Battlestar Galactica Plug

Looking for help

I'm looking for someone who is good at 3d ship design to help design the ships for a battlestar themed plug. I'm looking for 5 ships: Galactica, Pegasus, Viper mk2, Viper mk7, and a raptor. Possibly in later release a basestar and raiders. Helping in this will give you an immortal place in the plug in a BSG ship of your choice. I've already started working on outfits and extra planets, all i need is someone to help with the ships. Thanks for your time. Also I'm aware that there is already a BSG plug out there, but no offence to the creator I want one that uses actual bsg pics, and has a storyline.

I'm not entirely sure if I could find it again, but there's a website out there with open source models of sci-fi ships from all different brands. I think it's something like sci-fimeshes.com, but that doesn't sound quite right. I found it when I was looking for models to add into Celestia. I know when I ran across it that I found a whole downloadable set of models for BSG, including Vipers, Raptors, Battlestars, Baseships, and just about everything else. There's one rather poor model of the original BSG on the Celestia motherlode if you'd want it.

Otherwise, Blender is really pretty easy to use, once you get the hang of it, as is Google's Sketchup modeller. If you're willing to put in some of the more tedious work with it, you could put together some decent models in a few hours. I'd recommend playing with several of the tutorials in Blender unless you have some 3D modelling experience. It was really confusing for about the first hour I played with it, but it got a lot easier in a hurry. I've been working on a few models for a Firefly mod on and off. My computer isn't a fan of Blender's renderer, but I'm running an Acer (ugh,) that's really quite a pile, and I'm on Vista (double ugh,) Home Basic, (triple ugh.) If you're on anything more decent, Blender ought to work just fine for you. Other people around here might be able to help you with converting things from Sketchup to Blender better. I haven't had time to play with that much. I know it can be done, though. Sketchup is great for modelling, but I don't think it even has a renderer built in.

I'd offer to help you with this project, but I'm honestly overwhelmed with RealLife™ as it stands. Teaching junior high is consuming my soul and spitting it back out into glasses of scotch. If you were willing to wait until about late July for things, I might be able to give you a hand, but that's about it.

Yeah i understand...I have driven quite a few of my teachers to drink in college :mellow:
but if no one else seems interested in doing it...i guess i can wait for you. My 3d art skills are sub-sub-par at best. I stick to things i know...like logistics management and ordering people around lol. I'm surprised that with almost 100 views you are the only person to respond.

If you're not making the models yourself, just get some off the internet, such as off Google Warehouse or a sci-fi mesh site, and give full credit to the author. Then, you have to either find out how to animate it yourself (in sketchup), or set your camera to the correct angle and take screen shots and 10 degrees intervals for smaller ships, and 20 degree intervals for larger ships. Then, put the images through SpinApp. No art skill required.

Well, by might be able to help, I mean about a 10% chance that I might have a few spare hours in between what looks to be a lot of interviews and travelling around the state looking for teaching openings. My recommendation is to grab Sketchup and Blender and learn how to play. It's seriously not that hard, and you don't have to be a seasoned veteran or a graphic artist to manage it. If I can figure them out, you can. Make some simple things first, like just map a planet texture to a ball. The first thing I did in Blender was at a planetarium conference, where a guy showing how to use Blender and I made a small planet, downloaded a little figurine model, mapped a bunch of faces of people we didn't like to the figurines, and made an animation where as the planet turned, the people flew away from it into space. It took about an hour to make it. Just try to play with it and see what you get.

well another reason for me not wanting to do it is i'm trying to make this as good a noob mod as possible, I think the series deserves nothing less. Trying to learn how to do all of this is hard enough without having to try and figure out how to do the graphics too. I guess if no one is able to help here, i'll probably go to another site and ask for help there. Maybe i'll get lucky and you'll all enjoy an awesome plug soon. Right now i'm trying to figure out how to make flak rounds.

Flak rounds shouldn't be too bad. I think the easiest way to do it would be to have a weapon that submunitions on proximity into a bunch of 2-3 pixel pieces. Actually, that sounds pretty cool...

yeah it's been alot of trial an error, trying to get the cannons to have smoke trails, and what not...i'm only scratching the surface of what i want to do.

Trial by fire is the best way to learn the engine. Look at it this way: you can't break anything. You can maybe screw up a resource or two, but no worse than that.

yeah, it's just tedious and slow going...hence my plea for assistance lol.

This post has been edited by mgspecter : 26 March 2009 - 10:53 AM