Battle of the Bases! (September 7, 2007)

[Bandit LOAF]

Kevin Caccamo has rendered a Wing Commander II-style Star Base (or is it a Wing Commander Academy-style space station?). He says: "Notice how the starbase is completely made of Spheres (some are manipulated.) This is probably one of my first experiments with the "Dissolve" function which eliminates all edges between selected faces in Wings3D." I'll take your word for it! You can download the 3D model here.

​

Not to be outdone, Iceman16 has also made a Star Base model! Who will win this most epic of all contests?

​

--
Original update published on September 7, 2007

 

[Kevin Caccamo]

Well, I was thinking of making a WC Academy mod for Flight Commander.

Otherwise, thank you for copying Iceman's pictures to the Wcnews site. That's the first chance I ever saw those pictures.

 

[Iceman16]

sweet, first time I've been in the news here! thanks!

btw here are some updated pics of my star base, Ive uploaded them on Imageshack so hopefully everyone can see them. this is for a WC2 remake I've been planning on making for a few years, been waiting nearly that long for a person I asked to model this base, finally got some free time and modelled it myself.

 

[Kevin Caccamo]

A Wing Commander 2 Remake? Well, good luck!

A great alternative resource to Standoff is the XWA WCTC, which contains a variety of WC ships from WC1 to WCP.

Here is a link to the public beta, and here are some useful XWA editing tools. You can use opt 2 3ds to convert the game's models into 3DS format. (Hint: scroll down)

Another great util used for viewing the models is Opt GL, found here.

 

[Quarto]

You know, it's funny, this outbreak of starbases, because last week Eder finally got around to texturing and finishing off the starbase model he had lying around... so, that makes three starbases in one week .

 

[Eder]

It had been textured for months (maybe over a year?), what I did was just split it up into components and make the destroyed versions and import everything into Vision... but yeah, three finalized Starbases in a week.

I'll take some screenies and post them here later (gotta tweak a mission to do it, because Q only included the base in the ugliest, yellowest sector ever).

 

[Eder]

Here we go.

​

I even got carried away and took some more screenshots and made a thread about them here.

 

[Iceman16]

wow. Eder what program do you use for modelling? I can see I have some way to go before I can be that good haha.

 

[Eder]

I switched to 3ds MAX about two or three years ago... most of Standoff's models predate that and were made in TrueSpace 3.

I think even newer versions of TrueSpace are free now... but it's pretty obsolete. There are much better free programs, like Blender (which has some great free plugins).

 

[Kevin Caccamo]

sweet, first time I've been in the news here! thanks!

btw here are some updated pics of my star base, Ive uploaded them on Imageshack so hopefully everyone can see them. this is for a WC2 remake I've been planning on making for a few years, been waiting nearly that long for a person I asked to model this base, finally got some free time and modelled it myself.

WHY CAN'T I DO THAT GOOD?!?!!!!!!

Anyways, that's some awesome work. It out-wits anything I could ever do. I wish I was a better 2D artist, but I'm not, and I feel I need to learn how to do this stuff.

Also, with what Eder said, I think he automatically wins the Battle of the Bases.

 

[Eder]

Eh, it just takes practice - I've been modeling for about 10 years now, that's kind of an unfair headstart.

Back in the day I wouldn't even attempt to model anything that wasn't boxy, and my textures were definitely worse than those... I remember about 8 years ago when I started making models of WC ships, I used to think I would never be able to model a Sabre or Broadsword. And my first Rapier II ever is an incredibly unaccurate model that makes me cringe every time it (still) shows up in people's screenshots.

You guys should up the polycounts and the texture resolution, and you'd be surprised with what you can do. The starbase in particular is basically a bunch of cut or squashed spheres stacked on top of tapered cylinders and things like that... so it's a good design for you to start getting used to model with more detail. The hardest part will be getting the proportions right, but after that it should be easy to manipulate the primitives. Take some reference pictures and start hacking at those cylinders until they look good.