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Doesn't the scoutship look cute all snuggled away in the hangar bay? According to the one scrap of canon we have about the Leif, there are supposed to be two scoutships. Joseph C. Brown demonstrated that it is possible to fit two in the hangar if they are interlocked in Yin-Yang fashion. I will do this eventually I also finally got around to fixing the rear greebles on the Leif Ericson proper, including the complicated wing vents. For the rear plate I might cheat and use a bump-map. More importantly, I re-sized the Leif so was at a 10 meters to one Blender Unit scale (it originally was at no particular scale as received). The scout was build at 1 meter to one Blender Unit, so when I imported it into the Leif file, I merely scaled it down by a factor of ten. |
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Here's the scout in pseudo-SAC markings, floating in the water. |
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Just for fun, I sized a mesh by Lance Brown of the Millennium Falcon to scale with the scoutship, as a size comparison. Unfortunately the main thing it demonstrates is how amateurish my mesh is. Oh, well, I'm still learning. |
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Ah, so, I make honorable mistake. The head of the scoutship always bothered me and I finally figured out why. I looked at the plastic model through a magnfying glass and realized that in the mesh the bug-eyed windows are far too small. Going back to Robert Merrill's blueprints I could see that I had stupidly traced the wrong outline for the windows. It took a couple of days, but I managed to expand the windows to the proper blueprint outlines. They look much better now. In the images here the old version is first, then the corrected version. |
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The vents on the back of the scout are created with what is called a bump map (Blender has two types: NOR maps and displacement maps, I used the former since the latter sends the polygon count through the roof). This was due to an attempt to avoid work. A mesh artist named Gemini recently let me see some of his impressive artwork. He no longer uses bump maps since they do not allow a lot of fine detail. This shamed me into getting rid of the bump map and doing it the hard way: carving the individual lines manually. It is a lot of work (though nowhere near as much as I'd feared). And as you can see the results are fabulous, if I say so myself. Compare the vents on the back of these images to the images above. |