Great new spacecraft - Discovery from 2001 - but needs help!

[fsgregs]

I have always been captivated by the movie 2001 and was delighted to find a good model of the big space station on the Celestia add-on page. Although I have yet to get that 3ds mesh to load any textures, even without textures it looks great.
That mesh is also available on a website called strafe.com. (http://www.strafe.com/2001/). Actually, there are two meshes of the Station V space station on that site. The first one claims to come with 2 megs of texture, but when I try running it in Celestia, the 3ds mesh runs OK but most of the textures don't load. In fact, some parts of the station turn weird colors.

In any event, this website has a second model. It is a model of the Discovery, the big ship that HAL ran and which was left abandoned somewhere in space outside of Jupiter. In the sequel movie (2010), we revisit the Discovery and find it adrift and rotating slowly along its long axis.

There are 3 versions of the 3ds model of Discovery. One of them comes with lots of textures but is in StudioMax format only. The 3ds meshes are available for download from the site as 3D Studio R4 files but don't appear to load textures.

The model created by Matthew Parker is a great mesh, but when I load it in Celestia, a strange thing happens. The entire skeleton backbone of the ship becomes transparent. The rest of the ship is rendered nicely in color. Obviously, a ship with half of it missing is not too great.

The second 3ds model is by Matt Wilson. It loads and displays OK in Celestia, but there are again no textures associated with it, and at times, parts of it become inverted (you can see inside the model) as it slowly rotates in space.

The 3rd model doesn't work in Celestia.

In any case, for those who want to put Discovery adrift in space above Jupiter, here is a reasonable Extras ssc file to do so:

# Somewhere in Jupiter space

"Discovery" "Sol/Jupiter"
{
Class "spacecraft"
Mesh "d2.3ds" # the name of the mesh that is downloaded
Radius 0.5
RotationPeriod 0.100
Orientation [90 1 0 1]

EllipticalOrbit {
Period 4.0 #entirely made up
SemiMajorAxis 300000
Eccentricity 0.601
Inclination 0.470
AscendingNode 74
ArgOfPericenter 131
MeanAnomaly 43
}

Albedo 0.10
}


Loading Discovery as aboe results in a very lonely view of a giant ship, abandoned and adrift in cold space. It is really neat. Try it out.

If anyone can fix either of the 3ds models (particularly the first one) so that it/they properly display textures or don't have half of their bodies disappear, I would appreciate it. If so, please post the fixed mesh on the forum or e-mail to me.

Thanks and enjoy.

[Guest]

Very thorough post, I'm sure someone will help with the models... in the meantime, do you have the pod and monolith add-on ? I don't think it's on Bruckner's site, but a forum search should reveal it... the pod is a great model, well worth any 2001 fan (i.e. most Celestia fans !) getting.

[fsgregs]

I got the monolith from either Bruckner or the forum. I can't remember which but it is good. If you need it, I can e-mail the 3ds, texture jpg and ssc file to you.

I downloaded the pod from the same website as Discovery, but I can't get any of the textures to work. The pod appears as a gray/white mesh without further texture. Your note suggests, however, that your pod looks great. If that means your pod textures may be loading in Celestia, please tell me how to do it.

Thanks

Frank G

[Darkmiss]

I have a model converter program if you want to send me the file
ill see what i can do

[jgrillo2002]

Guys, david from the orbiter forum which his screenname is Dbartles2 is going to make the discovery for the new version, also with the Leonov from 2010 with it. he already made it for the previous version but it does not work with the new version.

[chris]

The model created by Matthew Parker is a great mesh, but when I load it in Celestia, a strange thing happens. The entire skeleton backbone of the ship becomes transparent. The rest of the ship is rendered nicely in color. Obviously, a ship with half of it missing is not too great.

The second 3ds model is by Matt Wilson. It loads and displays OK in Celestia, but there are again no textures associated with it, and at times, parts of it become inverted (you can see inside the model) as it slowly rotates in space.

A big problem with many of the 3ds models out on the net is that they consist of inconsistently oriented polygons. Typically, the triangles of a mesh that's supposed to represent a solid object are only ever visible from one side. In models designed for real-time 3D graphics, the orientation of vertices in all triangles will have the same orientation when viewed from their visible side. This makes it very easy to cull the invisible backfacing triangles--they're the ones with the wrong orientation. Unfortunately, this very useful test doesn't work if the triangles have inconsistent orientation. Some triangles that should be visible get culled or are visible from the wrong side, thus the "inside-out" appearance. Some mesh editors have a feature that lets you duplicate all triangles in a mesh. This fixes the problem with invisible geometry, but it doubles the amount of work required to display the mesh. The only way to really fix the problem is to edit the mesh and reverse the orientation of all the backwards triangles.

