XWA Upgrade

Saxman what is wrong with you...LOL...attention to detail whore!!! LOL

Hey Bigshot, don't forget to bevel those hard edges so the light can catch them better...slight bevels raises renders to the next level

Better than I can do since I don't have it in me - wonderful work as always Saxman!

Oh sure, give me more work to do. Not like it's already a very complex mesh or anything. ;-P

In seriousness, I did play around with beveling some of the edges, and that largely just made a tremendous mess of the shading.

I used it in a few places to denote moving parts (gear bay doors, torpedo access hatch, and canopy) but I'm not likely to do so elsewhere.

Whoa! You just crank out a beautiful E-Wing just like that?!

ooooh an E-wing. One of the most underrated ships in the EU. Can't wait to see the finished version

Merry Christmas.

Yikes.

Oooo! That is so pretty! So, how will you feel if the E-Wing is the first Star Citizen-ready Star Wars ship? Although I doubt you'll add gimbaled thrusters and all that, since that's not something visible on most Star Wars ships.

The tricky part is that Star Wars fighters would have TREMENDOUS advantages over Star Citizen's.

They're no bigger than the Merlin or M50, but pack more firepower. I mean seriously, the Hornet is nearly the size of the Falcon. Combat speeds in Star Wars are also on the order of 1km/s at LEAST, while SCM restricts even the fastest ships to between 200-300m/s (it looks like v2.1 is going to make combat at cruise speed virtually impossible). To say nothing of the acceleration compensator allowing Star Wars fighters to pull far more Gs than Star Citizen fighters are capable of.

You'd honestly want to have them on a private server all by their lonesome, because they'd be THAT unbalanced.

Mechanically, I'm thinking instead of using mav thrusters, Star Wars fighters would use combinations of electromagnetic gyros, vectoring, and thrust differential for rotation/attitude control (supported by Johnston's concept work), with the repulsors for translational movement/braking. Best way I can think of to account for the apparent lack of conventional maneuvering thrusters.

Comparing the E-wing to the T-70 X-Wing:
The T-70 is officially 12.48m long. I'm sticking with the same 11.2m length for the E-wing from the old specs. Doesn't seem like too much of a difference, but when you look at this one...
It's clear the T-70 is a significantly larger and more massive machine.

This is kind of my reimaginement of the E-wing to fit the new, Disney-era continuity. The background I'm toying with is as follows:

Incom T-90 E-wing Starfighter

In the aftermath of the destruction of the Hosnian system by the First Order, the New Republic found itself forcibly drawn into open conflict. With a signficiant portion of the fleet destroyed, the Republic srambled to rebuild while the scattered remnants of its military are left to wage a desperate defensive campaign against the First Order.

Although the X-wing had long been a symbol of the Republic's starfighter corps, the complex design taxed Incom's ability to quickly manufacture more fighters to replenish those lost both with the destruction of the fleet at Hosnian Prime, and combat losses by the beleaguered squadrons struggling to hold back the First Order's onslaught. With the assistance of Rebellion and New Republic hero Wedge Antilles, Incom fast-tracked a new design to supplement the X-wing. This new fighter was designated the T-90 E-wing.

The complex S-foil mechanism was replaced with a conventional fixed-foil design, as well as incorporating numerous advances in power and weapons systems. The astromech was also eliminated, and replaced with an on-board and astrogation and power management system assuming the usual functions of the droid. This eliminated both the space and interface requirements, and further simplified the design.

Other improvements included an enlarged ordinance bay, while the weapons loadout increased to 16 proton torpedoes. An attempt to boost firepower while keeping the hull as small as possible led to the addition of a third cannon above the cockpit, while advances in laser cannon design further improved weapons performance. As a result, the new design saw little, if any, reduction in firepower compared to the X-wing despite the loss of a gun. Additionally, the significantly reduced mass resulted in across-the-board performance increases, including acceleration, maximum speed, and maneuverability, allowing the E-wing to meet or exceed the performance of any current or projected First Order fighter (one idea I was toying with was to reimagine the TIE Avenger as a new First Order design, with the E-wing developed to counter it).

With the Republic desperate for more fighters as quickly as possible, Incom subcontracted manufacture to FreiTek, allowing their own factories to replenish the fleet's inventory of X-wings in parallel with the construction of the new fighter. As a result of the rapid development and adoption of the E-wing, the type is not without its teething problems. Initial evaluation flights revealed that the new cannon power systems are prone to overload and burnout, while the on-board computer systems lack the versatility of a true astromech droid. In order to field the fighter as quickly as possible, the ship utilizes an older hyperdrive system, resulting in a slower speed through hyperspace. Additionally, unlike the X-wing, the E-wing lacks an internal cargo compartment, greatly reducing the fighter's autonomy and range. Updates for the cannon, computer, and hyperdrive systems to eliminate these flaws are currently being investigated, based on field modifications devised by ground technicians.

Sounds very good.

Just one thing I'd point out here is that the T-70 X-wing is actually an old design that is used by the Resistance. The New Republic Fleet is actually using the more modern T-85, so that one may be larger - or smaller - than the T-70.

As for the backstory you could add something like that the E-wing was designed for additional tactical flexibility, to perform in roles the X-wing isn't suited for, i.e interception or bomber suppression. I do absolutely love the idea of a First Order TIE Avenger though, seeing as its my favorite Imperial fighter.

