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!
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)
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!
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.
The ships robot (a 12 foot tall ill-tempered ABC Warrior (look it up)) takes it out on the dock droids at Heathrow Starport.
Thats right friends, I'm sure eveyone reading this blog is oozing with anticipation at the thought that finally, after years and years of shameless teasing, it really does seem as if a proper modern sequel to Elite and Frontier is only perhaps, maybe at best several years from completion.
Luckily for us, the pioneering head of developments and King of Frontier, David Braben has decided to utilise the series massive fan base of massive nerds to attempt to propel this project into solid virtual reality with a well placed Kickstarter to the tender underparts of Frontier Developments.
For the last couple of years i've been sourcing parts and restoring a classic Amiga 1200, the very
machine I received 19 years ago this Christmas. I used it a lot for more than 5 years and learned some of the basics of digital art that I persue today as something that almost approximates a professional career. It was also a great games machine and one of the finest titles is easily Frontier, the sequel to the revolutionary 1984 BBC Micro title - Elite.
1993's Frontier was more evolutionary but presented a reasonably realistic (physics working as Sir Isaac Newton would have prefered) and an unbelievably well realised massive galaxy to explore. For a game that will run from floppy disk (remember them?) in 1mb of memory on a computer that operates at 6mhz Frontier was especially impressive, simulating a level of scale from a working clock on a church tower to an entire WORKING solar system to an entire galaxy was something simply unheard of, and in many ways has not been beaten so far.
Needless to say it captivated me in way that no other game ever had, but it was a game that required some imagination to get the best out of it.
Lasers are red, spacetime is blue.... I have no idea why.
So the above, a typical screen, at least in my head, resembled the most fantastic looking space-opera I could imagine, the low res chunky graphics, laughable interface style and bug ridden rendering of low poly spacecraft and environments became a mere framework for a vividly detailed universe. Ask anyone who played it (and enjoyed it) or its wire-frame 8-bit predecessor and you'll probably get a similar response, it really didn't look like the above at all when you were fully immersed in it.
Years later after the Amiga became obsolete and stopped functioning properly I would still play Frontier (and its sequel FFE) on an x86 PC, occasionally via emulation or modification and reverse engineered code projects with perhaps dubious legal status, enjoying much faster framerates, higher resolutions, better controls and so on, but none actually looked anything like the old Amiga Frontier did in my head, nothing looked as good as in the imagination.
Several times I've attemped to realise some of these as 3d models
First, is the Asp Explorer... You already saw it at the top of the page, This older project (construction will probably be detailed in a later blog entry - keep em peeled) represented to a degree what the game, or at least what one of the vehicles featured kinda looked like to me - in this case a very battered almost Millenium Falcon-esq cargo ship.
This is how it looked in the original game:
Here are a few more old pics of my interpretation of the original 7-odd triangle model:
Asp CL-577 departs Boring Boston Base, where no one ever shoots at you, unless you shoot them first.
Built in 2004 I produced a floor plan part way during modelling (the 3d model visible here is far from finished) this was apparently later used by a group of naval architects who contacted me to use it for their role playing game. No, really.
I'd have made the stars less, umm, intense today.
A recently leaked Elite: Dangerous screenshot.
I have built several other vehicles based on this Universe, end of part 1, more to come!
Fresh out of the fusion reactor, get em while they're blisteringly hot and mildly radioactive. (erm, in actuality of course its perfectly safe plastic, I take no responsibility for any injuries caused by radiation, gaping jaws or excessive drool production clogging keyboards)
Previously listed here in this blog, here is the tiniest version that will be available, it has a hollow interior (with walls 3 times the minimum thickness for strength) and optional aerodynamic bolt on parts.
This is a pretty well known model of piano, frequently seen at concerts and often characters from NBC's quality comedy show "Frasier" would gather round while one of them performed the theme from Wings or something.
I made this for printing, for a museum piece. Actually thought I'd lost it but turned out I had it on a backup disk. I only completed the exterior, as a craftsman was hand building a miniature soundboard for it - the final printed and completed exhibit was 1/4 scale. From the attachment angle it basically looks finished, but the inside is completely empty!
So i'm going to build and fit my own highly detailed soundboard, and refine some of the rough edges on the brass pieces and so on, perhaps map it so I can add textures for grime and dirt etc.
To the surprise of almost everyone, our species is now perhaps slightly closer to someone not wearing a Star Trek uniform uttering that statement, in fact he or she may well be wearing a lab coat, probably won't be in space but secretly might like Star Trek.... I'm sure everyone reading this is familiar with this epic plot device as featured in every Star Trek episode ever. As everything else from Trek becomes true over time we may one day build a functional Alcubierre Drive - the 'real' name for "Warp Drive".
Avoid tricky time dilation, with WARP DRIVE!
Alcubierre bends space in order to cheat Einstein and make a mockery of his ludicrous theories, of course cheating Einstein always takes a ton of energy... More precisely the number of tons that make up the entirety of Jupiter, which is umm, a lot of tons.... So many tons that it clearly makes such a propulsion system a bit of a non-starter since no ship in Star Trek appears to be towing a gas giant behind it, sucking its mass into its warp core with some type of big straw.
How many tons? How the hell should I know, Wes? - It wasn't written in the script.
But not any more! Probably... By carefully configuring your warp drive in a manner that would make Mr Scott or Geordi La Forge flush with manly pride you can apparently bring this magic amount down to the amount of energy contained in a pifflingly small volume - according to actual real men and women of science its the same mass as the Voyager 1 probe. Don't ask me how much mileage you'd get out of that, I'm not a scientition, dammit.
Avoid silly hats, with ALCUBIERRE DRIVE!
