Celestia Forums

I thoroughly enjoyed the 2016 movie, "Passengers", starring Jennifer Lawrence and /Chris Pratt. The movie took place on a massive "starship" named, "Avalon", which was designed by the movie directors to be somewhat realistic. It rotated to simulate gravity, and did not have fictional warp drive. Instead, it traveled at 50% light speed using Ion propulsion, and required its 5,000 occupants to hibernate long-term for 90 years on its way to a new planetary colony.

FYI, Selden Ball and I simulated the passage of the Avalon in space, by designing an add-on using the "Discovery" model from the 2001 add-on already available on the Motherlode. Here is a video of that neat flyby:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6pbrehqnc5wuhfj/Discovery%20passing.mp4?dl=0. You should be able to download the add-on in a few days from Motherlode (in the 2001 fictional category).

I have searched in vain for a 3DS or CMOD model of the Avalon online. I would love to put it in motion in Celestia, as seen in the movie. Has anyone come across a digital model of the Avalon yet? If not, do any of you great model designers have an interest in designing it for us all? It s a beautiful complicated ship and would be such a great addition to Celestia.

a lores mesh
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2123394



no uv and all one mesh

needs a lot of work for making a cmod

Thanks John. I saw this and realized it was a 3D printed model. I did not realize it could be converted to a digital 3DS or CMOD. I wish I knew how to do all this. I once tried to learn Blender, and it was so far above my ability I just gave it up. I guess you can't teach an old 70 yr old dog new tricks.

Anyway, given how beautiful the actual movie model is (see this video clip - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bh8lRjn-DU), I don't suppose you would someday consider making a nice CMOD of this, would you ?

Frank,

Although it's very easy to convert it into a CMOD, it is very difficult to do it so that it would look right/good in Celestia.
Main problems are:

1/2 of the normals are reversed.
No useful sub-meshes in the model.

The only practical way to get this into Celestia in any decent form would be to contact the designer to see if he ever had a version with the necessary sub-meshes. John would know what's required in this respect.
It looks like he (the designer) at some stage had it broken down into a number of sub-meshes, but I suspect probably not to the level of detail required to allow a decent conversion for Celestia ... and even if that was the case, there would still be the not in-significant work of texturing ... so, best case scenario (which is unlikely), it's still a very BIG job!

CC

MeshLab v1.2.3 can be used to convert .STL files into a version of .OBJ format which is compatible with Anim8or. Newer versions of MeshLab output a newer .OBJ format that Anim8or doesn't understand.

The current beta of Anim8or includes a function (Build -> Split Solid) which splits a mesh into all of its component sub-meshes if the mesh was created by merging several. (It works to split apart the low-res .STL of Aurora. I didn't look at the high-res version.) This is in addition to the manual point-editor command sequence ( select surface element, c, D ) which splits off one sub-mesh at a time.

In addition to having sub-meshes with some or all of their normals reversed, at least one of the apparent pieces of the model actually consists of at least 30 identical sub-meshes positioned at exactly the same location. Some of them have different normals reversed. Somebody must have had a twitchy finger.

I stopped playing with the low-res .STL at that point.

Selden,

I just downloaded animv100beta3 but there is no sign of a Build -> Split Solid function in it.
Is there a later version than beta3?

EDIT: Forget about it ... I found a later dev build which has that feature.

Maybe it's more of an Alpha. The copy I'm running is v 1.01.1312 dated Dec 11.

It's described in the "Ongoing Anim8or Development" subforum at http://www.anim8or.com/smf/index.php/board,7.0.html

in the post at http://www.anim8or.com/smf/index.php/topic,5667.0.html



The yellowish shading on some parts of the model is one indication of messed up meshes. I added the blocks to help force the pieces to stay centered. Since it has tri-fold symmetry, the "center" operator doesn't center its axis.

Edited to add: I find the new and only-partially-implemented "trackball rotation" function unusable. It can be disabled in the menu Options -> Debug -> Use Original Arc Rotate

selden wrote:The copy I'm running is v 1.01.1312 dated Dec 11.

Yep, that's the one I found shortly afterwards (see my edit in last post). and it works well! Thanks for the reply though.

Well, that info was intended for other people, too, just in case they might want to consider that approach to manipulating 3D models.

Not all of us are Blender-heads....