Big Spaceships 003 - Covenant CCS Battle Cruiser - part 1

"Wait, come back, I've left my iPhone on board! Oh, I'll call the captain.... Oh, sh.....eez" 

If you, like any sensible person have a fetish for GIGANTIC ALIEN SPACECRAFT you have come to the right place.  As previewed earlier in the year, one of last years major projects for Coolhand Graphics revolved around building assets for Halo 4, specifically the Spartan Ops campaign that has ended with the last segment released just today! Which means after an agonising wait I'm finally able to spill the beans, squeal like a stuck little piggy-wiggy and lift the lid on a particular fascinating and challenging construction.

I invite you, Dear reader (wasn't he in charge of North Korea? -ed) to the following briefing which has until today been TOP SECRET....

Sit down gentlemen, ladies, and anyone in between... Even if you're on a mobile thing and crossing the road, just sit down, right there in the middle of the street* - that bus will wait, the driver has seen you, I promise! Are you sitting comfortably? OK, please review the datasheet below:

This nearly two-kilometer long monster of a vessel is perhaps mid-range for the Covenant arsenal, that said its still absolutely gigantic. Naturally, given its tremendous size and because it has more curves than Kim Kardashian's wobbly bits, and about as friendly to caress, this is not an easy shape to build up to movie quality standards, as required for these cut-scenes. Fortunately, Axis Animation up in jolly old Scotchland, knowing they had a problem, knowing now one else could help, and having a pretty good idea of where I was (hiding in a small lead-lined cupboard, as I so often do on a Thursday), thought maybe they could hire... The S-Team!

Anyway, enough with the shtick, we don't have time for it... This is against the clock, people, against the clock!  And indeed it was, as I had all of 4 weeks to complete the largest, the most complex single model I have ever built, in fact two models, but we'll get into that later. Was I ready for it? Did I massively screw it up? Find out next week on the S-Team!

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Naw, just kidding, where shall we start? at the beginning  OK... It may come as no surprise to some that the huge CCS BC is in fact very similar in shape to a much smaller Covenant ship, the Covenant Cruiser, (I'm not sure it has a better name?) So I first built this smaller craft and based the larger CCS on it.

Starting with a model from the game, I dropped in my Akula model, to get an idea of the detail I wanted to put into both ships:

See that tiny ship in the corner, thats one of my most detailed ships, the 5 million triangle Akula Class. Yikes!

I had to up-scale the low detail mesh and make sure its smooth - nice and high-res looking, here's some of the initial work on the bow... Remember this corresponds to the smaller of the two covenant ships in the above image:

I added textures pretty early on, it was requested that i put only basic UV mapping data as many effects would be achieved procedurally - as usual most of the final look of the surfaces were established in-house after I handed over the model.  

Was I worried, was I, bah..... Yes of course, I was completely terrified, so I decided to concentrate and complete the bow first as a self contained part, this way I could see how long it took and how much to panic about doing the rest. 

I was allowed a lot of freedom with the detailing and trusted to handle it in my own way, after analysing the Halo 4 covenant style guide I added shapes such as the hair like detail on the borders where the armour steps down. I also drew some inspiration from my one of my favourite designers - H R Giger, appropriate as Halo is often said to draw inspiration from the Aliens franchise.

Textured underside of the bow - something a bit squid-like about this, again channelling a little Giger. 

After finishing the bow to an acceptable standard, I realised this was a huge task but I was pretty sure, well fairly sure, it wouldn't end in a huge embarrassing disaster, but still the fear of that was a powerful motivator, a bit like a Death Star commander awaiting a visit from Palpatine.

Sometimes I'm asked, hey you why you put that colour on so early, you stoopid or somethin'? Well, it helps a modeller to make selections, for example all the underlying layers are a darker material than the overlaying armour, so its easy to select these areas by material, or by colour, also, grey is boring, also, It helps to show where I've put UV's, also, shut up.;) 

So, I'm tackling the model methodically, working from one end to the other, often I'll work haphazardly on many different areas at once, depending on my mood.  Here I tried to be as disciplined as possible, if only so my client could see clear progress with each update, as you follow the pictures you can see the "HD" areas growing and overtaking the low detail without jumping ahead.

