Digital Art Zone

Hi all:)

Sticking with my watercraft theme - this was inspired by a model toy I saw while shopping for a Christmas present - turns out is is Earthrace, the record-holder for the fastest ocean circumnavigation - 60 days!

Cool boat. It looks like it could double as a space fighter.

Yes, the original is quite something!  Wish I could do it justice - just could never get flat windows in a smoothed model.  This has been spoken of at great length in this forum, but I don’t think it has ever been satisfactorily resolved.

It has given me some ideas on spacecraft - strange that spacecraft are always so aerodynamic, when there’s no need for that in space:)

I would really appreciate some help from the texturing guru’s.  You see in the below pic of the original those beautifully delicate patterns on the “tailplanes”.  I’d like to copy those onto the model.  I’ve tried tracing them in Gimp using stroked paths, but the resolution is terrible.  One of the problems is that I only have a very low resolution original to copy from.  The other may be that the resolution of my UV maps is 1024 X 1024.

I’m only just starting trying to do detailed textures, so there’s a lot I don’t know about Gimp yet.

I’d really appreciate some pointers on doing this.

Cheers:)

Getting “sharp corners” with a smoothed object is easily done through the use of the “Extract edge” tools.

As for space ships being aerodynamic when it’s unnecessary in space. It’s done because many space ships (particularly fighters) can also fly within the atmosphere. They aren’t restricted to space only. Without the aerodynamics, they would be.

I had good luck in increasing the resolution in both the uv maps and the texture maps.
Instead of 1024x1024, how about 4096x4096? D/Studio & Poser can use Hi-res textures.
How about a hi-res bump map?

Getting “sharp corners” with a smoothed object is easily done through the use of the “Extract edge” tools.

Care to give a demo?  In the attached pic two of the faces have been given the extract edge treatment. 

1.  Shows it unsmoothed
2.  Shows it smoothed level 2 - even with double edge extraction and very tight edges, it doesn’t work.
3.  Shows it with breaks - about the closest I can get, but not satisfactory.

Just kidding about the aerodynamic spacecraft - guess we’ll never really know whether it is actually possible to build a craft that can zip in and out of atmospheres and space:)

@nitehawk - yes, looks like that is the way to go:)

Thankfully my daughter came to my rescue by doing the patterns in Coral Draw and I could layer the .svg in Gimp - and she gave me an A4 size Wacom tablet so I can learn to do this for myself in InkScape:)

What a nice daughter. 

Yes, I’m very fortunate to have two of them:)

Hmm!  I have four, they can get a bit expensive though.   
Oh the boat, nice artwork.

Thank goodness mine have grown up beyond being expensive…excepting that my refrigerator is now known by the name “Pick and No Pay” whenever they visit:)

Starting to get the hang of placing detailed artwork on the UV templates - previously just did flood-filling:)

Hi Roy. You have your daughters well trained nice model - good job on the textures too