MOD:WCU:Design and Standardization

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The purpose of this page is to define a standardize look and feel for all Wing Commander Ships. As many of you know when Wing Commander was first released it used 2D pre-generated bitmaps to display the ships. These 2D images were made from much higher quality 3D models long sense lost by Origin. One of the goals for WCU is to recreate the lost models, and enhance existing models.

How to: Models

HowTo:Model_Ships

When Creating a NEW 3D model from the original WC, WC2, Priv; You should uses either the detailed blueprints that came with the game (Wing Commander 1 had blueprints for the Hornet, Rapier, Scimitar, Raptor) or if a blueprints are not available use the 2D bitmaps that were in the game. To do this, use the extracted bitmaps (TBA).

I personally find the best way to recreate a model of the old WC1, WC2 ships is by taking the original bitmap, scaling it up as large as I can, print it out (hardcopy) and then tracing the outlines on a piece of graph paper. You should have the six basic views, Top, Bottom, Left Side, Right Side, Top and Bottom. All the other views are used as a reference for determining how the 6 plans views fit together.

Note on the original models. Because the original 2D images were so pixilated many find it difficult to interpret some of the models and simply extrapolate by making up stuff to get to work. There is no faster way of getting a model rejected by WCU then by adding stuff that was never there. Most of the time this ends up causing additional headaches down the line, and the new model will always have the appearance that something is wrong with it. As a possible yet controversial solution to this problem is to use models that already exist. If a model for a ship that you are working on has already has been created, but has been rejected or is incorrect for some reason, this does not mean that that model is worthless. There are usually some elements of the model that are fine, and can be used to assist you in creating your new model.

If you are recreating an existing 3D from the, WC3, WC4, WCA, WCP, original game use that model and it textures to create a higher quality model. If done correctly, you new model should occupy the same model space as original, but where before the texture was used to define additional detail, the model itself will have the additional detail.

How detailed should you make a model? This is all subjective, but usually you want to use as only as many polygons as absolutely needed, best guestimate would be around 3000-5000 polygons for the typical fighter model. Capital ships are made from multiple models each with the 3000-5000 polygons recommended limit.

How to: Textures & Style

Textures are the most important aspect of a model. Without a decent texture even some of the best models will look like crap. With WCU we are imposing a style limit on all ship, the style limit is there because we want all the ships to look like there is some logical design lineage, NO cartoonish ships, NO overly detailed ships. Below is an example of how the where the ships came from and what they should look like for WCU.

All ships should have a SINLGE texture for all aspects of the ship. Recommend Size for various ships.

• 1024x1024 for smaller craft
• 2048x2048 for larger capital ships
• All textures sould be 24bit or 32bit color and saved as either a PNG, Targa or TIFF format.

Note: Currently ATI video cards have a 2K (2048x2048) textures limit for all single textures, NVIDIA has a 4K (4096x4096) limit on single textures; do not let this limit you there are many things on the programing end that can alleviate the program, or you can just wait for the next gen cards.

How to: Color Themes

The Primary purpose of Themes is to have a standardize colors for all ships and not the wide variety that out there now.

Confed Primary Color Themes (Examples Only)

Kilrathi Primary Color Themes (Examples Only)

Other Colors (Examples Only)

PS. Make your own Textures.

Reference Material

The following is not to advocate any projects, just the level of quality we are looking for in both ship design and textures Image: image: image: image: image: Remember what you build today by the time it makes it into the final project might be obsolete, so design with the future in mind.