Silhouettes and Generic WC Counters

Speaking as someone who needs to make those 'five view' ship images for the WCPedia yesterday, I would very much want that.
 
That would be helpful, yes. If you're willing to give it a go, go right ahead.

I don't suppose you could direct me to Standoff's Hakaga model? It's not in the game's ship viewer. I do have an image I could make a silhouette from; just thought I'd press my luck a bit.
 
Right, I'll get onto that. It's an easy task, though time-consuming, and likely to take me a couple of days.

The same goes for the Hakaga. We didn't display it in Standoff's ship viewer for obvious reasons - Confed has no intelligence about it, so you don't get to see it - but modifying the viewer to add it is not a big deal.
 
Small update - I've spent a bit of time saturday morning working on this. It's going quickly, but there's a lot of ships to be added. I've got just about all of the fighters in there, as well as all the Kilrathi ships and one or two bug capships. Currently I'm going through the Confed capships. For each capship, every single part that's separate from the main mesh (bridges, hangars, rotating thingies... turrets!) has to be added as a child object and attached to a hardpoint.

I'm also trying to include some of the more interesting objects from SO that did not show up in the game. So, you'll be able to see the Confed and bug drones, and even the "Nautilus" (the Confed capship seen in the WCP intro).
 
How about this view?

Some time ago, I had make VDU images for fighters and capships that I converted for FC. The Plunkett turned out reasonably well, but the Murphy is a little too split up mesh-wise to get an image using the simple method I used.

I can send you lightwave object files for most every ship from WCP/SO. You should be able to load it up then in whatever modeling tool/viewer you have.

Standoff ships might be possible, but I bet some of their iffs might give Eddieb's tool fits during conversion.
 

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Found some 3ds meshes over the weekend from one of the Solsector.net sites (Wing Commander 3d). http://wcmdf.solsector.net/confed_capships_hi.htm has the Murphy and Plunkett meshes. I've decided to wait for the ones from the game itself, though (per Quarto's work); I'll probably go with whatever one comes out the cleanest.

Just as an FYI, I'm a Blender user, so I can go with pretty much anything. Doesn't matter if the meshes have shaders, textures and whatnot, given what I'm doing with them. OgreMeshy has been doing well enough for the Arena stuff as well.

Prepped a trial set for hardcopy over the weekend (my Starflight counters). I still need to apply the Krylon fixative to them; decided to wait until my wife and son were out of the house before trying to use the stuff, given the rather nasty ingredients and their potential harmful health effects as listed on the can (stuff contains benzene, acetone, toluene and some other carcinogenic hydrocarbon that I can't remember off the top of my head). Hoping to start cutting later this week.

Work on the ordnance sheet is still progressing. I haven't had a lot of free time of late to do the necessary prep work for some objects, but I hope to have the sheet up by the end of the week.

@Iceblade: Since I've got (or will have) access to full-sized meshes of these two ships, I probably won't use the VDU you posted. Thank you anyway.

@Major A Payne: That's a Murphy, right? If so, that is of use. Thanks.
 
Almost there, guys :). I've got all the Confed and Kilrathi ships done (whew... the Midway has 31 turrets altogether!), and I'm knee-deep in the bugs. All their fighters are done, but most of the capships still remain - and as I said before, it's the capships that require the most work.
 
Got a question for all of you who are following this thread this morning. I'm getting ready to design the Privateer 2 sheet. For the pirates, should I make them all a single color, or should I give each pirate clan their own unique color?

Made more progress on the ordnance sheet this morning; not exactly sure what still needs to be made at this point. Not much is left, I know that much.
 
Oh sorry capi. Yes thats a render of the Murphy. In fact if you look at the murphy from Wing Commander 3d website you might find an uncanny resemblance.
 
Oh sorry capi. Yes thats a render of the Murphy. In fact if you look at the murphy from Wing Commander 3d website you might find an uncanny resemblance.

