Free Hornet Model

tbaldree

Rear Admiral
So, I've been studying Howie's amazing models and textures from the shots he's posted in the past for Pioneer and other projects, and trying to brush up on my modeling/texturing skills for my little personal project.

After several evenings of work, and looking at tons of source material, and Howie's fantastic highres Hornet, as well as shots of game-suitable Hornets that Howie and other modders/artists have put together, I finally finished mine.

The texturing style owes a lot to Howard's work, as is probably pretty obvious.
Hopefully he doesn't mind some fanboyish emulation on my part.

Anyway, it's about 2800 polys, and includes diffuse, specular, illumination, and bump maps.

This should be game suitable, and easily integrated into an existing mod project, and you are free to do so if you like, no strings.

I've packed up a version with the textures, as well as a MAX7 mesh and a 3DS for anybody without MAX.

Apologies for any shoddiness - I'm not the finest modeler/texturer, more of a code-monkey.

Feel free to use this in whatever you want - hope you have fun with it!



http://buildingworlds.com/WC/hornetmodel.zip


Shots -

render1hornet.jpg


render2hornet.jpg


render3hornet.jpg


enjoy!
 
Wow, it looks pretty much exactly like my Hornet. I'm curious - did you use my high-res model as texture source? Directly, I mean. If so, no worries - that's actually how most of the WC:prophecy textures were created - they made a high-res cinematic model, and then baked the textures into lower-res models. Random bit 'o trivia. Looks good.
 
Actually, no - the textures are from scratch. A big 'ol messy PSD with a jillion layers.

Although I did think about it - I've never had much luck in doing render-to-texture from highres source with projected coordinates and getting anything good out of it. The lattices give me headaches, and I wanted to work on basic texture techniques to boot, so this was probably better for me in the long run :p

Mostly I just used solid base colors, and tons of lines with bevel effects, and a 'dirty' layer where I did a lot of dodge-burning.

Then I generated a bumpmap based on the flats and lines, and did a radiosity (sort of) rendering to-texture in MAX, and used it as a multiply layer over the whole thing-

I looked at your highres model many times for proportions, and at overall shape, and layout of color-regions- and for a lot of little details that you injected that you just can't find in the original source, and that look so great.

as far as most of the detail, I actually looked primarily at the Pioneer shots of the Hornet that you posted ages ago, so it probably cleaves closer to that one.

You da man-
 
WEll, don't take my models - the high-res ones - as the absolute truth when it comes to details. Much of the original reference didn't provide the detail I wanted to add so I made stuff up. Most of it is at least partially accurate - but I'd ignore it when it comes to the really minute details - stickers and warning tape, for instance. :D
 
Yeah. It's like learning to draw. I think when you're learning, you copy a lot, and as you get more comfortable, you become more original. I think this is from the 'copying' stage :) I'll do my best to be less of a copycat next go-round, but this time out was a great learning experience. Thanks for not hatin' ;)
 
Great model!

I've been playing around with DirectX for the past little while and I've been looking all over for WC models that export nicely to X files. Loads up no problem... Got any more I can play with? ;)
 
Well it would be fun to fly that Hornet around a Tigers Claw in my little engine hehe. :cool:


Anyone have any sound effects I can load into this thing?
 
Cockpit == a pain. Fitting them inside the external enclosure is time consuming, and the original 2D artwork doesn't exactly work in 3D, so you have to sort of extrapolate, and just make some stuff up. Subsequently getting that to look right from perspective ingame is also a bit of a tweakfest, so the cockpit is taking longer than expected. Finally got all the geometry in place, ~1500 polys, which I'm pretty happy with - on to UV-ing. I think I'll lightmap it too. Trying to set it up so that all of my ingame HUD elements can work readably/properly on the actual cockpit, rather than as HUD overlays, which I think will be neat.

I probably don't know what I'm getting into with the Tiger's Caw. Has anybody got specs on it, or can they direct me to some? Those sprites are awful small- I'd like to be able to match the launch sequence from WC1 with the actual geometry of the ship. I expect this will take quite a bit of extrapolating too-

On an unrelated note - get away from those .X files as soon as humanly possible. They are the devil :) If you can make the jump to another format sooner rather than later, you'll be well served - trust me.

managing your own custom model format is pretty easy too with a little practice - here's a free flexible 3dsmax exporter plugin that will let you make your own! It's a good start.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/freexporter/
 
Okay cool thanks.... I heard X files have gone legacy but I figured it was easier to use because I actually had documentation for it that was easy to figure out.
 
tbaldree said:
I probably don't know what I'm getting into with the Tiger's Caw. Has anybody got specs on it, or can they direct me to some? Those sprites are awful small- I'd like to be able to match the launch sequence from WC1 with the actual geometry of the ship. I expect this will take quite a bit of extrapolating too-
You must have seen this already, right?
http://www.blacklance.org/claw/19.html
 
Just out of curiosity... I imported your ship into Nexus like I've done with my mod to see what it'd look like... and here's what I got. :D

Hornet.jpg


Maybe a WC1 ship pack would be pretty neat... good modeling, and great texture!
 
Scale

Hey I had a question maybe some one can answer. I have been playing around with loading this model in my direct3d project and was wondering how this thing is scaled. I mean how many pixels per meter sort of thing? I want to throw some more objects in the mix but I'm not sure how to scale things. I'm not a pro-star at 3ds so I can't figure out how the scale works in it.
 
Back
Top