Looks like the sole mention of the T-85 in the new canon so far is the Before the Awakening children's book. At least according to Wookieepedia, so there's almost no details about that model, or even an official visual design yet.

However I would think that most likely it would be similar in size to the T-65 and T-70, so about 12.5m long with a relatively broad and deep fuselage, and a fairly broad wingspan.

Did some minor playing around.
Shortened up the rear deck a little bit, got rid of those fins on the engine forward of the wing, and enlarged the cannon by 5%

Not much new to show. Finally got around to correcting the length of the wing braces, and I also enlarged the cannon by a further 5%. I've also remodeled a couple parts of the rear bulkhead, but that's still very much a WIP so nothing to show there. I also decided to eliminate the built-in boarding lander/handhold for aesthetics and lore reasons

I've started UV mapping while I'm waiting on references for the cockpit to turn up. Unfortunately there's VERY little reliable information out there on the T-70s cockpit, which I'm wanting to use as my base, so I'm kind of stuck at the moment.

I have most of the main hull mapped, as are the wing engines and cannons. I've now begun working on the main landing gear bays (ugh, I'm dreading mapping all those actuator arms...).

Very early look at texturing, showing the squadron markings and ID tabs (Red Six for this one).

Looks good man - crisp

Textures need more dirt, Sax.

Looks fantastic Saxman. I have hypothesis, that despite high poly count, you maybe able to get this model into XWA. Not sure if it would slow down the game, perhaps some scaling back of details would work, but..... after reading through the help file of Optech, it occurred to me that the back door to get around the 50 mesh limit is to "assign" regular High level or Low level LOD meshes to other existing Meshes (mix or match). And I'm assuming all meshes are maxed out at 512 vertices or less. The 50 Mesh limit does NOT apply to sub-meshes, per my understanding from Jeremy. Here's an easier way to explain this....

Think about typical family unit. A family always consists of one or more persons. Think of each 50 main Meshes as distinct family units.
Each of the 50 Meshes can have one or more sub-meshes assigned to it. i.e. a spouse and children as separate sub-meshes assigned to the patriarch mesh. In programming speak, kind of like an instance/class inheriting each of the 50 parent meshes.

So what I'm saying is, if you break down your model into separate meshes, and group related sub-meshes with a parent mesh... MainHull and it's group of other MainHull meshes assigned to one, Fuselage and it's group of sub-meshes assigned to it, etc. this might work. I could be wrong, but, I thoroughly tested this with a capital starship .opt model recently and it works fine in game. In Optech, I imported 15 extra high level meshes and added them to an existing model. This put me way over the 50 Mesh limit count in Optech. Then, when I started assigning one, two, and even three other Hull meshes to one parent MainHull mesh, they disappear from the listing, but are now grouped under the main one. All are still intact and fine. This got me back under the 50 mesh limit count. I assigned meshes that were adjacent to a main mesh, so that might matter. After compiling with Optech, I imported into Jeremy's XWAOptEditor and also grouped similar MainHull meshes as Target ID "1" for example. Not sure if that matters either, but you didn't have to cycle through all the different meshes during game play. I believe the HitZones change because the mesh groupings, but no problems so far.

I'm also using most all of Jeremy's patches, but I'm not sure if this process will work for starfighter models. Also begs the question of how many sub-meshes can be assigned to a parent mesh ? Haven't had time to test that yet, but am curious if you ever get around to testing your high poly model in XWA. Anyway, this gives me great hope with detail I want to add to the Mk-II SD Avenger model I'm working on, and I suspect this might help with other WIP projects.

The problem is there's a number of meshes well above the 512 vertex limit. The cannon have 1668, and the engines and thrust nozzles (two separate meshes) combine for ~6200 (10,000 triangles). And note that the vertecies are welded in Blender, so its' not like I've got duplicates floating around in there.

The concern with a fighter is whether or not parenting meshes together would screw with how the model breaks up when destroyed.

Simple estimate of what the view out the cockpit will look like using a Blender camera. I'm not sure what XWA's default field of view is. The dorsal gun does obscure visibility, but actually doesn't appear to be as bad as it was on my old E-wing, even though the cannon has a heavier barrel design.

Beveling and face-weighted normals. Whee!

You mentioned in january you haven't had enough info on the T-70 Cockpit, have you seen this? A 360 panorama of the cockpit

http://www.starwars.com/news/star-wars- ... arwars-com

Yep, I've seen that and will be using it whenever I get back to working on the E-wing.

Anyone here have Battlefront and can get me some 360 degree screens of the T-65 cockpit? IIRC they used the original ILM plans from ANH when they did the model, which means it's also the only source I know of for a good look at the ANH version of the cockpit (almost everything, IE the resin kits, use the ESB cockpit for reference).

The Saxman wrote:Yep, I've seen that and will be using it whenever I get back to working on the E-wing.

Anyone here have Battlefront and can get me some 360 degree screens of the T-65 cockpit? IIRC they used the original ILM plans from ANH when they did the model, which means it's also the only source I know of for a good look at the ANH version of the cockpit (almost everything, IE the resin kits, use the ESB cockpit for reference).

There is a rip of the actual cockpit model out there on the web. Probably be a lot better then screenshots.

But I'm not sure if I would be allowed to link it here.

Almost all the Battlefront ship character and weapons models have be ripped actually.

Hm, the one I found doesn't have the gunnery scope at the bottom of the flight console, but seems like it's a good starting point.