USS Nimitz - WIP

[fighterman 10]

cant wait to fly off it with the RKSL merlin, lynx, puma.

ill give someone a fiver if the can land the an-225 on it

[Schancky 10]

ill give someone a fiver if the can land the an-225 on it

Deal. Video to follow ;)

[konyo 14]

Deal. Video to follow ;)

Lol id like to see this :)

[dlang 24]

Good job jdog !

[JDog 11]

Lol that'll be something to pull off. You better have flaps that go WAY down on that plane haha, or use the islands to brake your speed, no arrestors on the QE. I've landed the An-225 on the Nimitz already, as well as launched it haha.

When I give it to you guys it'll be in like "beta" stage lol. I'm still learning stuff as I go. No shadow LOD or rvmats on it yet, unfortunately, so the islands don't look up to par. Still functional though. But hey if anyone wants to contribute and knows about rvmats... :D

Added some yellow lights around the edge of the elevator on the QE deck, so unwary pilots don't fall into a lowered elevator at night.

Edited October 30, 2010 by JDog

[JDog 11]

Queen Elizabeth released:

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=109491

Now... back to work on the Nimitz! That's the real prize :)

[Drew 10]

congrats on ur release

[dlang 24]

Hi Jdog,

When you relesase the Nimitz, can you make a variant who don't need Mando Missile ?

Because many people don't won't to use it...

[kremator 1065]

^^ Shame on you NOT using mando missiles .... go wash your brain out with soap !

MM does come in a script version you know dlang.

Anyhoo suck it up. If JDog wants to have it MM compatible then you either download and use MM or don't use the Nimitz :)

[JDog 11]

dlang, as Kremator said, MMA is also available in script-form. And though the turrets on the QE automatically spawn, mission-makers can set a variable so that the turrets DONT spawn. So a mission-maker could prevent the default turrets from spawning, and then set his own up however he wants.

But in response to your question, yes I've thought about doing it somewhat differently for the Nimitz, but I haven't started on it yet to test it or anything without MMA.

Honestly it's just more about reinventing the wheel. However as I said, I am definitely going to try to make the Nimitz as self-reliant an addon as I can.

[Sgt Mack 10]

Hey JDog, congrats on the HMS QE release! I checked out your sample mission using MMA and that's pretty awesome!

One thing though, do you plan to use a better texture for the deck? It seems kind of well...low-res. Or was that the intention? Just curious...

Again, great release and I look forward to the "big prize"; the Nimitz-class carrier!

[JDog 11]

One thing though, do you plan to use a better texture for the deck? It seems kind of well...low-res. Or was that the intention? Just curious...

The deck texture? Weird lol, you should complain about the islands instead. It isn't really "low-res" per se... if it was there'd be a lot more aliasing going on. But yea for the physical size of the deck in-game it probably is low-res. The deck texture is 8192px long, split into 2 4096x4096 textures. The Nimitz deck texture was made on a 8,192 x 16,384px canvas. Editing that brought my comp to its knees lol. And in some places it still doesn't look quite as sharp as it could.

I mean I guess I could go back and remake the QE deck texture eventually but... to be honest I'm not sure what I'd do to it. It's not supposed to look horribly worn, there are some speckles but you can't really tell unless you look down on it, otherwise yea it more or less looks like a flat color.

[Schancky 10]

It think Mack ment you might want to up the bump mapping on the deck, like on the deck of the Khe Sanh.

[JDog 11]

Man if that's the case I've got an even worse answer: it doesn't have any bump/normal maps. Hopefully, maybe, I'll get some on the Nimitz but idk. Still new to all this, have barely touched baking normal maps at all, much less tried getting into the game.

[JDog 11]

Just so you guys know I'm not idle with the Nimitz lol, got somethin to show (since I can't very well show a bunch of boring redone scripts/code lol).

JBD overhaul. Not entirely complete yet, but mostly there. Before & After.

Cant promise this much detail throughout the entirety of the ship lol, but I'm beginning to think this might be an ongoing project for a while after release to keep making it better as I get better at this stuff.

[fighterman 10]

very nice will u be using the same defence setup as on the QE with all the sea sparrows and stuff

[soldier2390 0]

very nice work love the detail! hope to see more pics in the near future!

[gobbo 10]

Just so you guys know I'm not idle with the Nimitz lol, got somethin to show (since I can't very well show a bunch of boring redone scripts/code lol).

