The Ancient Mariner - Engine Room

Calamity_Jones

Hey there... It's the crazy guy from Yorkshire who has expended several months of his life building that bloody thing...

Thanks for the comments, it's nice to see that the endless hours of blood, sweat and tears (mostly sweat and tears) is appreciated

@ Marian: The file is a mere 44.6MB (at the moment), mainly because everything is a component. Though, when I export it to Kerkythea, it tends to balloon to several hundred MB

I have a deviantART page with renders and a set of pics showing how I built the thing, if you're interested:
http://calamityjones.deviantart.com/

Thanks again

Marian

Only 44 mb? I'm not suprised about the kerky file sized, when i first saw the model i thought it was the detailed model of an actual submarine.

Calamity_Jones

Well, the geometry isn't actually that complex, and many of the components are just duplicated a lot of times...

Overall ,there's around 30 000 components, and the walkways make up around 24 000 of those...

There's 6665 standard floor tiles, 5852 corner tiles, 1244 corner tiles with lights, 2272 tiles with vents... And so on

The file size is so low because each of the floor tiles has only 50-100 ish lines, and the model only needs to contain that file's information once... But exporting it to a full 3D mesh, the tiles are combined into something with millions of polygons

Marian

So, what your next project or what do you still have to make for the ship?

Calamity_Jones

Got lots left to make on this ship...

Let's see...

Finish the Walkways.
Finish the Albatross Airlocks.
Finish "the office".
Add covers to the missile launcher tubes.
Add Airlocks.
Add hull cameras and sensors. (And associated cables)
Add internal walls to separate areas of the ship (like cordoning off the AGR's)

And probably much much more...

I started this thing in January... I probably won't finish for another few months yet
I'm not working on it all day, every day any more... But I was for a couple of months

Marian

...you must have a super dooper computer, i don't know if would have the patience to wait the loading of such a big model on my pc, and now i know why your avatar is the way it is.

Calamity_Jones

I'm an obsessive person, I need to be to have the patience to make something like this...

My pc is pretty powerful, mainly so I can play Supreme Commander, but it also helps when Sketchin'

Got an AMD Phenom Quad-Core, 8GB of RAM, HD 3850 graphics card... And so on

Edit:

Yes, I go cold turkey without coffee... It's not a pretty sight.

remus

Good job that file full of floor tiles made me whimper.

Calamity_Jones

It makes me foam at the mouth...

The memories... Oh god... The memories! ...of sitting in the unholy glow of my monitor at 3AM, trying to mate two components together, and something, somewhere is out by 1mm!

remus

Calamity_Jones

I'm planning another couple of video's to describe how other parts of the ship work...

One will focus on the Albatrosses, and I'll describe:
-How the Cargo Containers are transferred from the storage modules to the Albatrosses.
-How the Albatrosses are launched from, and docked with the 'Mariner.
-How the Albatrosses deliver and pick up cargo.

The other will focus on the major design concepts of the ship, and I'll describe:
-How the propulsion system controls the ship.
-How the ship distributes forces through its framework.
-How the Artificial Gravity Rings (AGR's) work.

I'm posting this here, because I'm hoping people can tell me what they'd be more interested in hearing about, and if there's anything else I should add to my list!

Thanks in advance