Reef remodel

Hi

I had this idea for a new reef model since quite some time. And since I had some time and no motivation to do anything more worthwhile ( cough gunships *cough*)... well here is a half arsed reef model. after cleanup it should be about 6000-7000 tris. But there is a lot of detail which can be removed easely to push it below 5k. Obviously its still very wip: the scale of the diffrent parts compared to each other arent quite right imo. But since they are all seperate parts, adjusting their sizes should be easy. Havent seen a reef in quite some time, so I´m not sure if it already has a new model.

If somebody wants to fidle with it or even finish it, feel free to do so.

here is he link for the .wings file, but if needed, I can upload other formats to.

http://www.file-upload.net/download-8195041/reef.rar.html

If somebody is willing to texture it, i would offer to clean it up ( removing all the unneeded geometry ).

Had quite some fun building this, the drone was specialy fun: took about 10mins and looks ok for that imo :). So if this just rots in data-hell, thats fine too.

some pics





since i dont trust the forum, here are the direct links to the pictures

Polys are no problem, thats 6-7 glaives. The only issue is how hard that is to uvmap and texture.

It's still using a really old 3do model, and no efforts have been made to re-do it. The style really fits to, so yeah this is really good. All your models are really nice Muffe.

I have a texturing process set up for ships that is pretty formulaic and mostly relies on a few prefab textures and some AO baking, so texturing it in the style of the other ships is nothing fancy but fairly easy to do.

This does look like it has less repair pads than the current one though which uses it's many, many repair pads to repair and re-arm its drones.

People talk about a lot of things TheSponge.

Sak: It has the same amount of repair spots (current model and Muffe's both have 3).

@saktoth: thx for the kind words :)

TheDarkStar probably got the impresion the same way i did: the reef has those optical patern that repeats itself three times on the landing-pad range.

But thanks to the magic of modular design, more pads are not really a problem to add... unless its starting to look really messy...







I personly like the 5 pad version most.

Drones are small, so there's no technical fuzzle letting 4 of them land on one "physical" pad, which is actually 1 small "virtual" pad in each corner. And larger planes would only be allowed to land on center -- if at all. Do we really need planes landing on Reef?

I love the 5-pad version.

I really like those hangar-things hanging from the side of the hull. Though I suspect they are just for show. Is that correct?

In any case, it is inspiring. I'm daydreaming about a carrier recognising an incoming plane and use that for animations. i.e. opening the bay-doors or some kind of self-adjusting landing-pads, or having an mechanical arm holding a craft in position for repairs.

The missile is clearly shot from the area behind the control tower, while the side-hangars are for launching the drones (though I'm not sure the lua supports that, it probably should).

-nice model!

about the unit itself:
-remove rockets. we already have warlord which does artillery bombing. and warlord shells are awesome compared to this dumb rocket. and the sound.
-as exchange, add d-gun attack. executed by a temporary, uncontrollable aircraft (or 3-5 in nice formation of course)
-make repairing ability faster or lichos stuck there forever
-unsure about the antinuke. maybe this could be moved to a new true supporter unit (like having shieldor cloaker or and antinuke, maybe some reclaim ability or sth..)
-oh i almost forgot: make it possible to build! like a mobile factory. maybe restrict possible planes to build.

To be honest, i kinda like the idea of a pure-drone ship without anti.

Current Reef just has everything bolted on it, and while that does sound like what a modern carrier would have, it feels decidedly against the crippling-specialization doctrine used on the rest (or at least most of) ZK units.

Interestingly enough, there's one other unit that does that to this extent - and that's Funnelweb...

Yeah, I have to agree with Anarchid - the Reef seems to be a bunch of barely-related stuff duct-taped together... a common feature with Strider-scale units. They don't get enough regular usage, so people don't think about them enough to realize how insane they are.

I mean, the Strider ships are
(1) an artillery ship,
(2) an artillery submarine with an anti-nuke bolted on, and
(3) an artillery ship with an anti-nuke bolted on.

I understand how it happened, but the end result isn't real good.

Obviously ZK will always have need for the Reef, but I wouldn't stress the specifics of its loadout as I imagine there is at least one dev with a plan to revamp this aspect of the generally-broken sea-play.