I see...is that what I'd get if I made a silhouette from the WC3d website's version of the Murphy? Definitely eyeballing their version of the Behemoth...


My trial set of counters are ready to cut and I'm considering which sets I'd like to have from WC first in hardcopy. Leaning towards the WC2 set; a friend of mine and I have a pnp game of TacOps in the planning stages.

Ordnance sheet is coming along; I need to tweak the weapons satellite token (tried to tweak the silhouette in Paint instead of GIMP and lost the alpha channel; yeah, I realize it was a dumb move but at least now I know a quick and dirty way of removing the alpha channel from an image) and I still need to find the "prototype" mesh. Filling in some of the Prophecy weapons has proven to be harder than I originally thought it would be. Probably will wind up making this sheet into a hardcopy too; it's got a larger variety of asteroid and mine tokens.

Also decided to make the Privateer 2 pirate ships a uniform color; identifying which ships belong to which clans has been moved into the craft's designator. P2 ships will use three letters instead of two; this let me go ahead and pick designators without having to worry about accidentally re-using one from one of the prior sets. Should make identifying P2 ships a little easier if nothing else.
 
Actually that version of the Murphy is one I rebuilt using the original model as a base with the original textures reapplied. Same goes for quite a few of the models from the project I was working on. If theres any others you need and I have them your more than welcoem to the renders or the models themselves if you want them.
 
@Major A Payne: I'll consider it. I'd probably prefer the renders at this point.

Well, I was about to release the ordnance sheet, but I've noticed a lot of artifacts on some of the silhouettes (a lot of them have a little box around them instead of having an alpha channel all the way to the edges). Not sure how they got there but they would definitely show up if anyone tried to make a hardcopy of the sheet. Good news is that it should be relatively easy to fix, so I may still be able to release the sheet later today. Bad news is, of course, that I can't release the thing ~now~ like I had wanted to...
 
Alright, guys. I was able to get the last of the silhouettes I needed this morning for the ordnance sheet and the ones I had problems with have been fixed. Could not find a mesh for the prototype station mentioned on p.38 of Star*Soldier; I figured it either wasn't in there with the rest of the Arena meshes, or it was a composite object of some sort. Either way, I made the executive decision to say WTH and just go with something other than a top-down view. Silhouetted the prototype on Star*Soldier's front cover. Also finished making missile silhouettes. I took a few liberties with the silhouettes for missiles, simply because the same picture was associated with several different types of missiles in Prophecy (for example, the ImRec also represented the LRImRec and the EnLRImRec). Some of y'all might catch the difference, but I figure the average Joe wouldn't really care that much. I also took a slight liberty by changing the yellow Arena powerups to a light orange; I figured it would be easier to look at on a white background. Orange powerups from Arena are a darker orange color. The Stealth powerup (the only white powerup in Arena) is black instead, for what I hope is an obvious reason.

So I can at long last proudly present the ordnance sheet to y'all. This sheet is specifically meant to go with the traditional basic Prophecy and Arena sheets, but there is no real reason why it couldn't be used to augment any of the other existing sheets. It includes four copies of each missile type from Prophecy, four copies of each of the satellite types from Arena, four copies of each Arena powerup as listed in Star*Soldier, 21 asteroids (using 14 different models), and 21 mines (using three different models).

Share and Enjoy. On to the Privateer 2 sheet...
 

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Making some progress with the P2 sheet today...I've got silhouettes done for most of the craft at this point, though I still need to get the rest of the pirate craft (all the Chirichan fighters are done as well as the Jincilla Skull; still need to get the rest). I can tell y'all right now that P2 is going to be a two-parter, simply by virtue of the sheer number of craft in that game; even being conservative, it's going to take two sheets. That should include ordnance and commodities, though.

P2 is going to wrap up work on the traditional-basic sets. I have plans for a revision to the WCP sheet once Quarto's finished up and I'm hoping to put together a Standoff sheet at some point.

