dialNforNinja

HOLY POLYGONS, BATMAN! But, so beautiful, even at this stage. I'm jealous, actually. My brain seems to have a built-in 1500 quads/3000 triangles limit without accessories or armor packs, which is good for game purposes but not so impressive for rendered artwork. High end ones in the gallery I just posted a link to might hit 2500...

While I can't do much stuck in this potato again, here's a link to renders of some of the models that were on the dead laptop. http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/813/battah21forelefttopx.png Hitting the "next" link a couple dozen times will show you more views of the Skate and its HA-5 Harlequin heavy armor, the Raven variable bomber, and eventually the Scorpion and its Heavy Variable Armor, while "previous" leads to mostly less-Macross styled robots though I think the Drachenjaeger mkII is that way.

I hope it heralds a new Artdink game, though it would certainly be for Vita rather than PSP. I'd have a reason to buy a Vita then... Just hope that if so they ditch dating sim mode from the last game and just level up pilot skills like the first two.

The Yamato can still drop and fire its center hull/torso missiles, though, this one would launch them straight into its armpits and explode. I'm not really feeling the upper legs, either... I don't mind the feet, though the Yamato's look less Gundamish and therefore better. Edit to add: Yeah, really looking at it, I think the only things I prefer here are the slightly sloped shoulders from the anhedral on the wings, and the way the rear sensor pod gets folded away instead of sticking way out behind it like the official art. The best parts are the head, arms, lower legs and shoulders, which are all line art-style and hence pretty close on to the Yamato version. What does this tell me? That my F-Off Scale VF-4, should I ever actually get into it, will be mostly like the Yamato except for having more downward cant (aka anhedral) to the wings, and folding away the tail in battroid. How big am I talking? Big enough to put my Yorkie dog in the cockpit and take cute pictures. I'd probably be mainly working in carboard with wooden frame parts (and a stand to hold it up) and putty to seal it for painting. Call it 1/10 or so... But, I barely stick through my 3d modeling projects on the computer, let alone anything that requires prep and cleamup time... probably never happen. Dear god it would be cool though... - dNN

Got some time on the real computer instead of just web browsing on my PSP... figured I should give some sign that this project is still twitching. So, textures! The pearl white will eventually become a Skull-1 scheme, but I've been mainly working on the RL Shinden paints and getting the big, pretty poster-style starscape to align across the various seams - the goal being that if someone wants a skin like the Sheryl and Ranka custom VF-25s & 29s, it's easy. The skin is mapped to two 512x512 images, though internal parts will have a third and/or a number of smaller ones adding up to a total of no more than 1024x1024 for all of them (including the current two.) That's probably still too big for actual game use on older hardware, but while the image maps still look okay at half that size they do get some obvious jaggies on the panel lines and such. Anyway, behold!

Awesome! Thanks Ignacio, though I'm afraid nothing so earth shatteringly awesome as the Yamato VF-4 is on offer even on my best day. As for the other, I did eventually find a couple of lowish res scanned pages from the Pheyos instructions that show how the legs work, but that's it. Seriously, you'd think someone would have put up an image gallery after building it, most modelers live to show off their work... as I well know, though none of my customs or 3d projects are closer than "Macross-ish."

While I'm at it, has anyone ever actually built an S.H.E. Pheyos? I've never seen a single picture of it except the two peices of line art and scans of the front of the box... one that shows what the legs do in ufo/jet mode would be favorite. (double post rather than an edit because my access is via PSP and input box length is sharply limited)

I would buy three of these if I could... possibly four to display in all three awesome modes and still have one to paint, mod a fin type head, and maybe fit super packs (on a pivot) & reflex missiles to. Until they make a perfect transformation FZ-109A or M7 version VF-14 (the sleek SR-71 like one, not the spindly, gribbly M3 one) this is going to remain my favorite variable fighter with a physical model. And I so .sigged Neoverse Omega's love letter to VF-4 from p22 or so elseforum, just so he(?) knows.

I've seen the front and back battroid images linked here and there, but not at very high resolution, and nothing on the fighter mode (mentioned as shown in 209, and even further off the line art than the battroid, but even if it's not the "real" VF-4 it still looked pretty cool) or how it transformed. Anyone have some that they can share? This would have been from 2009ish iirc so it's not like posting them would hurt their sales...

Thanks! The P-38 can still use the props for battroid, though, just like in GERWALK - there's actually more clearance between them and the head than there is from the nose in plane mode, and even with the engine nacelles at 0 tilt the upper arms are long enough to not be cutting off its own elbows. I just hope I can successfully rez the dead lappie, that model would be the least of the data loss since the optical drive died something like a year and a half ago and I haven't been able to make backups... - dNN

I'm back! And I brought my awesome. I did not, unfortunately, bring my variable P-38, because the laptop I was working on it with had the CPU fan die. (All hpoe is not yet lost, I'm getting a replacement fan shipped right now) I do, however, have a variable J7W1 Shinden ("Magnificent Lightning") the last Japanese fighter design from the war, even if it never went into production to match the IJN's order. Check it out! Aside from making the vertical fins about 20% larger, the small intakes being squared off, and a very slight hump in the fairing behind the cockpit it's almost an exact match for the real Shinden. Well, discounting the wacky color scheme of course, that's just for visualization purposes. It only has 4 guns to the p-38's five, but carries nearly twice as many missiles with the optional equipment. - dNN

Project suspended for a bit - some damn fool elseforum reminded me of Carmageddon, and I reinstalled it and... well, let's just say there's a whole lot of crashing going on. - dNN, will get back to this but it may be a while

