Overview
Fighter is a realistic mid-poly spacecraft that can be used in a variety of genres (Action, Simulation, RPG, RTS, …). It’s designed to fit in a near-future setting with aircraft-like design, but with realistic spacecraft features, like thrusters all around the craft and a retro-engine. It comes with two weapon types: two linear cannons and two turrets.
Blueprints
The ship blueprint are a very simple keyboard control scheme with linear thrust and rotational thrust. The mouse look also serves to drive the turret alignment. Keys 1 and 2 choose the weapons and 3 and 4 activate the solar panels to give it more engine power and open the docking port.
An enum drives the skin choice, which can be manually chosen in the details panel or by using the function SetSkin in Blueprints. To add new skins, create the Textures and Material Instances, edit enum ESFFighterSkins and then edit the SetSkin function to account for the change.
Armature
The armature has bones for the solar panels, docking port and lid, the turrets socket position, cannons socket position, cockpit chair, flight stick and throttle. The solar panels are separate meshes attached to their bones, which move during solar panel deploy animation. The second animation moves the docking port lid and extends the docking port. The turrets and cannons bones are oriented with X forward and Z top to conform with Unreal’s orientation, still, sockets are attached to these bones which in turn attach to the weapons.
A pilot mesh can be attached to the pit_chair’s socket. See the section below for an example pilot pose.
Currently there are no animations for the flight stick and throttle, which can be moved by direct blueprint manipulation or their rotation with Get and SetBoneRotationByName .
Static Meshes and Animations
Besides the necessary static meshes and animations, an S_SFFighter_Static is included with all the meshes together. This is for exporting if desired. To help with the pilot posing, here’s the default UE4 Mannequin in pilot pose which matches the default position of the chair and flight sticks.
The diameter of the docking port is about 256cm and a possible docking port on the other side should have an usable diameter no larger than 217cm.
Textures
This ship has three textures. A main 4096px texture set for most of it and a secondary 4096px texture set for the cockpit and solar panels. The third 2048px texture set is for the weapons. Each texture set has an RGB Albedo map, an RGB detail map with Metallic, Roughness and AO in each channel and an RGB emissive map. Currently there are 7 skins. Ship contains no Normal maps.
Here you can download a pack which includes convenient UV layout maps, ID maps, decals and base textures in .tif format:
Base Textures Pack
Notes and Updates
- In the future I plan to make a couple more skins.
- The docking port measurements will be used for docking ports on any further space themed assets I’ll create