JBD overhaul. Not entirely complete yet, but mostly there. Before & After.

[...]

Cant promise this much detail throughout the entirety of the ship lol, but I'm beginning to think this might be an ongoing project for a while after release to keep making it better as I get better at this stuff.

:eek: HOLY SHIT! This is awesome! Can't wait for it

[=kct=blackmamba 44]

thats a very nice improvement Jdog

[JDog 11]

Sorry the updates have been horrendously slow. Few weeks of class left, then winter break. Trying to work on this so its ready by Christmas lol, got the JBDs 100% done today. Added some simple pistons for a little more detail underneath and did some textures for it also, and redid the animations for them, each JBD raises as 3 individual sections now. Also, If anyone's good with .rvmats, I wouldn't turn down help with that.

I'm going to work on the hangar bay next... objects, details, textures. Not sure what all to put in there... some cargo containers, utility boxes lol... any ideas are helpful. Its Thanksgiving week so I should have some extra time and stuff to show by the weekend of the hangar. If I don't, hound me lol.

[-BAC-honzikpen 10]

looks great!!!!!!

love it!!

[Macadam Cow 1]

It's looking really good JDog, really nice attention to details :)

I hope someone will be able to port the super hornet and why not the seahawk from ArmA1, would be sad to only have one plane to put on this beauty.

Keep up the good work, I can't wait to put it under my christmas tree :D

[munger 25]

Wow, that's some lovely detail there JDog. I really can't wait for this addon!

Agree with Macadam Cow re the Hornet. Keep seeing pics of them in various threads but as yet no release, gah! :D

[nodunit 397]

Glad to see you are picking this back up, beautiful detail on the that launch barricade (is that what they call em?) ideas.. I have a few if I may. First I would definately recommend using the 'patchwork' pattern on the ceiling http://www.c7f.navy.mil/imagery/high-res/2009/09-September/090914-N-2600H-003.jpg this could be double important since beams going in one direction could make the room seem that much larger..

'front to back' to make it look longer, side to side to make it look wider. I would suggest I beams, if you want to break the monotmy of the pattern you could always add extra plates and pipes running around as seen there as well, a few side to side beams between some of the front and back. Perhaps a few window sections even if not reachable as sort of security post http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2329/2335730114_27bc4a356b_o.jpg some beams along the wall, water sprinklers on the ceiling connected by suspended pipes..

I wouldn't reference it had it not worked so well but you might want to do something like the Crysis carrier, make many prop objects, pipes with cut off sections that included straight, curved, and angled rather than a full blown pipe unique to a room. For one this means you could place them nearly anywhere and use the "place by vertice" function to ensure they are connected.

This might seem like a bad idea at first, you think "Oh but how many polies.." however UV mapping size and space required would be tons easier since one texture could account for one or more so say you have 3 or 4 types of pipe, one single 256x128 (if even that) texture could cover all of these (even better if seamless) as opposed to having unique pipes per room that would take up more UV space and be a pain to unwrap around the curves.

This technique was also used on walls, take the wall of your hangar, now UV map it, imagine the size you would need to have clarity on that, same with the floor..BUT, if you use segments of wall with one 512x512 as opposed to 2048+ texture and seamless you could lay this model with that one texture over and over, you would achieve even BETTER results for less texture size. Likewise you could again use more sizes of said wall with texture..so say you want to make a small room with a little corner at the end, or an inset in the middle so you have 8x8 and then in the middle a 8x4, followed by an 8x2 then 8x4 to return to 8x8, you could use that exact same texture on all of those without stretching or wasted UV space.

Edited November 21, 2010 by NodUnit

[JDog 11]

Hey NodUnit, first off - "jet blast deflector" haha :D Some great finds there on the interior of the hangar, will definitely come in handy when I get started. The beams along the ceiling are already in place actually :D I also want to make those huge sliding fire-doors that bisect the hangar bay (I think that's what they are). However looking at those pictures... I'm thinking my hangar bay isn't as tall as it should be, even though I made it from design dimensions, hmmm.

And yes once I get done with modeling and start mapping the hangar bay I'll probably end up tiling some and splitting up the polys in other places as you said as well. I wanted to do this for the deck, so it could be more clear, but I can't really do that since it has markings on it that stretch all the way across its length. I tried tiling a base texture on the deck, and have another poly on top, mostly transparent, with the markings, but it starts to fade/flicker as you gain distance from it.