Unit Preview: Star Wars V-19 Torrent Fighter

I started making this unit a while back, stopped for real life, and am now finishing it. 'Tis my first unit, so I am looking for as many suggestions on how to improve it as possible. Don't be shy

First, I would like to say that I am currently reworking the timing for the explosions in the death.

EDIT 1 11:17 PM CST: Edited in a new image of the death.

Is this a conversion from a game or your own animation of a model? In any case it's too large for an air unit right now.
Missile Attack: I ran into the same problem when I 1st started to aircraft and tried to use lights for gun effects. I think they are more trouble than they are worth, unless you can limit the range of the light, because the lights that form the missile flames also shine across the ground, and that will screw up your palletes. A bright textured flame object that is not a light could work.
Your colors look very dark, any change of brighting your textures?

Good start, but again, waaayyy too large. You can shrink it by alteast 30-40% and still keep a lot of detail.

What Wyrmshadow said.

The lights look cool, but screw things up. They change the shade of the ground, and complicate the palette. I goofed around with this too on my x303, way more trouble then they are worth.

I would suggest less rocking in the attacks.

What is supposed to be civ colored?

The current frame size is 320x240. The max supported is 240x240. Find another unit you figure might be close to the same size, and model it after that. I know, my x303 was INSANELY large, but this was by request. I suspect a fighter should be ALOT smaller then a main battleship. Perhaps something close in size to a modern jet would work. I would guess that your current pixel count is 4 times the size of a typical fighter craft. You also have to remember to leave room in the scale for later larger craft. Make the fighters too big and the heavy craft look mis-sized. The other thing with size is the size of the map. I know it is hard to shrink a beautiful unit and hide much of the detail.

In the death anim, I would not leave part of the ship floating there. Looks a little odd... have it tumble off Maybe by shrinking the size down, which gives the illusion of receding in the distance. Some of the pieces in the death seem to float a little bit.

Is this unit going to be used as a space ship (naval unit) or air unit?

Mind sharing how this unit was made? Tools used. Original model, or extracted from a a game or?

As Wyrmshadow said, your major problems are the size of the frame and the lights. With the lights you should be able to easily scale down your attenuate lights so that they don't affect the ground and/or add some lights that illumate the scene so that the net result of the gunflash light on the ground is negligible (if you add mutiple lights make then quite dark as mass lighting can be too strong).

As for the size, there should be an option to specify the animation size on the Render dialogue. However, if you have a bulk resize utility you can render to large frames and then resize down. It takes longer but the Post-Pro special effects will look cooler

I made this model from scratch using ppmodeler, which is in Kinboat's sig. I then exported it into .3ds to use in OpenFX.

I'm using The Morpheus's template for OpenFX, in which if I just try to adjust the frame size in the Render dialogue, it just squeezes everything inside instead of cropping the edges. In some tests runs I ran, what I did to adjust the frame size was make the Storyboard and cropping the 80 extra pixels there.

I see the problem with the model size now...I hadn't really compared the two scales.

Currently no civ color, but I think I will make the burgundy on the wings the civ color.

Death Animation: I will work on making parts not appear to float as much. I'll also make the hull fly away a little bit more.

I'll scale down my lights to try and stop them from shining on the ground.

I believe the guys at the Star Wars Mod are planning on using fighters as air units and capital ships as sea units.

Thanks a lot for the feedback! Time for me to get crankin' some more.

Sooooooooooooooooooooo....... any progress?

Working on palettes, right now. Sorry I've been awhile in updating. I've been splitting my modding time between this and making some interface graphics for the private beta of LOTM.