A far more subdued colour scheme though, the final version as created by Axis was somewhat brighter like the first renders, but I had no idea what tones they would choose at the time.

As always, progress is slow and demands immense patience... But then if I wanted excitement I would never have given up on that career delivering pizza on the Gaza Strip.

Ok, Jumping ahead just a little! Most of the panels you can see cut into this hull are carefully made to be faithful to the in-game textures. 

I think this ship looks best from the side! 

Some of the "engraved" detail on the cargo bays. 

Some of the detail on the upper-mid section, not sure what these freaky looking shapes in the cut-outs are meant to be, they just seemed like an interesting way to use up that space and create some contrast area. I recall after showing this image to the crew at Axis, they were wondering just where I was going to go for the larger Cruiser.  I had some ideas... 

One of the purposes of detail on a spacecraft model, for film use, is to create areas of contrast. The gaps between detail create darker areas, they can cast shadow or soak up light, so even if you can't see all the detail itself, you'll see the darker, contrasting areas on it, this creates visual appeal no matter what the lighting angle, it's important to have smooth areas that will light brightly, and darker areas which add definition, which adds scale, make sense? Good, there will be a test.*

Work in progress of the upper side of the cruiser, thats what WIP means if you haven't been keeping up with the world of nerd. 

.... Flip it over and attack the underside for massive poly-counts! 

Ah, now its starting to look the part.  I always imagined this area in the centre was the bridge of the ship, but according to various un-nammed geeky sources it's probably just the ship's bar, the covenant space hooch is good, hardly make your insides melt but served warm with side orders of live salty flies. 

Getting close to what I thought the final version of the small cruiser would be... This is perhaps a week or so into the build, anxious to finish and get started on the real ship, little did I know at this point I'd already started it. 

Look closely at the (landing leg?) adding the first bit of actual mechanical looking detail - 'Greeble' or 'Nurnie' this shape was ripped straight off my Akula, and has been used on numerous models, you will need to click and see the expanded version - but you were doing that anyway, right? 

A nice view of the energy-rose, err, thing... Yeah I have no idea what that round part is called, just that it has light coming out of it - I really did my homework as you can tell! 

A nice view of the Airlock thing on the side, again with the covenant engraving, which also sees use on the upper rear of the bridge area - I figured this could be another airlock or shuttle bay, like a huge door that slides upward, but nothing like that is hinted at in the plans.

And so friends, we all too soon reach the end of part 1, not to be cruel but Blogger's editor hates having too many large pics in one article and its acting up, making it hard for me to add anything else... I fear if I add any more awesome to this piece I may break the internet forever!    

Moving on, lots of ground to cover in part 2, which will not be too far down the road, and hopefully if I haven't been assassinated by the studio's sinister agents for giving away too many insider secrets we can get all the rest into the next exciting update! 

Hope you've enjoyed it so far, please click the buttons below to 'like' and 'share' this article on Google, Facebook etc, each one means a lot to me, and don't forget to hit the follow button on the sliding tab thingy on the right.:)

* Coolhand Graphics takes no responsibility for you becoming fatally injured, slightly bruised or sore in an intimate area after reading this blog.

** There will not be a test.

Space Babes 001 - Major Erika Cooper

She may be a battle hardened marine, with years of experience maiming Umpa Lumpas on Rigel 7 (hey, its either maim or be maimed), but she has a soft side too, all the same don't get complacent or say the wrong thing or she'll kick your a**...

Here, she is pictured on board the UNSS Ecliptic, on tour near the Heart Nebula (thank you Hubble), sporting at least part of a MkIV Combat Harness, with the optional Tactical Command Helmet which includes integrated brain-stem interface hardware, speeding tactical decisions.  The Martini, is very dry - though where she's been keeping the olives is a secret. 

For all you lonely Space Marines out there, Valentines sucks if you're on patrol somewhere out on the cold, lonely fringes of the cosmos... Unless you have a holosuite of course: Wife? What wife? - You know, the one you forgot to get a card or present for....  

