[MOD - IDEA] Yamato Universe Ships and Weapon Effects

I've definitely used Yamato and other Anime influences (namely Gundam) when designing stuff in Black Sun. So yeah, there's a lot of really cool designs there that I personally don't think really get approached by modern western media. The trouble you'll run into is the effects and how limited sins is.

Effect trails in sins are a total mess because they don't update very fast, and the child particles always die immediately with the parent. So, any and all long trails just vanish when the projectile hits. Depending on the scales of your ships, and the speeds of the weapons, there's a few different strategies you can use. Traditional trails can work if the projectile is extremely slow, an example of this is the solid color trails in Bailknights missiles. Those tend to be very expensive particle-wise though, and suck for performance/particle limits. "Fake" trails, like those I make in Black Sun, can achieve the exact same effect but due to the high speed of my projectiles it can be hard to even see them at all.

Both are sort of demonstrated in this screencap from one of my internal videos.

Thanks much for your post, Iskatu

Kinda disappointing, but I was planning to have the projectiles move at about 1/2 speed more or less then a normal plasma bullet (i.e grab any old advent ship, look at it shooting plasma bullets and you get the idea, might be better to get the ones from the mothership though, or maybe even from the starbase)

Another question I thought off is the shrinking of certain weapon models, for example the ograv's torpedos are hilariously big, and obviously wouldn't fit a torpedo barrage from a Heavy Cruiser, which has 6 of them, I assume it is possible to simply shrink the model so that its less overly huge?

also, found a video that better shows the speed I want.

There a bit of the weaponry at 0:25 - 0:30 

But a better look at it at 0:48 - 0:58

Mesh files are easily resized through a mesh resize tool that can be found around here. Non-mesh based effects can be resized through particleforge which should have come with rebellion.

Nice trailer. I see some sound effects I'd love to rip from the actual anime. I might have to try to find that, now.

The projectile speeds are not that high. I believe you can get a trail like that quite easily. The problem will be just the trail vanishing when the projectile hits.

Suppose I'll help you by giving this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tk80HPjIcI4

the designs of the ships, the weapons, the effects, all of this is why I eventually dream that one day I will have a sins mod that is equal to this.

You've been helpful in answering most of my questions so this should provide you with some sound sources if these are indeed the ones you wanted.

also upon closer inspection, it appears the weapon trails themselves are not that long at all, i.e the ones you use in your example image you provided above are actually the perfect size, downsize the speed a little bit and its peachy.

http://puu.sh/4h8AE

Guess they just wanted to show some cool beam lasers or something.

It's mostly the details that are extremely hard with sins because of the limits. Sins technically doesn't have real child particles, so stuff like particles inheriting the properties of other particles in terms of position and velocity is all entirely impossible. Sins also doesn't have ribbons, which would make these pulsebeams extremely trivial. So, things like the beams colliding correctly or leaving weapons smoothly is very challenging, and the challenge gets harder the faster the weapon is because sins doesn't "update" the positions property for non-attached emitters, thus those gaps in the trails.

When I say fake trails, I mean technically my emitters are not really trails at all, they're just particles moving backwards. That works quite well with very short missile smoke trails or, in this case, these pulsebeam effects. So while a 1:1 effect is going to be extremely hard, I have similar ideas already in place in Black Sun (though most of those are from non-revealed content I won't show until the movie is finished). This is not a mod though.

There's a few good sound samples I've collected from the first episode so far that I am sure I can clean up and get working ingame.

damn, looks like I'm at a crossroads here, either work forever to try and get a workable positron beam laser or take the easy way out, and just grab one of Sins's default weapon effects and hope for the best, and tbh im kinda leaning towards just grabbing the ragnorov's railgun effect, making the weapon size smaller, changing its colour and calling it a day lol.

This softimage mod tool is doing my head in, trying to follow these tutorials makes me think 'why don't I just pay somebody in steam games for this' but thats probably not allowed here. (and would in no doubt, get extremely expensive very quickly hahah)

I'll be interested in the sound effects you are able to get working in your mod! hopefully it all works out. Guess I will just put modelling on the backburner for now and just focus on trying to figure out the initial problem, sounds, weapon effects and stuff like that, I'm guessing if I can get Ragnorov railgun blasts coming out of a Kol's Battleship lasers, I'm heading in the right direction.

What tool would you recommend for changing mesh sizes of weapons, was it particle forge? can these also change weapon colours?

