Ok here it is folks, the second installment to the GalTrek series: The Defiant. The first can be found here: [link], though I think that I should redo it. Please post here if you feel that you would like to make use of these ships in the future. If i know people are interested, then I will hasten my efforts.

As you may or may not know, the goal of this project is to bring high detail (yet still playable) Star Trek ship hulls into GalCiv2. These hulls will act like any normal in-game hull, with mount points for weapons, extras, you name it.

What makes these hulls special is that I am working with models of very high mesh density and high resolution composite textures.These ships look amazing when rendering in max, but they are obviously too large to fit into a game (though, GalCiv2 engine does a fantastic job with high poly counts).

To that end, I have spent a great deal of time in optimization of geometry, while still keeping the high-detail look of each model. Each mesh I will bring into Galciv will have its materials (which currently are highly composited and blended in max) collapsed into workable layerless textures, which can be easily digested by the GalCiv2 engine. Also, to top things off, I am introducing a lighting pass in max which will add nice shadow detail, and which I can also be collapsed into the base textures.

So lets get started shall we?

The Defiant

After about a full day of optimizing the mesh, I’ve gotten what was once 260,000 triangles down to about 15,000.

I have then lit the model using a couple of area-shadow casting direct lights, and a skylight for fill lighting. Then to make this lighting and all the textures accessible by the GalCiv2 engine, I have employed max’s “Render to Texture” tool to collapse all the lighting and material (lots of layers) into game-friendly PNGs.

Unfortunately, some of the automated features of max’s “Render to Texture” tool could not be used, and I had to automatically assign these newly flattened textures back into the mesh.

This is a composite material before the collapse (not game friendly):

This was the result after collapse and merging back into the mesh (game friendly, whoo hoo!):

And the final result. Please note that this is fully real-time rendered in a max viewport (no actual “rendering” necessary):

Ok looks good so far, but will it all work in GalCiv2? Lo and behold, GalCiv 2 was unimpressed, and my model went to disco-Ville (don’t ask). Hm. For some reason, even though the model works well in DirectX Viewer, GalCiv2 is much more picky about map channels, and as the “Render to Texture” tool produced it’s texture coordinates on map channel 3, I ended up copying this channel to channel 1, 2 and 4 (I had to create chanel 4 on all objects except one). I admit that I am not 100% sure about why it is necessary, but it works.

Lets give GalCiv2 another run.

Ah, much more palatable. Notice the self-illuminated lights around the bottom of the ship. GalCiv2 does a special lighting pass if you have your textures set up properly. I’ve imported this model as a “large” ship hull, so for the Defiant, it looks a little larger then expected in the game.

This is only temporary of course, since I have not actually gotten to figuring out what hulls will go with what sizes. I will work out the final details later, including adding mount points for in-game hardware (the mount points really do work!).

In-game performance is good, though there is obviously a slight frame rate drop. I really do think that these models (even over 20K tris) are very playable by all players except those who have itty bitty video cards.

My intention is to create ships for each hull size: tiny, small, medium, large, huge. I am taking suggestions as to which federation ships to use for each size.

So this was my second attempt at going from Max -> GalCiv2. I think this ship is a big improvement over my last, in terms of in-game performance and appeal. I welcome and questions of comments, as well as ship suggestions for each size class. Also if you have any questions about getting your max ships into GalCiv2 let me know. FWI: The max optimization modifier is garbage, plus it scrambles your mapping coordinates. There are much better optimization plugins available.

Thanks for reading. My next task is to create something small! I’ve spent about 2 days straight on the Defiant. Maybe I will try one of the tiny hulls (Shuttle? Runabout? Lifeboat?)

Cheers.

-Brian