Bishop Steiner, on 25 March 2016 - 01:38 PM, said:
the JA-KL-1532-Jackal
Found it. I'm working a generation or two back in terms of 3D models (so PS2-quality since I'm building a 'lot' of models). So it won't be this impressive, but you'll be seeing them move too, so yeah. Heh.
Locationclimbing Mt Tryhard, one smoldering Meta-Mech corpse at a time
Posted 19 April 2016 - 07:16 AM
Koniving, on 19 April 2016 - 06:31 AM, said:
Found it. I'm working a generation or two back in terms of 3D models (so PS2-quality since I'm building a 'lot' of models). So it won't be this impressive, but you'll be seeing them move too, so yeah. Heh.
Sweet. Should be fun. You'll see this one moving too, but since it's a hobby project, things take time in between IRL. Kiriage is still doing the texture mapping, tweaking details. But the rigging and animation he did for my old King Crab is impressive.
Bishop Steiner, on 19 April 2016 - 07:16 AM, said:
Sweet. Should be fun. You'll see this one moving too, but since it's a hobby project, things take time in between IRL. Kiriage is still doing the texture mapping, tweaking details. But the rigging and animation he did for my old King Crab is impressive.
Replicating concept art is pretty easy though time consuming; in fact the less complex it is the more time consuming it seems to be which baffles me. Probably due to the need to 'insert' details as the imagination gets too wild with less detail.
(Random concept art I found back in 2004)
Spoiler
My textures will pretty much be non-existent. I'll need to source 'em out. UV mapping is easy, the texture work is a bit like digital painting, not as easy as one might like and I suck at "borrowing" textures and making them work.
Spoiler
Mid 2005, a texture mapping attempt. Worked great. Never got it textured. Then again in 2006 that whole computer and hard drives were lost. Lightning surge through the modem wire. I mean seriously who expects to get one? I do have it and many others on backup but back then I lost the drive for a long time.
This S.A.W. (Squad Automatic Weapon) was based loosely on 5 seconds or so of watching some movie called uh... Something about marines on a ship and some sort of squid monster. I saw this thing firing and was like "Must have." The sound of it, the way the barrels spun, all of it screamed "You'll use this someday."
Spoiler
So I should certainly have a fun time with weapon system appearances. Which I'll need to because the project almost finished is this:
I've stayed true to everything, even the weird way the arms are sloped so that their convergence is tighter as you go up and wider as you go down (seems like it'd really be useful if trying to use its lasers against infantry) ...but the legs. Hydraulics? No, no no no no. Myomers are muscles and it simply can't do. Not to mention it only pivots on a single axis for all of the joints, running/walking/balancing is practically impossible. So that thread I mentioned I'd start calls for both cockpit interior layout concepts (welcoming things as simple as 'noun on location') as well as for some leg redesign ideas that keep with the look this mech has. (As mentioned I'd be doing many versions of each mech and the intention for some is to have 'pick and choose' parts and for others to have different visual versions so that newer generations of variants look 'newer' than older ones.)
The planned post, minus the pretty much empty 3D interior or other images (Wings 3D is not cooperating with allowing me to view the interior with a wide enough FOV and my other program literally simplifies 3D objects to 'blocks' with heavily overcreased hard edges. And Max... my trial expired. I generally had mixed feelings on Max anyway.
Spoiler
Cockpit design challenge! Flea (classic)
Hello everyone, Koniving here. As some of you may have heard, I intend on building a series of 'Mechs. Partly out of practice, partly out of admiration and the intention is to use them for animations. The primary hope is to give a visualization of what I think a Battletech simulator (not game, simulator) would look like.
Currently I am working on the classic Flea. This as far as I know is the original design of the Flea light BattleMech. It is a scout 'Mech designed for the Free World League. Dirt cheap, easy to produce and has a focus on speed and firepower at the sacrifice of armor on a twenty ton pivot-able platform.
