3D Model Showroom

Note about future models.
So far since I’ve came back to The Starport after long hiatus I have been relegated to using an LG smartphone.
Characters on screen can be as small as 2mm. Also Android has bugs, Chrome has MAJOR bugs, and Firefox is in beta testing and now that. I’ve got developer version crashes my PHONE when I beta test. After friends read past post to poor half blind me I’m utterly embarrassed at misreading the very nature of some things. Stress misreading. Also virtual keyboard used to type has developed serious bugs with Android’s new update.

Therefore Jefferson001 is signing off The Starport until issues are resolved. I will be back when my internet connection to my desktops is restored. This might not be for a month or so. I humbly apologise to the site for sequential posts, innumerable edits and other (annoying) things I’ve done here simply because of the number of handicaps I’ve had to deal with. Rather than embarrassing myself futher I’m leaving until those handicaps are gone and I’m posting from internet and not 4GLTE.

THANK YOU for you patients Starport.

I will keep the links to the cloud up for those downloads.

Edit: Thanks to Admin team cloud links going down as models coming up in dowload pages.

Jefferson001 signing off for now. Remember to check your six and change that vector at least every five seconds. It’s the Bogie you DON’T SEE that’s going to kill you.

Keep in mind that this is an old site for an old game and that it probably not worth investing into new software for the few regulary users.

Couldn’t get back to sleep got email notify.
No new software for website, just internet connection to desktop. Route desktop to HDTV through HDMI from video card. If watch tv, route to 29 inch monitor. Tried connecting keyboard to phone. Bad lag. Tried typing text on desktop and transferring to phone. Brilliant idea in theory, problem. Loses cut and paste ability in post well.
(No right mouse to click either). Just stylus and virtual keyboard. So I can wait until my internet is back up and I can function again. What happened was logging in on a friends computer and seeing the site over the internet when by phone didn’t play nice with my cloud drive. Then and there I said “No more.”

When Firefox rolls out of beta for Android things might be better. For now though this whole flaky Chrome-Android business with characters less than 5mm high is killing me.

I’ll monitor but post? Nope. Will work on patching cell screen to HDMI for visually impaired.

Edit: Thanks to Firefox for ability to read screen without magnifying glass. Thanks to efforts now chrome for Android followed suit. Screen expansion stays put while typing. Both no longer loses submit and other buttons on post and edit wells here and elsewhere.

I neglected to post something every modeler can use with a my own make over.
That little used ship accessory that for the sake of some sense of realism should get more use, but most said it looked like…. Well you know.
This item is just four sides and top and any sense of depth is from the 3D rendered texture. Texture will hold up at 256x256 resolution to replace older textures since the UV of old is retained. Just import new texture into mat file with UTF edit. So here’s my update of the old equipment base:

A modder in the X3 community just fronted me the tools to pull out the ships, dds textures from X3 terran conflict and X3 reunion for 3DS Max and gmax. Included the software to decompile the catalogs to get to the stuff to get them into the Importer Exporter. If you have the games and have interest I’ll get them to you somehow. Just drop me a message in my inbox. I’ll send them and enough info to get you stared. Be warned it’s not an easy process. It makes Freelancer CMP building look just plain easy.

Edit: Objective is (Of course) to put the models into Freelancer. X3 also uses dds textures. Those alone can be just extracted from the catalog files. They packed these catalogs tight. Be ready if unpack all 10 catalogs to have over 3gb of data from reunion and more from terran conflict. Works with X2 also.

I think that there is not a single X2 + X3 ship that isnt already in a FL mod.

Perhaps though I haven’t seen one yet. Yes X2 ships, but they were pretty rough. I’ve been in that community since 2006 and pulling together tools now. They even have video tutorials… In Russian though I’m looking for ones in English.

https://youtu.be/WP6Sr_KOiOY

Now here’s a couple of X3 ships. Have you seen them in Freelancer?

dunno about the carrier but the M1 for sure
I think that all the small ships have been used while the bigger ones were not so easy to import… especially back when the creation of sur files was still a kind of art

Well you have that spot on right Swat, that why I didn’t try this back in the day as late as 2008. Now I can “Decimate” them down to well within reason and still keep the UV’s and it seems all the tools needed have been or are being revamped to Win 10. However the big guy carrier is off a new conversion program called 3D Object Convert 6.50 from Hungary. The registration costs $50 US, but to cure some conversion problems between GW OBJ and Wavefront OBJ it was worth it and I’m trying to talk Zoltan the inventer into tacking CMP and MAT. He’s an okay guy.

Edit: Well it all works, but it’s still a process. But polygon reduction got this guy down to 9635 polygons (quads) 18189 (triangles) which is not too bad for a capital ship. This was imported into MAX 8, output into Wavefront .obj. Textures I changed to tga from dds to render this using C4D. Output in tif with an alpha mat so I could superimpose it over the background nebula. This render used the X3’s diff, luminance, bump, normals and specular files. However for Freelancer the same effect can be had be using all the channels on a flat plane with the camera 90 degrees from the plane and area lit and area shadowed and size the render at the size of the original texture.

Total time from import to render: 96 min. (I timed it).

