A bit of a new look.

I was just dithering about this morning, playing with various stuff in max and came up with a new header pic.  It's pretty simplistic, but I kind of like it, at least until I come up with something better.

Time keeps on ticking...

Howdy troops.

I'm still around, just been preoccupied with a few things.  I finally got my Challenge submission finished and submitted, just waiting to hear back from Steff to see if they need anything else.  Meanwhile, I've been screwing around with textures, looking for ways to make that process a bit easier.  I think my breakthrough may have been discovered, using max's Composite/Mix/Blend functions.  Basically, it's a material shader that acts like photoshop layers, and seems to work okay.

 

The mesh I had laying around from an earlier attempt at a Sulieman, so I knocked together some turrets and thrusters and set up a test material to see if I could make it work without spending a week in photoshop.  It's not great, but passable for wide shots and background ships.  Basically, it's a basic generic hull plating texture composited with a quickie photoshop paint job.  Certainly not the prettiest thing I've ever done, but then again I only spent about 2 hours toying with the texture.

At this point, I'm kind of thinking of going this route for my 'freebie' releases such as the technical manuals.  I've spent far too much time mucking around with textures and am getting a bug up my ass to actually start producing something besides renders, namely ships stats and deckplans.  I'll probably still grind through detailed textures if I get any 'paying' gigs, but I think quick and dirty is the way to go at this point; produce more hard content and useful renders, rather than sweating over the detail work that goes into painting hulls by hand.

Besides, it seems like I'm faster at the modeling end of things, and it's probably just as easy to build in the detail at the mesh level rather than the textures.  So, I think what I'll do is develop a dozen or so 'generic' hull plate arrangements and weathering templates, then when I get something finished I can just layer them all together and start rendering.

Holy smokes...

Wow, time got away from me again.  I've been elbow deep in my Challenge project, tinkering with random concepts for future development, spending some time with the 3ds max Bible to learn some new tricks, and just generally jumping through the hoops of life.  

Today I've been tinkering with a 20 ton fighter for a 3000 ton pocket carrier I'm experimenting with.  The thing that sucks about carried craft is the fact that the allowances made for in the rules make it damn tricky to design a vehicle that fits in that space and still leaves some area to walk around and do maintenance on it, especially on things like carriers.  Launch tubes exacerbate the problem, because now you've got to taking moving the fighters into launch position into account.

Anyway, hopefully a bit more later today.  I will endeavor to throw up some of the other concepts in the works tonight sometime, and try to get into a little more solid groove with this blog.

The time, she sure flys by...

Sorry once again about the complete and utter lack of updates.  FYI, last Monday (Jan 24th) I went in and got my pacemaker/ICD put in, so I've been recovering from that.  Work continues on my other projects (JG Type C, the Technical Manuals for that and the X-boat service hull, etc), and I'm starting to get a respectable stable of ships together so I can start doing some more interesting renders (and maybe some animation!).

Some of the other stuff I've been delving into are a thread on Citizens of the Imperium, starting with just an image and turning it into a 3d model (which you can find here).  Progress has been slow, and now the original artist has posted one of his original sketches for the design on COTI, so I may go back and touch up some things.  But, this current incarnation is ready for texture.  This one will probably get it's own Technical Manual as well.

 Whilst digging through some of my old Truespace stuff I found I found this little gem, based off a ship in 2300AD's Ships of the French Arm.  I ported it over to Max, and think this one will get a full workup and Technical Manual as well.

 I'm also in the midst of working up something to submit for the return of Challenge Magazine; we'll see how that goes.  I'm also going to start submitting a few things to JTAS, in the hopes that I can maybe make a little money (or at least gaming goodies) from my endeavors.   Oh, and I'm going to write up an article about turning a pic into a model and submit that to Freelance Traveller in (hopefully) the next week or two, depending on how things go.

Anyway, things seem to be rolling along quite nicely.  More as things develop later!

Arrrgh! Two weeks!

  Wow, didn't realize it's been two weeks without a post.  I'm coming out of a bit of a dry spell; the grind finishing textures for the Type C seems to have beat my muse into a corner temporarily.  Actually today, I got some inspiration and delved into some of the stuff I'm helping Major B with over on COTI - a 20 ton shuttle and 20 ton fighter to go along with the planetary assault ship he's working on.  These are just rough sketches at the moment, but I think I've finally hit on something I like.

Back from the Holidays

I took a little break from posting over the holidays to allow some family time, but decided I should probably post something.  I finished the basic textures for the pinnaces; the ATVs and Air/Raft are on hold for the time being (they both still need a fair bit of modeling, and in the case of the ATV, a complete rework due to some really crappy geometry I couldn't resolve).  But, below is a shot of the pirate cruiser and pinnaces in action.

For those of you not aware of the fact, I'm now a sorta published author/artist.  I did a complete writeup on the X-boat Service Hull for Freelance Traveller, which came out yesterday.  I got the cover picture, 2 interior pictures, a very complete set of deckplans, and several pages of text.  Thanks to Jeff Zeitlin, the publisher, for thinking my work was worth printing.  You can get the current issue here - Freelance Traveller #13.  He's also encouraged me to work up the Type C for publication, which I may do down the road, and I'll probably be putting both ships together into my own LBB format ("Technical Manuals") in the future.

Whatcha think? Too much?

Well, since this Type C is going to be a pirate/merc cruiser, I decided to get a little wild with the paintjob.  Going with the lightning motiff on the nose art, I simply expanded it into a full-on lightning job (as opposed to a flame job).  What do you think?  Too much?  Too not-Traveller?