This design is manufactured in the area of Asuncion, on the planet Bernado by Earthwerks Incorporated on an Earthwerk Trooper chassis protected by 2 tons of armor produced by Livingston Ceremics.
Its General Motors 120-rated power plant gives it a cruising speed of 64 kph and a max speed of 97 kph.
It possesses no jumpjets and has no jump capabilities.
The FLE-4 is armed with 1 Martell Large Laser, 2 Martell Small Lasers and 1 Olympian Flamer which can be front or rear mounted, and all of this is cooled with 10 standard heatsinks.
To communicate it uses the Neil 2000.
Its Targeting and Tracking System / Sensor Suite is the Dalban HiRez-B, the same T&TS as the King Crab 0000 (quad-zero).
Though the original Trooper began testing in 2475, the design didn't pass until 2500 due to a plethora of flaws. It began its official service in 2501.
I intend to make several versions of each BattleMech. This version of the Flea, I feel, should represent this 'old' design, among the first iterations of the Trooper turned Flea.
This brings me to the purpose of this thread. I would like to have the community's help with two things.
The first is the leg design. From the image it is clearly hydrulic (or Pnuematic) rather than Myomer muscularture. Given its age I figure this probably won't matter terribly but as is it borderlines "Industrial Mech" rather than Battlemech. The foot, upper and lower leg actuators are all bi-directional (forward/backward, no side to side) which means this thing would be awful at catching itself. Do you feel this should be kept to represent some of its flaws or do you feel it should be redesigned to be a quad-directional (forward/backward/left/right) (2 axis) pivot at each joint? And if you are able, can you give an idea of how you would make the change with a minimalist (change as little as possible about how it feels) approach?
Second and more importantly, what I need from the community is a cockpit design. One that gives the impression it is remeniscent of the era of the Terrain Hegemony and the early Star League would be nice, but lower priority. Of higher priority is that the interior should appear to be something that is cheap and disposable. If it's possible to do that and look like it is 'easily fixed', by all means.
Some notes:
As can be seen, it is currently void of any dash design, freeing you to design a dash of any sort.
Monitors should be few. One minimum, four maximum.
Controls can be placed at as dashboards beneath, on either side, or above the viewport.
Space should be allotted for the following: Foot pedals, one throttle stick (left), one joystick (right), one ejection 'handle' (Placement is open to interpretation though the standard is between legs between chair and foot pedals).
Artistic Notes:
Primary HUD is to be displayed on the viewport (drawing won't be necessary but is optional if so inclined).
There is no room to walk around inside. It should feel cramped like a metal coffin.
Hatch is on top.
To get a physical feel for the cockpit space, get into a car, truck or minivan and sit in the 'middle'. Now imagine the seats on either side of you are cut out right in half and in their place there are just metal walls and your only way to get in and out is through the skylight/ceiling of your vehicle. Welcome to claustrophobia, welcome to the Flea. Now capture this.
Locationclimbing Mt Tryhard, one smoldering Meta-Mech corpse at a time
Posted 19 April 2016 - 09:46 AM
Koniving, on 19 April 2016 - 09:18 AM, said:
Replicating concept art is pretty easy though time consuming; in fact the less complex it is the more time consuming it seems to be which baffles me. Probably due to the need to 'insert' details as the imagination gets too wild with less detail.
(Random concept art I found back in 2004)
Spoiler
My textures will pretty much be non-existent. I'll need to source 'em out. UV mapping is easy, the texture work is a bit like digital painting, not as easy as one might like and I suck at "borrowing" textures and making them work.
Spoiler
Mid 2005, a texture mapping attempt. Worked great. Never got it textured. Then again in 2006 that whole computer and hard drives were lost. Lightning surge through the modem wire. I mean seriously who expects to get one? I do have it and many others on backup but back then I lost the drive for a long time.
This S.A.W. (Squad Automatic Weapon) was based loosely on 5 seconds or so of watching some movie called uh... Something about marines on a ship and some sort of squid monster. I saw this thing firing and was like "Must have." The sound of it, the way the barrels spun, all of it screamed "You'll use this someday."