Impressive stuff but for Freelancer i’d leave the textures in dds format. Way smaller file size

Packing them up now. All in dds. 1am here and I’m outside in the tent. Tomorrow if the zip is too big for one zip I’lm break it into two zips. In .obj-mtl and post it for the community. Then on to this next huge pretty mother from Boron later. This process is is a bit too involved for most and needs 3DS MAX and takes a catalog unpacker, a conversion program to change .bob to .bod and so on. I’ll concentrate on on the capital ships since I can knock the 30+ k polys of some down to Freelancer’s tolerance. At the least there’s hundreds of new DDS textures here. That in and of itself is a score. Some Real pretty nebulas, planet textures besides ship plates. What might be just as nice? Groups of GUN looking GUNS! Turrets that make you say ouch just looking at them. So on.
Coming attractions now that I can read this screen.

Edit: Still packing up the Carrier. Will have to put on cloud drive and submit for downoad. It’s big.
Packed into 2 zips 1 for dds 1 for tga they sum up to over a half a gig.

EDIT: Sometimes things sneak up on me and this did.
The VAST amount of materials. Unpacked from their native catalogs, batch converted to .dds and .tga. It’s 3.68 gigabytes of textures. At present I’ve dropped other projects to move related textures into packs. (Ship-Station pack, Effects pack, Planet-Space pack, etc.) Since I created a template of 3D meshes from templates of the better (my opinion) Freelancer ship textures, I plugged in X3 textures with their Diffuse maps, bump maps, luminance maps, normals maps and specular maps and rendered using area light and area shadows into a single 1024x 1024 texture. I’ve been doing this with textures since I was under enthused with textures put out by using 2D photo and graphics software.

3D is the way to go to get new 2D textures.
Here’s a jpeg of it cut down to fit the post and using only solar panel textures from one faction called Argon:

Okay. Lots of work and big files for a big ship.
This is first place you had to head in thus game’s story line.

Argon One where the big boss Ban Danna hangs out.

Were the hero’s father in in deep freeze. (For now)…

Download both zips, unpack into THE SAME DIRECTORY load her up. She’s in DDS textures. To use in FL take out the bump maps, normals maps and specular maps, the luminance maps can stay along with the diffuse maps. (Keep the .dds files for 3D rendered textures if your ambitious).

Here’s the link to to the Obj and Mtl files:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WnSULQumPuuTIpclvrGkNPncxaXlUmFH/view?usp=drivesdk

And here’s the textures:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ecsR_Kr_efgzHjUyvtwg75u9D10dlDN1/view?usp=drivesdk

(Or was that the other way around? Oh well doesn’t matter)

VIDEO:

Freelancer - Jump to Lightspeed - SWBF Millennium Falcon MOD

See Lightspeed effect mod @ 2:30

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ydchqtjKsk

XD

Utterly cool ship. I’ve often wondered who hard it would be to cut FL’s dependence on jumpgates and go to a “from here ti X point in Y system.” Until I saw what that would take. The MF would be just the ship to do it too.

Hi again people.
Yes I was gone for quite a while. I’m still around but modeling is sort of out of the question.
Though it’s not a star ship and I didn’t do the model I can still slowly work at texturing.

Edit: I took this down after realizing politics is the
wrong topic to drag into this site. It should be (And is) a respite from such divisive issues and a place to
come together.

Erm… Sorry but I don’t have the feeling that it’s a great place for politic. You don’t really know the inclination of people, it’s better to don’t know political tastes of people, it allows us to remain in good moods. I don’t really know the tacit rules of this forum a lot but it’s better to put this 3D model screenshot in a satiric forum.

I put one time a topic about TV/monitor calibration back in 2012 and despite the fact I have a greater knowledge of color science, I don’t know if it will be the right place to post something related to it except if it’s directly FL related.

@ FrienlyFire : I will never talk about it anymore. I was so bored that I was just nerd nit-picking. It’s just the tiniest, less significant and the most difficult to remember detail inside the whole game. In summary : “Oh. A star. To info : […]” one day later : no remembrance…

It’s the last model you post on the forum, it’s rather sad. I enjoyed watching your 3d models.

I hope I did not hurt you in some ways.

@ Freestalker.fr
??? No in fact the opposite.
Politics aside I did that texture job on a stock model becasuse I to see… well I can’t see the point. Literally. I can’t see the points (unless I get nose prints on the screen) Macular Degeneration. Nasty business. Yes I feed my display into a wall sized HDTV, still no good.
That texture job was poor at best too, but I done my best.

Hey I haven’t been gone really. Just that I can’t even play the game anymore. I use a text 2 speech program to LISTEN in.

Thanks for being concerned.

+Freestalker.fr this one is for political forums
Take civil FL texture from the liners

To Freestalker.fr &Helloween
You’re right and I was wrong. Political comment even in jest as the model was done in has no place on this site which is a respite from it. Not a platform for it.

And I was perhaps wrong about the last model you’ll see from me here. There are many more models, but promised to another mod in development. Only that mod might not happen. The main Dev has been off the grid for some time. If the mod is scrapped then since they’ve been already packed up months ago, they’ll show up here. However as I said, I won’t (can’t) produce new ones.

Great to see that you have remaining 3D models to show.

And I was perhaps wrong about the last model you’ll see from me here. There are many more models, but promised to another mod in development. Only that mod might not happen. The main Dev has been off the grid for some time. If the mod is scrapped then since they’ve been already packed up months ago, they’ll show up here. However as I said, I won’t (can’t) produce new ones.

Too bad you are not able to produce any other 3D model. There is less expensive and free ways to make 3D models, too.

@ Freestalker.fr

Yeah, but it’s just not the same.
Though a peek at some waiting in the
wings. It might even raise someone from
the dead.

The Liberty Dreadnaught is a full retexture package using 3D rendered textures.

All these are months old now.