Battlestar Scale re-revisited again.

[Punisher454]

So the recent discussion of landing bay dimensions and layout prompted me to dig out some testing stuff I made a while back. This was built on the 2008 drawings that are considered the best available.
The landing bay shape is based on the one made by Taranis and the vipers are by David Kerin scaled to 28.5' long. I crudely reduced the viper polycount to shorten rendering times, so keep in mind thats not the way Davids Vipers are supposed to look.
The Launching bay is by Me, based on the studio blueprints. I had to deviate from the blueprints by a few inches here and there to make the rooms square since the set was built crooked (probably on purpose). The launching bays are angled 21.5 degrees towards the bow.

basic measurements are:

Width of 4 launchtubes at tube centerline = 92’6” along battlestar length
Launchtube spacing , center to center , ships axis = 30.83’
Launching bay length from elevator door to launchtube enterance 54’ along tube axis
Launching bay width including column/bulkhead wall thickness along tube axis =28’7.8”
Width of elevator door =18’
Max length of ship in elevator =35’5”

Landing bay flight deck dimensions:
Width of bay = 238’
Height of bay at side walls = 90’
Height of bay at center = 119’6”

Flightpod width = 631’
Flightpod height = 279’
Flightpod length (not including landing deck “tongue”) = 2865’5”

and I'll post some Very low quality test renders.

[Punisher454]

a few more...

[Punisher454]

some wireframes...

[Punisher454]

and some more, including the view from the pilots elevator.

[gmd3d]

wow this is great ,, I will have to read it again tomorrow (come on its Friday night.. I had a few drinks )

but this looks fantastic

[Punisher454]

Dang, its early afternoon Friday here.
You may get to start your weekend earlier, but monday morning comes sooner too

But seriously, I'm tempted to load that scene back up and add in a few shuttles too.

[maudib]

Wow, you have put a lot of thought into trying to make sense and bring order out of Glen Larson's mess. Your work is highly impressive, but this is NOT what I am envisioning. I am ready to giveup all the discussion about what is "Canon BSG" scale and how the innards of a battlestar might be. I am probably just going to start from scratch and just build the various parts of the ship as needed to get the job of rendering done without worrying about making too much sense of it all. This BSG stuff is all in fun anyway, so let's go do it and have fun! But I hate the rivets! That is one silly aspect that will not make it into any of my meshes or renders. But thanks for the drawings and schematics. This will help me greatly in deciding how to construct the various structures I will need to render specialized cgi shots

I have almost settled on doubling the battlestar scale to 2 miles in length in order to fit large heavy transports inside making sense. The scene of an eastern alliance destroyer comfortably parked on the landing bay main flight deck suprised the heck out of me when I 1st saw it. Taranis, your layout is much too small to accomodate such large ships. I prefer the new BSG battlestar's landing bay in size and layout. The Colonial One vessel easily fits inside. Again, it'll all work out in the finished render, you'll see I am looking forward to your renders showing your ideas.

Yes, my battlestar will be around 20 million polys completed, but NEVER will 20 million polys be rendered at the same time! Only those parts of the mesh involved need be rendered. The inside scenes ( landing bay, launch tubes, bridge etc.) have nothing to do with rendering the outside of the ship, so those meshes can be equally large and detailed. Most of my shots will be multiple pass composites on my render farm anyway. And I plan to move to a GPU-based render farm as soon as I think the software is mature enough. This will speed up the rendering 10 fold as compared to a quadcore basd render node. That is the same as having 800 render nodes of my current 20 cpu-based units ( they're not even dual core processors). I'm drooling at the possibilities...

[gmd3d]

Originally Posted by maudib

. Taranis, your layout is much too small to accomodate such large ships. I prefer the new BSG battlestar's landing bay in size and layout. The Colonial One vessel easily fits inside. Again, it'll all work out in the finished render, you'll see I am looking forward to your renders showing your ideas.

yeah .. my landing bay is scaled to the size of the launch tubes .. on the model I used as a reference.. so I think anyone building the models should forget and throw out the size of the launch tubes on the sides of the landing bays .. they are to large for a ship a mile long. imo..

build it as you think it should look . as they never built the BSG to be subject to close scrutiny what ever the books or articles say

[Punisher454]

For sure the launch tube exits are WAY too big for a 1 mile ship. Whats even more grossly out of scale are the scenes of vipers landing in the landing bays. But we really didnt notice it much in 1978. By the standards of the day those SFX were really top notch.

I agree with Maudib on the fact that nothing in TOS was properly to scale and indeed it was a total mess (scale-wise).
Since My goal requires a functionsl interactive 3D environment primarily on the interior I have settled on trying to recreate the "Look" of the sets.
I have come up with a group of scale references and made them to work together. Of course someplace compromises have had to be made, but I have settled on compromoising what I felt impacted my objective least. That being launch tube length.
If I was doing still or motion renderings of launch tube sequences then I'd have really long launch tubes. But I'm not doing that So I shortened the tubes to fit. they're a little over a hundred feet right now .

My scale reference chain is as follows:

1. interior shuttle studio drawings combined with footage of the shuttle flight deck gives me the size of the shuttle passenger cabin.

2. The shuttle model scale is adjusted so that the windows closely aproximate the full size interior set layout. This gives me a plausable shuttle scale. (I ignore the scenes at the shuttle main hatch which use the 1/3 scale shuttle facade ).

3. I look at the SFX shots of the shuttle entering and leaving the landing bay as seen from inside the landing bay. I adjust the size of the battlestar model until the landing bay entrance has about the right scale proportion to the shuttle. Now this step is where I initially had an 8000 foot long battlestar. I really wanted the battlestar to be more like 1 nautical mile so I decided to make a slight adjustment to the landing bay opening proportions and it brought the ships length back down to ~6080 feet. I was satisfied with that.


About the rivets, I agree they are totally ridiculous. They have been outdated since Keizer started welding Liberty ships in WWII (right here in Vancouver where I live), but they did serve a real purpose on the BSG set. When you look at those columns and bulkheads your brain says "thats a heavy duty steel structure". I have thought about ditching the rivets too, especially with what they do to my poly count. but decided to keep them since its so easy to just bake them into a normal map (or even a parallax map).

But in the end everybody modeling for BSG (or anything else) should do it their way. This is 'ART' of course. I for one like to see some of the variations that from peoples different interpretations of the same thing.

[gmd3d]

the shuttle is the scale I should have used when building my Hanger bay .. but that was then and this is now .. I know more well I think I do ..

Given the hours you going to put in and have put in .. follow any suggestions you think are worth it .. but after that do what you think you should do.

rivets are a pain and add big time to the poly count for those who have limited pcs

I won´t be modeling for BSG for a long time to many things on .. but I will be following this with interest

[Punisher454]

My solution to the rivet polycount issue is to model them into the super high res version of the objects that use them, and then generate normal maps for the low and medium res versions. For rendering purposes you should be able to do the same thing. You'll save hundreds of thousands or even millions of polys that wont slow you down at render time.

The scale of your landing bay model should really be easy to adjust. The doors, the 'observation' windows and elevators could just be shrunk down. The overall shape and look of that landing bay is awesome and is VERY much like I always pictured it. Thats why I am following your design very closely with mine. Unfortunately I cant use it directly. The game engine gets really picky about some things.