--Chris

[Darkmiss]

check your mail box

[fsgregs]

I am happy to report that in response to this thread, DarkMiss went to the 2001 site, got mesh models for five of the spacecraft on the site and fixed them so that they display very nicely in Celestia (Thanks so much, Paul). There are no specific textures but the 3ds files now work well. Now, you will be able to place into orbit the massive Station V space station (in orbit above Earth), the Discovery (adrift near Jupiter), a pod from Discovery (adrift near the Discovery), the PanAm Orion space shuttle (in orbit around Earth) and the moonbus that skims over the moon. I'll also include the Monolith and its mesh (also orbiting Jupiter), which I previously obtained from a Celestia download link. I am writing fictional ssc files for each of these and will put them together with the meshes into a zip file for all to download.

Now, all I need is a host site to put the zip file. Would someone please volunteer their site? I'll then e-mail you the zip file for posting. Please let me know.

Frank G

[granthutchison]

The book 2010 tells us that the Discovery was abandon at the L1 libration point of Io - a point of gravitational balance between Io and Jupiter, situated between the two bodies. To simulate that, I've come up with following code:

Code: Select all

"Discovery" "Sol/Jupiter/Io"
{
   #Discovery abandoned at Jupiter/Io L1 point

   Class "spacecraft"
   Mesh "d2.3ds"
   Radius   0.05      #100 metres long

   EllipticalOrbit
   {
   Period         1.7691378  #synchronous with Io
   SemiMajorAxis  10540   #0.025 of Jupiter-Io distance
   MeanLongitude    220    #positioned on a line between Jupiter and Io
   }

   RotationPeriod 0.05    #slow "several minutes" tumble

   Obliquity 90               #rotating at right angles to orbit
   Orientation [90 0 0 1] #make rotation end-over-end

   Albedo         0.5
}


(Remember to look for it in orbit around Io in Solar System Browser ...)

Grant

[bh]

I've got about 1.5 megs of webspace left. How big is the zip.

BTW I too downloaded these models a while ago and they almost worked but didn't.

I will make some room on my server for them if you like.

[fsgregs]

Hi guys. First, Grant, I tried out your ssc file for Discovery and it is better than the one I created. I always have to remember that even with fictional things, some level of "accuracy" is expected. Thanks. I will include your ssc in the zip file. However, now I've got to go back and edit the files I created, to get them more accurate and reposition the Pod outside of Discovery.

Secondly, one of the 5 mesh files (Orion) turns out to have a problem I didn't discover before. After DarkMiss sent it to me, I checked it out quickly along with the others and it was on the dark side of Earth at the time. When I checked it today, however and it came into the light side of earth, it was still dark/black. The 3ds mesh is not the typical gray for this model, it is black. I've e-mailed DarkMiss to ask him to try fixing this bug, then the zip files will be ready.

The zip file, which includes the 5 model 3ds meshes and 5 ssc files should be about 2.6 Megs when done.

If anyone has space, I'll e-mail the models and ssc files to you/them.

[Rassilon]

The black on the mesh is due to an improper material assignment to the mesh...If someone gets a chance the best way is to add a material that is completely white...If using 3d studio max make the diffuse white, and the other two color schemes black...diffuse is the center color assignment...This should clear this up...If of course you want the surface of the mesh reflective or metallic...assign the specular color as a white or 75% grey shaded color depending on how reflective you want the surface...I would use a semi yellow color to simulate the reflective properties of the sun...

Some time ago I made a model of the monolith...Its high resolution and looks almost exactly like the one in 2010...Heres the link to it if your interested:

http://www.celestiaproject.net/~rassilon/monolith.zip

[fsgregs]

The meshes for the 2001 Space Odyssey spacescraft models and corresponding ssc files are ready. Thanks to a lot of folks, they've turned out really good.

I am zipping all files and should have them available on a website for you to reference within 2 days. The files are:

Massive Space Station V - mesh and ssc
Discovery - mesh and ssc
Pod from Discovery - mesh and ssc
Orion Shuttle - mesh and ssc
Moonbus - mesh and ssc
Monolith - mesh and ssc

Stay tuned