Spoiler
So I should certainly have a fun time with weapon system appearances. Which I'll need to because the project almost finished is this:
I've stayed true to everything, even the weird way the arms are sloped so that their convergence is tighter as you go up and wider as you go down (seems like it'd really be useful if trying to use its lasers against infantry) ...but the legs. Hydraulics? No, no no no no. Myomers are muscles and it simply can't do. Not to mention it only pivots on a single axis for all of the joints, running/walking/balancing is practically impossible. So that thread I mentioned I'd start calls for both cockpit interior layout concepts (welcoming things as simple as 'noun on location') as well as for some leg redesign ideas that keep with the look this mech has. (As mentioned I'd be doing many versions of each mech and the intention for some is to have 'pick and choose' parts and for others to have different visual versions so that newer generations of variants look 'newer' than older ones.)
The planned post, minus the pretty much empty 3D interior or other images (Wings 3D is not cooperating with allowing me to view the interior with a wide enough FOV and my other program literally simplifies 3D objects to 'blocks' with heavily overcreased hard edges. And Max... my trial expired. I generally had mixed feelings on Max anyway.
Spoiler
Cockpit design challenge! Flea (classic)
Hello everyone, Koniving here. As some of you may have heard, I intend on building a series of 'Mechs. Partly out of practice, partly out of admiration and the intention is to use them for animations. The primary hope is to give a visualization of what I think a Battletech simulator (not game, simulator) would look like.
Currently I am working on the classic Flea. This as far as I know is the original design of the Flea light BattleMech. It is a scout 'Mech designed for the Free World League. Dirt cheap, easy to produce and has a focus on speed and firepower at the sacrifice of armor on a twenty ton pivot-able platform.
This design is manufactured in the area of Asuncion, on the planet Bernado by Earthwerks Incorporated on an Earthwerk Trooper chassis protected by 2 tons of armor produced by Livingston Ceremics.
Its General Motors 120-rated power plant gives it a cruising speed of 64 kph and a max speed of 97 kph.
It possesses no jumpjets and has no jump capabilities.
The FLE-4 is armed with 1 Martell Large Laser, 2 Martell Small Lasers and 1 Olympian Flamer which can be front or rear mounted, and all of this is cooled with 10 standard heatsinks.
To communicate it uses the Neil 2000.
Its Targeting and Tracking System / Sensor Suite is the Dalban HiRez-B, the same T&TS as the King Crab 0000 (quad-zero).
Though the original Trooper began testing in 2475, the design didn't pass until 2500 due to a plethora of flaws. It began its official service in 2501.
I intend to make several versions of each BattleMech. This version of the Flea, I feel, should represent this 'old' design, among the first iterations of the Trooper turned Flea.
This brings me to the purpose of this thread. I would like to have the community's help with two things.
The first is the leg design. From the image it is clearly hydrulic (or Pnuematic) rather than Myomer muscularture. Given its age I figure this probably won't matter terribly but as is it borderlines "Industrial Mech" rather than Battlemech. The foot, upper and lower leg actuators are all bi-directional (forward/backward, no side to side) which means this thing would be awful at catching itself. Do you feel this should be kept to represent some of its flaws or do you feel it should be redesigned to be a quad-directional (forward/backward/left/right) (2 axis) pivot at each joint? And if you are able, can you give an idea of how you would make the change with a minimalist (change as little as possible about how it feels) approach?
Second and more importantly, what I need from the community is a cockpit design. One that gives the impression it is remeniscent of the era of the Terrain Hegemony and the early Star League would be nice, but lower priority. Of higher priority is that the interior should appear to be something that is cheap and disposable. If it's possible to do that and look like it is 'easily fixed', by all means.
Some notes:
As can be seen, it is currently void of any dash design, freeing you to design a dash of any sort.
Monitors should be few. One minimum, four maximum.
