Oolite Bulletins

Hi. For the past month I have been working on a Biological-Ship mod and it is nearing completion! All I have to do is texture and make it a little less blocky it for it to be done. I have decided to post a picture of it. Heres a link to a picture. (please note this is the first mod I have ever made for any game EVER, so if it isnt all perfect and round dont get mad at me as im only 12 )


http://www.picturehosting.com/images/gh ... oship1.png

Hi Danman

Welcome to.

Don't worry. People are usually very nice to each other in here (take the last few days as an exception).

Don't worry if modding seems a bit difficult at first - I had never tried scripting or much 3D modeling 5 months ago, Oolite makes it fun to learn it all.

Your ship looks interesting.

You might get a problem with the number of polygons though. After you have done a tesselate->triangulate in Wings3D with your model selected, it needs to have less than 512 faces for it to work in the game.

Happy modding and don't hold back on your questions. Some of the folks in here can answer just about any Oolite mod related question.

@Danman - Hello and Welcome! Nice looking model you've got there, can't wait to see a skin on it!

I'll not mention the jealousy I feel that a chap more than half my age can slap together models like that!

Do I see a new star arising?

Captain Hesperus
"He shall bring balance to the Force."

“More than half your age”? You are more than half your age. :-p

Ahruman wrote:

“More than half your age”? You are more than half your age. :-p

And getting older by the second. Pardon my brain, it's an idiot.

Captain Hesperus
"I must love the taste of boot leather, to keep putting my foot in my mouth."

Ya everyone thanks for the comments! . Also, yes before i put a skin on it (something of a stained beige to make it look like its alive) ill need to tone down the polygons, thats what im doing right now, currently im working on the wings and the cockpit area, if i could tone those down it should work in the game. Also, I have no idea whatsoever about texturing,I have followed the instructions on this website to the letter about that, but when i get to making the texture external, I dont get an option to change the format to png. It just asks me what to name it and where to save it. Can anyone help me with this? Thanks!

There should be a roll down menu for choosing file type in the save window when you make the texture external.

Hi Danman.

Good job so far, keep it up.

Some friendly points of advice:
Draw your ship first from various angles, this help you visualise the item.
Think ahead; chaos brings unneccecary actions, that are deleted, altered, moved, etc. This can create hidden errors in your mesh, which can be very frustrating to isolate and remove.
Don't worry too much if you get stuck on a single model, leave it for a while, start afresh. Compare the results, interbreed them. Or just dump it and work on something more interesting.
(I don't advice starting too ambitous projects either: start small and add to it in small increments.)

So what can you tell us about the background of your ship?
Is it cristaline? insectoid? A natural spaceborn species or a created construct?
Do they replicate by themselves or are they created de-novo in a biofactory/incubator?

---

Textures:

You can export textures from Wings3D by right-clicking the item in the outliner-window at the right. select Export.... then a standard query window appears asking you the filename (=what you named in the outiner) and below that what filetype you'd like to export as.

Alternatively, when your model and textures are finished.
go to the File menu, select Export again and then the Wavefront (obj) one.
The little square next to the Obj selection, hides the options for this method. Here you can define the default filetype for textures exported together with the Obj(mesh) and Mtl(UVmap) files.

Thanks for the help. My ship is supposed be like a space dwelling organism yes. But I will have one for sale in the game somewhere. The backround to this will be that somebody captured one and found out it coud support life and that once inside it its nervous system was exposed. So, the way its piloted is by touching different nerves to have different responces etc... Also, to make it more humain I have decided these organisms are not concious, like plants, they act more like vunus fly traps, but at a much more sophisticated level. As for propultion i dunno, ill just have the regular rockets and maybe someday ill figure out a way to make some sorta weird alein energy propulsion thingy. Thats the backround, i hope you enjoyed. They are just going to be grouped as pirates. Its gonna be in production for another month or two to smooth out all the kinks, i.e. too many polygons, hidden errors and other things. Im glad everyone likes it!

Oops forgot to say, ya i just tried all of your options, I appreciate the help but all it shows me are: File Name:, and Save Where: thanks for trying though. Im sure ill get the hang of it eventually.

(I appologize for all of my posts in a row) Woah i just tried something different and it worked, it was nearly the same but i just ignored the make external thingy and it worked out all the same as the instructions said it should have. I have one last question though, how do i upload the textures into OmniGraffle?

Dunno about omnigaffle,

but you could imitate the thargoids and forego the engine trails altogether.

You may even want to add a nice set of flashers as a driveglow (See Orbs.oxp) like they do in startrek.