that somebody is actually doing a star trek mod, not just talking about it!
Reply #17 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
keep it up man.. get those poly counts down and we can adopt them as our official ships
Reply #18 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Keep it up, excellent work!!!
Reply #19 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Heh just dont cut to many poly's. I rather have you offer the ships in a pack with high res and low res textures That way people with top of the line comps could still use the high poly models. But aye good work, looks great so far hope you decide to also work on some klingon and perhaps romulan ships:P
Reply #20 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Hey Vortexdr.

Ya I am targeting people who have the computer power to run these things. Check out my other ship that is infact lower poly (about 15,000!) and still packs in all the detail..

https://forums.galciv2.com/index.aspx?ForumID=162&AID=111535

I will post another one today (just a small shuttlecraft).

-Brian
Reply #21 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
hey nice work, Ill have to remember you when I start my mod group for TES4 Oblivion. just a quick questoin, ive been a star trek fan since i was a lil kid, not a huge fan but ive seen most of whats out there and as of yet ive never seen this magella class vessle, it look amazing. I would just like to know where the design is from and if you could send me a link wiht more info thanks and keep up the good work.
Reply #22 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
SwiftBoot It is a fan-based design as a matter of fact. Even searching Magallan (not magella, sorry) doesn't get you very far. It is certainly not an official ship type. I just thought it looked cool : )

-Brian
Reply #23 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Btw curious are the two ships you made already available for download for peep to play around with or are you gonna wait on release so that you can put out a "pack".

Woudnt mind playing around with em and shoudnt be to hard to .rar em and then toss em on fileplanet or something like that.
Reply #24 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
GREAT WORk BRIAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I read that you are as ambitious as modelling starfleet ships for all hull classes..... WOW! Can't wait!

I also read that you were still deciding which starfleet ships should map to what hull classes. I have a suggestion based on relative size in the Star Trek universe:

tiny: Shuttlecraft, Danube (runabaout),
small: Miranda, Constellation, Defiant, Norway, Nova, Sabre
medium: Constitution, Intrepid, Steamrunner, Prometheus
large: Excelsior, Ambassador, Nebula, Akira
Huge: Galaxy, Sovereign
Reply #25 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
vortexdr I am going to want BETA testers at some point just to play a few games with them to make sure everything runs smoothly, then release the whole thing as a pack.

AdmiralZ, thx for the list. I will keep it in mind.

-Brian