Controls can be placed at as dashboards beneath, on either side, or above the viewport.
Space should be allotted for the following: Foot pedals, one throttle stick (left), one joystick (right), one ejection 'handle' (Placement is open to interpretation though the standard is between legs between chair and foot pedals).
Artistic Notes:
Primary HUD is to be displayed on the viewport (drawing won't be necessary but is optional if so inclined).
There is no room to walk around inside. It should feel cramped like a metal coffin.
Hatch is on top.
To get a physical feel for the cockpit space, get into a car, truck or minivan and sit in the 'middle'. Now imagine the seats on either side of you are cut out right in half and in their place there are just metal walls and your only way to get in and out is through the skylight/ceiling of your vehicle. Welcome to claustrophobia, welcome to the Flea. Now capture this.
I think the Flea is a GREAT candidate for the Bishop/Kiriage Hip.
If you want I'll see if I can slap some concept work for it today (all the joint's use a slight ball joint type design ot give skeletal play for the myomer muscles, though myomers don't totally rule out hydraulics especially in legs, it's just that they would be functionally there solely as shock absorbers.
But for a brief idea, look to the original inspiration of the Flea
which is my inspiration for the Jackals hip.
GonaDie, on 19 April 2016 - 08:10 AM, said:
How does that work?
very well, actually, you can get a little bit of the idea from the ATST in my reply to Koniving. When kiriage gets a chance to pose and play with animations some more it'll be more apparent.
Bishop Steiner, on 19 April 2016 - 09:46 AM, said:
I think the Flea is a GREAT candidate for the Bishop/Kiriage Hip.
But for a brief idea, look to the original inspiration of the Flea
which is my inspiration for the Jackals hip.
Had this concept last year though never thought to apply it to the Flea; mine was instead for an original Mech design called the Nin Kei, a SecurityMech (which started at 15 tons but later got bumped to 20 tons due to a number of flaws with design and the desire for most versions to run an I.C.E. or Fuel Cell with only one variant making the shift to Fusion Engine.) Its leg design originally had Ed 209 (classic) for a base then was given two versions, one with 'long' hips (would actually be the thighs and it'd be Cicada-like in terms of lengths between actuators but still a similar standing position) and the other more AT-ST though actually got the idea for both from a Bird I drew.
The AT-ST-like hip design won out.
Last image I made of the Nin Kei before losing steam for it (I got a bit farther but wasn't liking its looks; this is what I get for literally 'concept-art-as-I-build' rather than sketching it ahead of time; I'm much better at replicating things).
The reasoning for the leg design actually had to do with two abilities I wanted it to have. The first was to be able to step over fences in an urban environment and the other was to be able to make use of the tracks on its legs should an actuator or the muscles get damaged through the commercial-grade armor.
Edit: (Having looked at my Blackjack again, it turns out I'm working on Short Painter's Blackjack not Shimmering Swords').
Locationclimbing Mt Tryhard, one smoldering Meta-Mech corpse at a time
Posted 14 May 2017 - 12:28 PM
Requiemking, on 13 May 2017 - 07:36 PM, said:
I actually think the Jackal might be fairly nasty with a single HPPC in that RT mount.
It might could. Especially if a variant only has a single mount. hopefully the Hvy PPC won't be too heat to damage crippling in the MWO version, what with being 10 tons and 4 bloody crits, and still having a minimum range.
It better do 15 pinpoint, and tbh, to be worth taking over the SNPPC or C-ERPPC, it probably needs to have scaling minimum range damage or somethings. Yeah, it does 5 more pinpoint dmg, potentially than the clan PPC, but at twice the crits, 166% the mass, and with shorter range and a minimum range. It's paying a healthy tax to do what it does.
2
Bishop Steiner, on 25 March 2016 - 01:38 PM, said:
Then again in 2006 that whole computer and hard drives were lost. Lightning surge through the modem wire. I mean seriously who expects to get one? I do have it and many others on backup but back then I lost the drive for a long time.