If you really are lonely tonight (and I'd be surprised if you are because 100% of science fiction fans are of course in long term stable relationships), then perhaps try brewing up a genetically engineered pleasure GELF in your sink, build a sexbot in your garage or just hit the bottle* until you think you see one, then pass out. 

*Coolhand Graphics expects you to drink responsibly, no more than 3 jugs of Space Hooch per recreation cycle, for example, and takes no liability for overdoses of any kind caused by Valentines depression, Vogon construction fleets, and / or waking up in a pool of vomit, just pray its your own. 

1/270 Spacefighters Part 1 - Huntsman

Now available from Shapeways in two distinct flavors. 

Heavy Huntsman:

Regular Huntsman

Paint and use these models in your favourite Star Fighter combat game! Also these are basically 6mm figure scale.

Ninja Magic ships painted up.

Just stumbled on this video on Robbin Fitton's G+ page.  Takes me back a bit, I built the protos for these for one of my first clients, Ninja Magic.

Here's his painting guide with lots of great closeups of a couple of the Junila ships, I also worked on the Kikoku fleet and perhaps something else - It was so long ago the brain modules that stored that data have undoubtedly corroded or eaten by scraplets.

And they are quite beautifully fetching in this colour scheme I think, well done sir. 

The Designs were all by Todd Boyce, I translated his plans into 3d and made up the detailing as I went along. 

Here are a couple of renderings of the Drone Carrier (these are very old so not the nicest of renderings)

In fact these might even be WIP shots...

Perhaps I will dig out the 3d files and make some better renders one day... 

I have set of the final production castings that Todd sent me... Somewhere, maybe i'll find them one day and give them a paint up, not sure if they'd look as nice as the paint up in the video but stay tuned folks! 

Section 8 - Heavy Armor Type B - Xbox 360

Here's an oldie that I haven't covered previously anywhere online, probably.

In '07,  Timegate Studios in Dallas, in the good ol' Lonestar state, you guessed it, rootin'-tootin', six-shootin' Texas USA... Err, anyway, cold-contacted me, clearly desperate for help with  their new shooter: Section 8.  As some of you will know, as you've probably like me been subject to one, a "Section 8" is traditionally best known as an exemption from military duty, due to poor mental health... And it very nearly cost me my own sensible mind, or would have, if I hadn't already had half of it blown out already by a misdirected friendly fire air-strike in Korea... OK, I admit I called it in, I have a hard time with maps, fortunately the 4077th scooped up what was left and stitched me back together, but that's a different story.

The beautiful concept artwork by, who knows...? If you painted this, let me know. If only I had seen this before agreeing to do the project, eh? 

See, I was perhaps slightly mislead getting into this, I signed the NDA, and got little more info, I was to build was "a vehicle", which technically I guess it is, a person sits inside and drives it around... But lets face it, its a bit more challenging than one might have expected for "a vehicle".  Cue much desaturation of hair-tone and frustration as Coolhand for a change finds himself a little out of depth, for the project was on a strict time limit and what did he learn from that?

Can I go home now, look I'm clearly mad... IAM WAERING TEH NURSEZ HAT

Lemme think....

....No.

(CUE AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION TRACK)

Bear with me and enjoy some pictures and words in a sequence, that you can play by moving the page up and down in your browser, while I think about what I learned and hammer the dings out of my head-plates for a little bit...

Early days, almost certainly day one, morning... Coming up to lunchtime, Roughing in the shapes, all seems to be going well... Later, I had beans on toast.  

I began the project knowing it would be a massive challenge, a model more complicated than anything I'd built before, a mixture of organic and hard surfaces, I had a hard time thinking of this walking gorilla-mech thing as simply a vehicle.  But, eh, when a freelancer with just a couple of years experience is offered something that's going into an X-Box game it's hard to turn it down. And back in 2007, I certainly enjoyed a bit of X-Boxing every now and then so it was all very exciting.

Everything ends in spikes and stabby looking things, makes sense really. 

On the left, my model, on the right Timegate's proxy. 

A requirement for this model was that as a mech, it requires a pilot to be able to enter and drive it around, so the whole back opens up to reveal a cockpit.  I had TWO WEEKS to do everything. I had been sent a proxy by Timegate showing the animated parts. You might be thinking, why didn't I simply start with the proxy and save some time? That would be a good question and its perhaps because I wanted a cleaner model to start with and felt I could do a better job that way, but due to the time constraints, this was probably a mistake that cost at least half a day.