I'm going to say again what I posted over in the Games forum - unless you plan to pay through the nose for a license from Harmony Gold, you'd better make original designs to be the "stock units" for any game you might make, and leave adding Macross designs (including enemies) to "unofficial" add-ons/mods. - dNN

Pff, as if. However, I have decided on a craft name and nose art for the pseudo-RL color scheme: "Fork-Tailed Lucile" will be in curved text on the upper/rear (currently yellow) nose section which becomes the rear part of the cockpit armor in battroid mode, with a naked redhead sitting just aft of the gunbarrels so her legs trail back under the currently-hot-pink "eye" parts (due to be made more hexagonal and turned into sensor eyes as seen on most VFs designed since the YF-19 IRL) and holding a pitchfork that extends over them, thus ending up on the left side "ear" of the head when transformed. Under the name, in smaller letters will be the pilot and chief mechanic's names, Ivan Erikson and Loring Hardy unless someone has better ideas. (Please, give me better ideas than juvenile innuendo-based names!) I'm thinking seven or eight kill marks on the lower (currently tan) section. Those will be inverted in battroid mode, but for kill counts it hardly matters. The name refers to the German pilots' nickname for the P-38, "fork-tailed devil," naturally. This brings up a matter for which I want to solicit opinions, should the kill marks be swastikas or the Zentreadi V-thing? Swastikas have the bonus of not being obvious if they're upside down, so I lean tentatively toward them myself. - dNN

I don't know about that, but it makes it so I can clearly see which part is which, when I'm not overly sure of teh design due to it changing to a greater or lesser degree with each session. I haven't actually done anything on it for the last couple of days due to finally having gotten copies of the Lego Harry Potter and Batman games - and probably won't for a couple more, because I like the Lego games a lot and expect to play them straight through one after the next. Have no fear, though, I'll be back to this right quick. I very much want to see this one through to a finished model and at least a Skull-1 and RL P-38 texture sets. Probably not YIPPEE or the White Lightning racer, I'm waffling between bare metal with invasion stripes and one of the OD Green/Haze Grey camo patterns. - dNN

The props can also be used in Battroid with the nacelles tilted as in GERWALK, and assuming the (too big to fit anyway) original engines are replaced with fusion-turboprops and the coolant radiators in the knee/tail pods with mini-jets, there's probably enough thrust to at least hover and fly slowly in B. And yes, there's clearance for the head and SUPER-ROCKETS with the nacelles tilted and props awhirl, though I won't deny it's close. As for the model itself, I won't be adding major amounts of polys - though getting those nacelles and the wings to look right with Smooth turned on has pushed it up over 2000, and probably will hit 3000+ by the time I finish with the arms as well, making this one a bit on the heavy side for my standard. It's all those Lockheed curves, they hate being turned into polyhedral figures instead of smooth curves. I suppose it could be subsurfaced but honestly I've never gotten the hang of making that look good - like the bumper sticker says, "I build my models the old fashioned way - one triangle at a time!" I'll post an updated still before I go to sleep this morning. There's no animation at the moment because I had to move to a new save file and delete all of it because there's quite a bit of geometry nd positioning changes going on - I extended the nose and engines by about the length of the prop spinners to be closer to the actual outline of a P-38 (and that was only about half of the difference) and nudged the tails/legs a little longer as well for the same reason, And I still haven't gotten around to working on the arms at all, d'oh. Current snapshot: - dNN

Edit 2013-03-26: Finally got my laptop back, and finished up the VP-38! Modeling anyhow, th8is is still just material colors with no actual texturing: Old/development version (same transformation, high-contrast color patern makes it easier to see how it works) The model is about 1320 polys as it stands. I also have a set of Super-Rockets for it, which attach to the top of the inner wing sections and on the bottom of the outermost (green) wing panels. Woke up this morning with the head and nacelle designs clear from a dream, and spent the rest of the day obsessing over the rest.I love the P-38. It's my favorite real-world fighter plane, and only the SR-71 beats it in "all aircraft" - dNN

For legal reasons, if you wanted to make a fan game, it would probably be neccessary to have the mecha and ships that are "stock" be original (do you REALLY want a C&D from Harmony Gold for including something with the word "Macross" or the fighting kite logo? Let alone the mecha designs thay insist they have sole NA rights to in perpetuity...) and leave adding every Macross mecha ever to modders. If nothing better was available, I even have some models that could be adapted - thumbnails ahoy! If you follow those back to Imageshack and poke around the gallery there's another (the Drachenjager) that is also tagged as "macross" but its polycount is around 3x these two, and it was modeled from a frankenmech that used bits of official line art. There's also a lot more views of them. Ah, and the Skate's super armor has a bunch of beams rather than missiles, becauce it's meant to have a Varauta-style gravity lens device in that big chest compartment, so it can bend them into itano circus tracking the target rather than needing physical missiles. The sword is just a scaled-up version of the VF-25's Barrier Knife, and is loosely based on something from one of the Air Cavalry Chronicles designs in Macross Design Works. I do have another original variable fighter design that hasn't been postedd, but these will suffice for my purpose here, more pics can go in the fanart area. - dNN</p>

Judging by what they use the terminology for in the series and first movie, it's just the new name for a Sound Energy System, except the performer doesn't have to be aboard. Which is probably a good thing - imagine trying to keep the breath control to sing under rapidly changing G-loading, even without the "guitar stick controls" issue of Sound Force designs. - dNN