Andrea Orioli's models

Yesterday I forgot to mention the other models shown in the MekaWars' trailer. They are the well known vehicles already used in Hoverjet Racing.

They come from an Andrea Orioli's old project known as Black Chaos, a clone of the old Wipeout 2097. He kindly gave the permission to use them in Hoverjet Racing and I find them so good that I use to include them as placeholders also in other projects.
Being a high-level graphic designer, Andrea finds those models obsolete, in fact after those first attempts he designed more advanced models for the same project and developed also professional models for commercial games. If you are interested, visit the Andrea Orioli's online portfolio.

Above you can see the new version of the Black Chaos vehicles, while below you can see some very suggestive buildings taken from the scenery where Black Chaos races had to take place.

MekaWars' models

Yesterday I talked about the basic viewer of the MekaWars' simulator and someone asked about the models shown in the game trailer's screenshots.
As usual they come from free packages available on the internet, but they are only placeholders for the real original models, of course. They were taken from TurboSquid, the famous 3D models repository.

There are several lowpoly models representing cargos, spacefigthers and even a space station. They fit quite well in the current line of development of the game, but I need more models to distinguish the different races and technologies.

In the same package, several ground buildings are also included, such as a landing dock, a graving dock and a barrack. They are shown in the trailer's screenshots, but those structures are not needed by the current design of the game, since it takes place in outer space only, around a few asteroids.

Spaceship modules

The simple modules described yesterday permit to assemble in a modular way any kind of starship necessary to the players of MekaWars.
Since the modules must easily connect along their sides and, at least in a first release, all the modules share the same shape, there are only a few regular polygons possible. The easiest to use are hexagons and octagons, in fact equilateral triangles and squares leave only a few free sides after connections, while pentagons can't build linear structures.
My first choice fell on octagons, because leave more sides free after any connection between modules.
The second step was to model those modules and, as usual, I played a little with Wings3D. This screenshot shows the result: a simple octagonal model that I can slightly modify to differentiate other specialized modules.

In Wings3D, it's possible to attach textures on models, of course. The texturing tool passes through several steps and it's not easy to master but the final result, as shown in the screenshot, is quite acceptable.

Since the game will feature several races and nations, it's easy to change the aspect of the modules modifying the attached textures, even if they are all octagonal.
Another possibility to differentiate the races may be also to assign a particular regular polygon (triangle, square, hexagon, pentagon and octagon) to each of them. Players must be careful to choose their preferred race also on an architectural basis, in fact to build effective spaceship based on pentagons should be very tricky.

Mushroom model

I need a model for Mushroom's Ride, but it seems that mushrooms does not inspire any builder of free 3D models, in fact I look everywhere on the internet but I coundn't find any simple or complex mushroom model. So I had to show my poor modelling capabilities and you can see my very schematic result in the screenshot below.

Years ago I have been working for some time as a technical drawer on AutoCAD. Even if I possess some practice, I can't find any modelling program that is enough intuitive and easy to use (to me), probably because I have very little practice in 3D drawings.
The modeller that I find most difficult and disorienting is Blender: I regurarly lose myself in its interface. Anim8or is easier to master, but it's almost impossible to use its texture tools.
To create the mushroom, I have used instead Wings3D and I must admit that it is a great tool. I put together a cylinder and a cone, shaped them a little and then layed down the triangles on a texture to color them in a paint program. If only Wings3D wouldn't be so slow when the number of triangles increases, I'll use it more frequently to create static models.