Some of the sculptural elements going in on the legs. 

Then there was the detailing, which I became very bogged down in, at that point in my career I hadn't learned and developed the workflow and techniques that make this manageable

Now its looking more the part, shame it took so long... 

Probably about now, probably before, I realised this wasn't going to go smoothly, which causes stress, which stresses out everyone at the other end, which stressed me out even more. I was uncertain about everything, but had to plough on and hope for the best.

What? - This isn't tropical white, long? 

I recall becoming slightly obsessed with the 'hinges' of the doors to the cockpit compartment... Even though nobody else cared *how* it worked as it all worked by video-game magic. 

Thats some pure modelling pr0n right there, for all you greeble junkies, a lot of those greebly parts came off my Akula Warship model.  Click for an expanded view, you know you want to, no ones looking... 

Yeah, Baby!

So now its really coming together, while the studio is pleased with the model itself, I'm still stressing as i'm just over the end of my allotted time.

Achtung! Baby!

"Bu... Bu... you're nearly done, right?" You ask, scared and confused.  

Yeah, sure with this model, but this is a model for a console that we were all still inaccurately calling "Next Gen" in 2007.  Clearly this model will not be good for a game as it has something like 4 million triangles, even the mighty Xbox 360 will RROD the instant it attempts to push such an amount around on an HD display. 

A view inside the cockpit, since you would place your legs inside the mechs legs, the design assumed you were a person with a two-foot crotch-gap, not much I could do about that but I did my best to make it seem plausible.  I probably should have cared less.  Also note the detail of all the artificial muscle around the hips, looks OK but it was made in an incredibly stupid, tedious and time consuming way, D'oh!

For a 'Next Gen' game, it became not only necessary to build a low-poly/real-time model, with as few triangles as possible, but also to build a really insanely detailed model too.  It's all to do with Normal Maps, I won't bore you to tears with a technical explanation, but its basic purpose is to give a low detailed surface (like a real time model) the look and detail of a very highly detailed surface, without the overhead of pushing millions of triangles around just to render someone's nose... This Technique was first used by id to make zombies and orcs fully 20 times more boring than they had been in Doom 2, in Doom 3.

Final render of the High-Poly model.... OOOOoooooh. 

SRSLY, IS THIS TV SHOW OVER ALREADY? What? JUST ONE MORE SEASON? CAN'T TAKE IT NO MORE. 

So now, already over my deadline I had to scramble to get a low poly version together too, the one that would actually be used in the game, with normal maps generated from the high poly version we are all now familiar with.

Exciting Low-Poly WIREFRAMES! 

Fortunately this doesn't take as long and I quickly built a highly optimised model around the high detail version, of course its crucial how the two models relate to each other so care needs to be taken to make the models match.  I was familiar with these concepts anyway, but this was highly stressed to me, I guessed they had problems previously with freelancers providing out-of-sync versions or something.

More wires, and more and more... The tiny spikes around the upper armour were later removed because they were stupid.

Sometimes its a challenge to work out what detail to leave in, and where, a problem with normal mapping is that it falls apart and fails at the edges of things, its an illusion created within a surface and does not extend beyond it... As if each triangle, each face of the model were a tiny screen itself, displaying a bit of the high poly version, it can give the illusion of depth but cannot extend outside the screen... Is that making sense, or confusing everyone more?

And here's the final version! This actually went into the game, a proper game made by almost real people. 

Finally this model was complete and joined its high detail counterpart on the Timegate FTP.  I was relieved and the studio were more than happy with the model, but it was overdue, I was a gibbering mess and I had missed the payroll date... Which combined with an accounting mistake meant I had to wait a long time for any compensation, which caused me additional problems.  It seems that the bigger the company, the more inflexible the payroll systems are.

As I was under NDA it was also a very long time before the game was released and I was able to talk about the work, a couple of years in fact, but that's so often the case, when the time came, I had more or less forgotten about it.

Whatever you do, try and look good doing it.

