VECTOR

looking good! I think we also need to consider that much of these sci-fi models, with lots of detail, cut out sections etc especially weapons and sci fi gadgets are modelled in cad software like fusion 360 and moi, where you can Boole all day long to your hearts content and not have to worry about topology, vastly improving the modelling time. Not only that but, allowing you to really play around with design aspects and experiment without having to worry about booleans causing ugly distortions to the mesh and so on. A lot of those models would be truley horrible to model any other way, I’ve done a few sci fi models of that nature with sub d modelling and a nightmare doesn’t put it in to context.

Totally. I felt genuinely annoyed reading it. If I were that guy I’d bow my head in shame receiving an award based on other peoples work while you take all the credit is not cool. I guess it depends what you would consider wasting your time, there’s definitely things you should prioritise under time constraints and alot of what @imashinationsaid was perfectly valid. If like with you Dave, it’s a personal project and you’re just trying to do a nice render, then yea I get that cleaning up anything more than what would be needed to render it nicely could be considered a waste of time and energy. I’m a bit of a wire frame render junkie so for me it’s all about the topo 😄 I like what you’ve done there adding additional detail, the turret is looking really good 😄

-___- ugh I’d die too. There certainly is a debate to be had about using time efficiently especially with tight deadlines, probably more prominently in the professional setting, I love modelling obviously so if it’s a personal project I’ll take time to finesse everything and make sure all the topology is super clean and efficient, regardless of wether the mesh will deform etc. I do less hard surface models these days as most clients come to me for character work, but when I was a lot of the times it’s because someone had recommended me for having said clean models, good topology etc. So I’d still do my best to make sure everything was modelled as cleanly as possible, with the time permitted. Definitely not worth missing a deadline because everything’s not perfect quads but as a modeller in my experience you’re definitely judged on the tidiness of your work, not just if it looks ok in the render. As a modeller you get a certain satisfaction with a clean quad based mesh. Now I can see the argument from both sides of this, from the studio side on a deadline, does it matter if the mesh is full of triangles and n-gons if they’re not on a curved surface, won’t be deforming and it doesn’t effect the render, e.g artefacts on the surface etc. logic would answer no, if it renders fine who cares about the topology, the client etc is never gonna see it, they just get the final image/video/whatever. From the artist/modellers side there’s certainly some modelling etiquette, and principles that I personally go by and is usually the reason I get the modelling work to begin with. I used to do roofing work years ago and some of the boys on site that worked for our company would have some shoddy quality work, mainly the combination of lazyness and the attitude of “ it I’ll look alright from the ground, don’t worry about it “ or my personal favourite of “ it I’ll look alright from my house “ using the fact that it won’t be seen closely, or noticed or that you don’t have time etc as an excuse for sub par/poor work, which tends to breed sub par/ poor work. Which i feel is likely half the reason why we end up getting these crappy models given to us in the first place to have to retopo, fix , condemn to hell etc. A combination of tight deadlines, not enough time or the client won’t see it ,even down to sloppy, messy scene files etc.

I’ve been giving some royally crappy cad data in the past to work with, completely triangulated , disconnected polys, edges. Floating points all over the place and I’ve literally had to tell the client. I can’t work with this it’s just more time and cost effective to start over 😄

My eyes feel abused. Gotta give it to you Dave, I think I’d of just started over 😬😂

HA! not sure i have the Patience for that !

Ever seen a Hamster in a track suit with 2 Samurai swords ? you have now. i'll probably do some variations of this one with some glocks and stuff XD

Giving Marvin an update

Here's another one, did a fancy render for this one too XD Vectors ray gun, or vray for short 😉

There's never been a more gallant steed!

Even the badass Vader fight in the final episode couldn’t save it, even parts of that blatantly ripped off Dave filonis material with Vader’s helmet being cut towards the end. There was just so much stupidity and “ wtf “ moments, one of my favourites is when Tala is sat at the control panel in the ultra secret imperial base just casually talking to obi wan about getting him access , with someone sat right next to her, then when some generic officer comes in and tells her to “ come with me” because this isn’t your station she just casually leaves him unconscious/dead? Tucked around the corner still blatantly visible to anyone walking past that way, Then to top it off the three of them attempt to escape with Leia tucked under Obi wans massive jacket. You have to suspend a certain amount of disbelief when it comes to star wars but that was just too much

Let’s be honest, apart from a handful of shows like Mando and the animated star wars stuff, Star Wars has taken a massive nose dive since Disney took over, milking starwars for every penny they can before they leave it’s bare carcass to slowly rot in the sun

Heres a quick submission, did a version with the knife but was way over, sigh.

Just back from holiday yesterday, still hanging a little but back to the grind, did some topo adjustments this morning.

I follow this guy, he’s got some impressive stuff for sure

can we sds if the pre smoothed mesh is 99 or less ?

Welcome 😄

I actually downloaded a star destroyer made by the guy from some website a while ago, i think if you search online you should be able to find the model somewhere. From what I can remember it was all very basic geometry, nothing built with sub d etc just lots of basic greebles, because the thing is so insanely large zoomed out you would never need an ultra close up shots so you could afford to model simply because of the sheer scale of the thing. An art book would be pretty cool, even if it never sold a single copy just having it in physical form would be cool !

Thank you! That is quite some praise indeed!😄 it was fun in some parts but the bit that really took it out of me was the wing sections. There is just so much detail and little bits and bobs there that it just becomes incredibly tedious quite quickly. Thankfully you essentially only need to model half a ship and can mirror over the other side saving lots of time. I didn’t have any existing greebles at the time so I had to make everything from scratch which is what took the majority of the time, as well as my persistence to model everything with quads, as cleanly as possible and use subdivision. If you don’t care about topology you could bash this together quite quickly. I also decided to model the wing panels ( the black ultra dense parts ) with geometry, because I’m that anal 😬😂 where in reality you could quite easily do that via texturing. It would also depend on how close to the camera and stuff the ship would be. if there’s no ultra close up, you could cobble together a lot of the greebles with basic primitives. Keeping them in “Islands” is a good way to approach it. Apart from a couple of areas where the geometry is physically attached everything else was in islands just sat on the surface. I only combined sections later on after modelling because the object count was running into the hundreds. so I combined them into several areas like “inner wing details” , “outer wing details” etc If I were to build a scaled back version I wouldn’t use sub d ( this thing was 11 million polys when subdivided! ) I’d use standard primitives for the most part, for cut in panels like on the wing arms and centre sphere section that has that segmented look and the black panels on the wings I’d use textures/displacement. Reusing greebles where possible would also speed up the process. @dastwas working on a little plug-in a few years ago that would be great for this kind of project. Where you could drop a greeble/object/whatever from a custom library into the scene either directly onto a selected area, attaching it to the mesh or have it placed onto the surface instead. Combine that with a good texture job and I think you’re most of the way there. The majority of those details and greebles are so small in scale compared to the rest of the ship unless you’re looking at it super close they don’t really need to be anything more than basic cubes, cylinders, torus etc

Ugh never again ! This bloody thing took a month, on and off a few hours here and there before work and single handedly changed my out look on life XD. it’s based on a Tie Interceptor, most of the greebles are my custom design an interceptor 2.0 if you will and was over all a massive pain in the rear end 😄 it was more a test of modelling prowess for me anyway 🙂

😬😬😬😬