Babylon5 Station Model V01.00 for Imagine 3.3 14/06/96 Requirements ------------ RAM, and lots of it! This is a large model, it takes up 2.5Mb of disk space and contains approx 75K polygons. Depending on how much detail is left in and how much of the model is visible, it can require a total amount of memory between 12Mb and 22Mb (these are actual recorded totals) This is for the bare model with no nice nebulas, planets or star furies. CPU, if you are going to render this model with all the nicities mentioned above then the bigger the better I currently have an 030 in my machine and the minimal renders (some jpegs included) normally took in the region of an hour to two hours each. This is for a ram only render, not using VMM or a similar tool. Development ----------- The overall elapsed time for this project is now almost a year, of that most of five months free time went into the building of the station. Most of the source material for this has been GIFs collected from the lurker site and tracing paper taped first over the TV with the video paused then carefully retaped over my monitor. The gifs were reduced to outlines, then sections stored out as separate images and used as backdrops. As the object grew test renders were then overlaid onto the original images to check how accurate they were. The procedures were then repeated and repeated until the 1.00 version was produced. Object Structure ---------------- The station is a grouped object built from 15 individual objects and a grouping axis. All the component objects are aligned along the X axis and the object could be placed in the cycle editor and the central sections given rotation vectors. The two _DETS objects in the group can be removed in distance shots along with the ELEVATOR object, of course if an object component like the docking bay is not visible at all in a particular scene then that can be removed as well Each object component has all of its faces placed in various subgroups. A face is currently only in one subgroup and no others. If you need to further reduce the polygon count in distance shots then subgroups like ducting ones can be removed as these have fairly high face counts. All the major objects in the group have had quick edges applied. A hint when first loading the object into the stage editor is to make the perspective view fullscreen then load the object and immediately select "quickedge all" from the menu. This will let you load the object and not have to wait for all the polygons to be drawn in all three parts of the triview. The _DETS objects have no quickedges and so are invisible in this state. Object Components ----------------- The axis/objects are as follows : STATION - Control Axis BODY_MAIN - The main cylinder BODY_TAIL - The tail assembly connecting the main body with the reactor COBRA_DETS - Additional detail on the cobra bays, can be removed for long distance shots. COBRA_MAIN - The main cobra bays,connects from the second sphere over to the first sphere DOCK_BAY - The detailed docking bay. This sits over the docking ring. DOCK_RING - This is the end cap from the super connect section. ELEVATOR - This leads out perpendicular from the sphere 1 details to the rim of sphere 2, can be removed for longer shots. REACTOR - The far end section connecting to the body tail. SOLAR_ARRAY - Overlapping the main body and the tail and holds the large solar panel assemblies SPHERE1 - Behind the super connecter section SPHERE1_DETS - Additional details on the connecting cylinder between the two spheres, can be removed for longer shots. SPHERE2 - The larger of the two spheres connects to the main body SUPER_CONNECT - This sits between the docking ring and the first sphere it links up to the superstructure front section SUPER_FRONT - The front superstructure sits on the super connect and backs onto the superstructure main section. SUPER_MAIN - Behind the super front sections the main superstructure spans the main body of the station anchoring down to the body tail. Texturing --------- The current model has no textures at all. Subgroups have been coloured so that the model is not too drab. This was a painful decision to make. I have created a series of brushmaps which would give the model what I believe to be an excellent finish, but Imagine 3.3 (and 4.0) simply cannot handle them! The biggest problem is that tiling only works on flat x-z surfaces and to use the textures tiling is required for both cylindrical and spherical surfaces. I have tried using procedural textures both the Imagine supplied and Essence collection but they actually make the object less realistic. I have also written some procedural textures of my own which again fail to provide the necessary effects. If Imagine 5 has a greatly improved brushmap control then I will revisit this section of the model. Future ------ There are a number of things I would like to add to the model, but then it would probably never see the light of day, but things to come are : - Lighting for 'night' scenes - Texturing as mentioned above - The offensive weaponry, gun points etc etc - Several predefined states. - Animatable sections, rotating, opening bay doors (gun points again) - Perhaps some of the smaller ships associated with B5 Any comments, suggestions (especially hints on brushmaps) about the model are welcome. Also by this author Realms - An AmiTCP Mud Server from Aminet:comms/tcp/realms.lha Andrew Baillie andyb@babylon5.demon.co.uk