The tool for resizing meshes is different than particleforge. It's a usermade tool. I imagine someone will probably pop in here with a link sooner or later, I don't have it on hand myself. Particleforge is what handles the actual particle systems, some of which use those meshes (all torpedo bodies are effectively meshes spawned as particles). Particleforge can't resize those meshes, but it can do everything else with particles including colors and textures, spawn rates, etc.

iskatumesk was right about a link poping up. here is a link to the ANCIENT but still works in 32 bit windows(preferably xp) neoburg's resize tool re-upload in wincustomise.

harpo

Tested and working on Windows 7 64-bit. Can't say about the output file but the program itself shows no issues.

are there any dependencies that are required to run that program? I'm getting comdlg32.ocx error when trying to run it. Fixed it by downloading the dll file in question and placing it in the folder where I put all my sins modding tools for now, but program crashes everytime I try to resize past the initial try. also it seems to spit out a mesh file that is only 1kb. Which can't be correct.

http://puu.sh/4hfgc.png

not sure what the giant black box is for either, I suppose its show a preview of the model, but yeah thats not working either. Guess how old it is, is definitely showing.

http://puu.sh/4hg6Z.png This eclipse tool is pretty nifty, not that hard to learn... I think

Still trying to find my bearings on locating certain ability weapon effects and such (Ragnorov's Titan's railgun)

I can be of service. Here's BD rips of the show with FLAC audio. If you're not a fan of torrents, I can probably find some XDCC bots that have the show.

I use this tool all the time on Win7 64-bit Ultimate; works fine for me. Just need to make sure you have the right Windows support packs installed (forget exactly what MS calls them).

here are a streasite http://www.animefave.net/space-battleship-yamato-2199-ova/

Streams aren't as good a source for ripping audio as the BD rips are, no offense.

ok sorry

Yup, those are the links I've been using. I've gotten several interesting sound bytes out of this so far. I only managed to get like 2-3 out of the live action show; while decent, quantity is pretty critical. I expect I can make use out of all of them, as beam sounds are particularly hard to fabricate from scratch. My beam sounds are very different from sins, which just uses a looping drone and fade in-out graphic. I managed to create quite a few interesting effects with a bit of tinkering...

Oh. I may as well throw this on the table. If you have an anime or movie or something you want a particular sound out of, and you think it's relatively clean e.g. as little background audio as possible, I might be able to rip/remaster it for you. It is very rarely possible to rip sounds out of noisy backgrounds, but it relies entirely on stereoscopic presence. That is why removing vocals from music is typically a myth. If the sound is short, the background audio may not really warp it enough for most people to care.

tbh, the only sounds I want are from the Yamato Fight at the beginning right now. I.e the Beam Laser sound from the UN Cosmo fleet, and the Positron Beams from the Gamilan Fleet. Check Episode 1 of the Remade Anime (first 10 minutes) for perfect cuts of this. Link was posted above by Lavo_2, the battle at the beginning should be almost perfect, i.e I know theres a little bit of background BGM playing, but you should be able to mux it and cancel it out using sound programs (or thats what my friend said who is alot more versed in the subject)

Also if possible, the explosion effect, is it possible to change explosion sounds?

I know its probably not possible to change explosion effects, but something exploding like this would be mighty cool. http://puu.sh/4gnBe

also is there anywhere on the web that can tell me how to start with modelling in softimage? Tutorials arn't that useful and mostly go into faces and human models and stuff. You could say I kinda just want to leap into a step to step guide on designing basic vehicles and things like that. Cause if I know how to make a vehicle, making a ship should be the next general step

Those effects are probably FumeFX or something equivalent which is not doable in sins. The most you can do is get sprite sheets built with fumeFX (I made a bunch for Black Sun) but sins has a very small frame limit on animated textures so that sort of a drawn out effect is basically impossible. Also, as I said, Sins doesn't have child particles, so those streaks of fire traveling outwards from debris will never look anywhere near as good ingame.

As for the sounds, there's a couple of clean shots in that first episode for sure. Remastering them should be very easy.

I use 3ds max for modeling myself. I find XSI detestable.

oh I'm fine with not having explosion effects, I meant to reword it in a way of just having the explosion sounds. I.e the kaboom! when the ships get hit and explode in firey flame.

This entire mod is basically me and one other person right now, both of us LOVE Yamato and really love the help we are receiving from you guys 

oh damn forgot to add something, theres a Torpedo sound effect I want from the first episode as well, sorry!

wait a minute

does Sins have turrets that can rotate on an axis? I just realized half the ships I want work with rotatable turrets. Bit of a shame if the game doesn't support it, as that means when I do learn how to model effectively, I'll have to point the turrets in whatever direction I want the ship to fire from.

Sins doesn't support turret animations.

Yeah, you'll need a more advanced engine like homeworld 1 if you want real turrets.

You should take some time to play the game and then play/investigate some mods. 

well thats a pity, guess I can work around it. Guess i'll make every ship have Illuminator style turrets or something.

@Zombie

yeah I've already downloaded every rebellion compatible mod I can find to examine file structures and files, along with gameplay and such, have about 300 hours of Sins on steam, 50 of that was just mucking around with 3 different mods seeing what I could discern.