Bob McDob
Better Health Through Less Flavor
No, really, this *is* good news - at least if you care a whit about the historical preservation of models. Yeah, if you saw the other post I made, you know what this is - the Fralthra cruiser lives again!
For whatever reason, when the original Origin models of the ships from Wing Commander II to Privateer were passed down from On High, one ship came through with less than sparkling results - the Fralthra. In fact, if you loaded it into some programs, it wouldn't appear at all, which spawned fears that the model itself was lost for good - thankfully, that's not the case. When Marc created his replica of the model, he used the original as a baseline, but was only able to come up with the model's vertices (edges of the actual 3D model, like trying to connect the dots, though fortunately the model is so high-resolution there's no real ambiguity in figuring out what the end result is). I don't know which model he used - the one that was released individually as part of a competition, or that came as part of the great model pack released last year (I can't even load the second one), so that might explain part of it - the other explanation is that the modeling program he used, and which I used to load it up (AC3D) has made leaps and bounds to actually make sense of things. Either way is fine by me.
So yeah, I'm pretty excited and not really able to write anything sensible here, these are just words to fill in where words should go. The next step obviously is to actually put the textures back on, but there are some problems with that, as anything I try to put on shows up sheer black (this might be a symptom of a larger problem - when I try to view the wireframes in 3ds Max the entire ship disappears like some kind of Incredible Cloaking Cruiser, which leads me to suspect the entire model may still have errors in it). I'm not really used to this kind of thing even under the best circumstances, though, I've been trying for some time to get the Concordia's bridge restored but the textures won't even show up in the material editor. Anyway, that's enough for now.
(The bottom part of the pylon is there - the rendering just makes it looks like it isn't; I was pretty giddy and didn't really bother to filter around to make the absolute best render I could.)
For whatever reason, when the original Origin models of the ships from Wing Commander II to Privateer were passed down from On High, one ship came through with less than sparkling results - the Fralthra. In fact, if you loaded it into some programs, it wouldn't appear at all, which spawned fears that the model itself was lost for good - thankfully, that's not the case. When Marc created his replica of the model, he used the original as a baseline, but was only able to come up with the model's vertices (edges of the actual 3D model, like trying to connect the dots, though fortunately the model is so high-resolution there's no real ambiguity in figuring out what the end result is). I don't know which model he used - the one that was released individually as part of a competition, or that came as part of the great model pack released last year (I can't even load the second one), so that might explain part of it - the other explanation is that the modeling program he used, and which I used to load it up (AC3D) has made leaps and bounds to actually make sense of things. Either way is fine by me.
So yeah, I'm pretty excited and not really able to write anything sensible here, these are just words to fill in where words should go. The next step obviously is to actually put the textures back on, but there are some problems with that, as anything I try to put on shows up sheer black (this might be a symptom of a larger problem - when I try to view the wireframes in 3ds Max the entire ship disappears like some kind of Incredible Cloaking Cruiser, which leads me to suspect the entire model may still have errors in it). I'm not really used to this kind of thing even under the best circumstances, though, I've been trying for some time to get the Concordia's bridge restored but the textures won't even show up in the material editor. Anyway, that's enough for now.
(The bottom part of the pylon is there - the rendering just makes it looks like it isn't; I was pretty giddy and didn't really bother to filter around to make the absolute best render I could.)
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