Ultimately, though I'm proud of the model as it worked out, at that point I'd have been better off not accepting the task, which given the time constraints was at that stage in my skills, beyond me. I actually felt I had been somewhat manipulated by the studio into taking on too much work, for too little reward in too short a time-frame - of course everyone wants things done cheaply and as quickly as possible, but this puts the people at the end of the chain of command under the most strain.

I'm not sure if this was either knowing or unknowing by the description given and the way things were handled, perhaps it was my own inexperience of dealing with these things and not knowing the right questions to ask and too much wishful thinking, working freelance in the games industry, as opposed to other industries, is a real minefield to new players.

I guess the lesson is to not be blinded by an apparently golden opportunity.

To be fair to the people who worked at Timegate, it was pretty obvious that everyone there was very strained, stressed and under pressure, don't forget that this was nearly two years before the game was actually released!

(I was also promised a copy of the game itself, two years later but that never appeared, surprise surprise;))

I really want to make clear that this was 6 years ago, today it would not be an issue. All the same it was still a challenging build of a very complicated design that had organic and in-organic shapes, all kinds of mechanisms and animated parts.

Finally here are some pics and vids of the final thing in the game and painted etc.

A Wiki Article about this, err, vehicle... is here I obviously never did play the game as I had no idea the mech is called, wait for it: M05 Silverback

 I was expecting a bit more from the texturing.

Still, looks pretty funky, and suitably scary enough to give a person a bit of shock to turn another boringly textured brown coloured corner to find it lurking menacingly near some bins or whatever else litters the map of this game I never played or was even sent a copy of, as promised. 

Ah, **** it, 6 years ago, who cares. 

You can see it in action in this video here from about 8 minutes in:

I think they also shoved it into the sequel too, the model gets the living crap kicked out of it by another angry looking mech, what is it with my models always getting blown up by these studios? 

Must be the new version of my old version, meh, I think the old one was a better design;) 

Anyway, thanks for reading, if you did, maybe you just looked through the pictures, kinda bored on your lunch break... You're probably already on facebook or twitter looking at other stuff and if you are don't forget to like this article on whatever, its a great help, and if you didn't like it, whatever, you can't have those precious minutes of your life back now.  

Pfft, don't kid me, and don't complain, you knew what you were getting into.

 M*A*S*H, if you've never seen it, the references to Klinger and his cross-dressing efforts to get Sectioned out of Korea will be entirely lost on you... BTW I did this whole project while wearing a dress.  AHAHaHahaaahaaa (don't move until the credits roll ends)

Halo 4 - Preview of my work for Spartan Ops DLC missions.

In the sweltering heat of last summer, 2012, As the country settled in to watch the Olympics I found myself taking on an Olympic sized challenge of my own, one you could say I've been in training for, for some time now.

I won't go too much into specifics, as I don't officially have any permission to post images etc, but you can see the covenant ships I built for them toward the end of this trailer. Here's a grab from part of it.

The trailer itself has been out since the end of October, but I believe the episodes that heavily feature the models are out this month (if you know differently please drop me a commnent below!)

I also built some of the explosion / wreckage meshes, anyway its a quick taste of intense spaceship action to come, hopefully more of the model will be seen in the productions, which form downloadable video content for a DLC with extra missions for the game. 

Soon as I get the all clear, which should be this month sometime, I'll post some gigantic images of the model so you can see all the detail thats on it and possibly detail the creation of the small and large covenant cruisers in one of my "Big Spaceships" Work in progress reconstruction threads.  

This was a very challenging build, both due to the sheer scale of it, the amount of detail and also because that detail had to conform to very organic curving shapes as typical of Halo's Covenant technology - which is about 10 times more difficult to accomplish than slab sided, straight edged models like my old Akula because no two bits of hull are at the same angle, curvature, etc.

Looking forward to hopefully seeing more of it in the full episode!

Shapeways Figurine - Gangnam Style

This is the result of a commission from a few weeks ago to produce a dancing PSY caricature. Buy Me! You know you want to... Kinda hard translating a 2d caricature into a 3d shape, and trying to keep it looking consistent but I think we were all pleased with the results.