My only question, how do we get Voyager back and use it to invent Warp travel before its turned into V'ger by that machine race, oh what.... It can be any mass? not specifically Voyager 1, OK I get it, well I have no more questions then.... Oh, who's this, Erich?
I HAVE QUESTIONS!
Oh there's a surprise, go on then....
I ask the question that science refuses to even make breakfast for and kicks out of it's parents home at 6am before its mother wakes up. If we can Warp-Drive with only the mass of Voyager, so may any Extra Te-rrrrestrial seevilisation...
Therefore I ask: Is Prometheus real future and ancient mythology? Is Damon Lindeloff noble future-seer? Perhaps most shockingly, we discover that Eeendiana Jones 4 is a semi-plausible reality. I would stake my reputation upon this being true.
If I may interject, Erich. This news will clearly be a boon to those in fringe science... Since it utterly blows the 'can't get here from there' argument out of the water.. Presumably a whole new series of Ancient Aliens is therefore in the works?
I have already ordered brand new yacht in anticipation!
"White and his colleagues have begun experimenting with a mini version of the warp drive in their laboratory."
Which is why I said they'd probably be wearing a lab coat.... Or perhaps an old pair of jeans and crinkled T-shirt (I am as stylish as I am talented). It all sounds straightforward enough... Anyone got some Dilithium handy?
It's been just over 10 years since I began showing my work publicly, and really working at improving it. I have made 3D models since 1993 and grew up drawing pictures of aviation, birds, cars, people... Sometimes even spaceships.
But there never seemed much point to it, no one bar a few mostly disinterested friends ever saw my work but I suddenly found an outlet with internet forums.
I had wanted to show my first ever big spaceship, as it would have been just over 10 years old this month, but having gone through all my backup disks I can find no trace of it. So I thought I'd show the first capital ship built for my Sol project. Sol is a cold war type scenario between planetary forces, constrained mostly to our solar system, broken down into two factions, essentially a Soviet type regime on a partly terraformed Mars and everyone else who stayed on Earth after the cataclysm.
I had already produced the Foxhound fighter/bomber (anti-capital(ist) ship warfare) as shown elsewhere in the blog. But I needed to find a way into a larger ship design so I chose the 'boat in space' style as used in shows like Starship Troopers. Working it entirely in 3D (not a concept sketch in sight) I refined a shape down to the finished model as depicted below, please click for a marginally larger resolution.
A rendering from 2003, hence the hon-HDness of it. I clearly had a thing for pink dust clouds - which were perhaps pollution from mining operations, obviously there are no pink nebula around our solar system so I had to come up with some explanation.
To get there I used a Pentium 3, something or other with a tiny amount of ram compared to today and probably a very early nvidia card. So it's not like a model I'd build today in that its very simplistic but on a par with the types of models that my peers were building at the time. The simplicity means its probably a nice one to study the method with.
Roughing out and refining the base hull and superstructure shapes, if you don't get this right then whats the point in detailing?
Adding and refining secondary shapes to the design, the turrets are designed for around 100 degrees of elevation change, meaning they can shoot straight up and attack the weak point for massive damage. Note the horribly overexposed lighting here, this was always trial and error for me before i began to understand these things.
Ah, much better lighting Coolhand, maybe a bit gloomy...
Increased the fill lighting to get more clarity in the shadow side - nearly looks like a spacecraft, or something.
Panelling and detailing the superstructure, the little indent on the side of the bridge is probably an airlock, in the heat of battle the crew would be located further inside the ship, this tall bridge being used for navigation - akin to the sail of a submarine, while it may have some windows the control centre is usually somewhere in the middle of the ship instead.
Since I seem to be missing a few WIP pics (if anyone has copies please let me have some copies back!) We'll skip ahead somewhat, getting very close to the finished model here, topside is nearly done. The dome on the front is probably the main fire-control and radar.
A closeup on the upper foredeck, some exposed structural elements imply a layered structure and depth. My main turret designs are sometimes compared to BSG's but this project pre-dates it by about a year, it's counterpart on the opposing faction even has a similar ribbed appearance to the nu-BSG Galactica but was also shown online before the new Galactica model... Jus' sayin'.
Enlivening the sides of the ship, still not quite interesting enough, note the same airlock structure as shown on the bridge earlier. Look near the three large windows on the right, human scale features like windows and airlocks are essential for creating a sense that we're looking at a large structure of some sort..
Ah, thats better, what could be more appropriate for a futuristic spaceship than a set of fixed, sideways firing cannons - perfect for delivering an 18th century style broadside.
finished pic showing the stern detailing. Stern, stern but fair.
Another view of it, the rear is particularly well covered by anti-aircraft type guns. The vents behind the turret became a recurring theme, in this case bad luck for the turret operator who's in the rear enclosure when the reactor is purged.
Key lighting is nicely balanced on this one, but the blue fill is horribly inky and awful looking - probably a result of too much saturation in the fill lights.
For the Motherland! (umm, Mars) Another nasty inky looking rendering, but at least it has a rough propaganda poster look - or something, not sure if I was going for that look or not.
Probably the best image I made with this model, has a sense of speed and emptiness, which is well, space travel in a nutshell if you're doing it right. The pink clouds actually looking fairly natural combined with the glow from the sun, backlighting a model against a pretty background is aaaaalways a good idea, imho.
I guess i just about got the blue looking akseptibull in the end. I must have switched to an area filter or something as this render looks so blurry compared to the rest.
And thats all folks, final analysis, I still think this design works pretty well, Its modelled and smoothed in a very simple way, detailing could be better and the textures are only procedural but I prefer it to some of my later ships... Which will be detailed in future blog articles, so join, ooh at least 10 other people and hit the subscribe button on the right tabs or add me to your reading list so you don't miss out!