Given the volume of work that's been done so far with these sheets, I'll throw this out here; I am willing to set up custom sheets if people need them for their own particular usage. By which I mean any combination of craft, any specific color, specific numbers of craft, etc. (like say if you want a sheet with half a dozen Steltek drones in red and another half-dozen in grey, things like that). If anybody is interested in that sort of thing, post to this thread and we'll talk.
 
Finished adding ships! Just need to set up the campaign file so that the object viewer actually becomes accessible in SO, and we'll be good to go. I'll hopefully upload the final product tonight.
 
There we go - I've uploaded the SO ship viewer in a separate thread. Here's the other thing you asked about - the Standoff ship viewer, modified to include the Hakaga (this was a very quick change, I didn't even bother to add a proper name for the ship). In order to use it, you'll need to edit Standoff's cfg file, so that the game reads files from folders.

Also - since this viewer and the SO ship viewer share the same filenames, you cannot have both of these installed at once.
 

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Just wanted to give you guys a quick update on the counters. I've been working the last couple of days on the Privateer 2 sheets and should be able to present them later this morning (as soon as I can get to a terminal that has the magic combination of Publisher and the correct installed font files). I've also got the images from Quarto's mesh viewer that I need to correct the Prophecy sheet. Unfortunately, the background grid is giving me merry hell, and I've yet to find a viable workaround (I had limited success with the Murphy yesterday, in that I got a finished silhouette that was pretty ragged looking - not on the order of the Kor'larh, but pretty damned close - which I'll go ahead and let y'all take a look at), so a corrected Prophecy sheet is still a little ways down the road. Given the amount of work involved in removing the grid, a plan to replace the earlier VDU images with silhouettes from these models is pretty much kaput; I'll still go ahead and get the ones that I don't have yet at least. I'll need to redesign the sheet a little more now to account for some of the other meshes that have become available as a result of Quarto's work, ships such as the Copernicus and Twilight Purchase. I also seem to have left off Stingray clusters.

Despite the problems involved with the grid, I still have every intention of building a Standoff sheet using the in-game models to generate silhouettes.

Thought I'd mention that I have begun physical production of some of the counter sheets; I have the WC1, Wc2, Wc3, Privateer, Armada (strategic) and logo sheets printed, treated and mounted, with the logo sheet currently cut into strips. I'm still in the midst of cutting up my Starflight set (five sheets), but hope to be able to start turning the WC sheets into proper counters soon. Definitely have to post some pics once I've got the WC stuff ready to go.
 
Evening, everybody. Well, as promised, the Privateer 2 traditional/basic set is ready to go. Would've had it up earlier today, but my home wireless router was being persnickety...

The Privateer 2 set comes on two different sheets (which was necessary owing to the large overall number of unique craft that appear in P2). The set contains four copies of each player-useable craft in two different colors (one for friendlies and one for hostiles), three copies of the Gea transport series in two different colors, two copies of all other transports in two different colors, one copy of the spacedude and one copy of the Talon in two different colors, eight copies of each military fighter, four copies of each military capship, four copies of each pirate fighter, four copies of each pirate shuttle, three copies of each pirate cruiser, six copies of both Kindred fighter classes, one copy of the Krono, one copy of Kastagan, Draenor and Kappa Labs, two copies of all five types of cargo pods, two copies of each of the various station types, two planet tokens, a nav buoy token, a jump gate token, three satellite tokens, three laser satellite tokens, and four copies of each missile type in the game. There should be enough there to conduct a pnp version of Privateer 2 or to perform homebrew missions in the same era. I think I've got everything in, but y'all be sure to let me know if something's missing.

Next step is to try and fix the Prophecy sheet. I had mentioned I'd let you all take a look at the Murphy silhouette I generated yesterday and then didn't do that, so I'll go ahead and post it now. And of course, here are the Privateer 2 sheets. Share and enjoy.
 

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