Starbright Illustrations

Ogg Theora vid of 3D spaceship model development

By The Illustrator | 2010/08/31 16:21 Posted in 3D, Blender, spaceship | Comments (0)

My enthusiasm for all things open source and free is now expanding to include video codecs. Whenever I have generated a video of my 3D work in the past I have saved it as a mov file to be played by a Quicktime plugin, but now I’ve gone ogg instead.

Making my ogg file proved pretty easy, but embedding it into this web page was a beast. Wordpress uploaded my file but then insisted it was an audio file and refused to play it! I did get my video embedded of course but this nice informative article explains why the video codec situation is so confused making what should be a simple task such a pain. And this page has a great explanation and example of an ogg Theora player for embed. ogg video embed
Embedding it was actually easy once I had found this link.

It seems the whole problem is that the giant mega-corps behind the two proprietary browsers that most people have heard of, Explorer and Safari, are not keen on using a video standard that anyone can play with and use for free, with no restrictions. They would prefer people to carry on using avi, mp4 and mov instead for their films.
Luckily Mozilla, the people behind Firefox, are more enlightened. Using ogg exclusively on my site means that someone surfing with Explorer or Safari is going to get an annoying little “your browser can not handle HTML5″ message, but I don’t see a way round this. I’m no longer going to prop up this crazy system of video standards where people are forced to pay royalties to write players that can actually play these ring-fenced video standards, and don’t get me started about flash. The sooner that dead end shrivels up and blows away the better.

Anyway the video I’ve made is just a series of slides showing the evolution of the model to date. As you can see it’s gone through a lot of changes. You can read more at the dedicated 3D spaceship model page with the latest renders and the latest blend file to download.

Quick and dirty partial render with Blender 2.5

By The Illustrator | 2010/08/27 18:39 Posted in 3D, Blender, spaceship | Comments (0)

spaceship detail

After a little bit of searching I’ve found a way to dramatically speed up my test renders. I’ve been greebling the surface of my spaceship lately, and each greeble is only a tiny part of the hull, some bigger (engine hatches, thrusters) some smaller (antenna, door handles), but to take a look at each new greeble I’ve been rendering the entire spaceship each time.

Unfortunately this can take almost an hour if my knackered old computer is in a bad mood, or if there is a lot of glass in the shot.

This page Doc:2.4/Books/Essential Blender/13.3.Render Settings: Discussion – BlenderWiki. however has a great solution. I can simply select the little bit of the spaceship that I’m interested in (he bit with the new greeble) by drawing a box around it while in a camera view with “shift B”. Then only that small part of the spaceship will be rendered. You have to enable this function first by clicking the border button in Blender’s rendering control panel.

Here is the spaceship view that I would normally render, as you can see the camera is seeing the entire spaceship.

as the camera sees the spaceship

The 3D window view gives a good idea of how a feature will render, but just to be sure it’s always nice to have the option of creating a render and seeing the spaceship exactly as it will appear.
To do this quickly – in just three or four minutes, even on my rubbish old computer – “shift B” and select the just the bit you need to take a look at.

Blender still creates an image of the full size render, but most of it is blacked out. Only the part you selected has the actual coloured pixels of the finished render in.

most of the render is blacked out

As the time it takes to render each of these pixels can sometimes be measured in seconds, and there are thousands of them, this is obviously a huge advantage, especially if all you want is a quick look at just one little detail.

Which Creative Commons licence for my spaceship art?

By The Illustrator | 2010/08/24 12:32 Posted in 3D, Blender, spaceship | Comments (0)

CC BY logo

Today I was approached about my spaceship being used in a movie. It’s great that my spaceship model is getting noticed, but with people beginning to show an interest in actually using this 3D spaceship model and the renders generated from it, it looks like I’m going to have to give some serious thought to what licence I’m going to release this project under.

The model is intended primarily for inclusion in the Vega Strike game – and I have received lots of support, advice, coaching and encouragement from the community behind this cool Elite-like space simulation game – so whatever licence I chose, it must be compatible with the Vega Strike submissions guidelines.

On the Vega Strike Wiki licence page there is a list of licences that are accepted for inclusion in the game. GPL, LGPL, GPDL, PD, CC BY, CC SA or CC BY-SA. According to my research these are various different flavours of three different type of licence. GP is the first type and stands for General Public. It seems that these general public licenses are mostly intended for making software open source. PD (Public domain) is the second type (explained in more detail here at Wikipedia) and seems to cover work where there are no intellectual property rights at all, as in when they have expired after the authors death. Again this doesn’t quite seem to cover what I intend for my spaceship model. I do want to regain some control over how it is attributed.

This leaves the three types of Creative Commons licence that Vega Strike allows. The Creative Commons people have a great page giving a simple terms summary of each license here >

Licenses – Creative Commons.

and useful tips here > FAQ Crediting.

I’ve chosen the “BY” license for my spaceship. As the Creative Commons page says,

“This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered, in terms of what others can do with your works licensed under Attribution.” Full licence here.

This licence will allow people to use the spaceship in games like Vega Strike, and in movies – both open source and commercial. It will also allow people to modify and develop the model and produce their own renders. I can according to the license stipulate the form of my credit, and so the credit that must be attached is;-

“3D VIP Spaceship Model” © 2010 Brett Fitzpatrick, available under a Creative Commons Attribution licence from: http://www.starbrightillustrations.com/Franklin_3D_spaceship_for_Vega_Strike_game.html, licence: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Hopefully this license will ensure that the most possible people get to see my work, and can modify it and use it in their creativity if they are so inclined, but also that my name and a link to my website will get out there along with it.

Noob to Pro navigation tip to keep 3D window centred

By The Illustrator | 2010/08/23 17:03 Posted in 3D, Blender | Comments (0)

pretty new Blender menu

I have been using Blender off and on for a couple of years now and one thing always bugged me. When I rotate a model this way and that in the 3D editing window, to get a better view when I’m fixing stuff, (right now I’m replacing all my triangles with quads for example), sometimes the model stays nice and centred while I rotate around it, but sometimes it jumps about like a jack in the box, but why?

All is explained here - Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Navigation in 3D – Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks. Apparently the model is rotating just like it should, but the centre of rotation has gotten a little lost.It’s easy to fix from the view menu in the 3D window though.

Unfortunately the short cut involves using the “.” button on the number pad. As I’m using a laptop and it doesn’t even have a number pad this isn’t going to be possible, and the huge number of times I find myself resetting the centre of rotation for the 3D window now that I know how to do it really demands that I use the short cut.

Luckily short cuts are customisable in Blender, here’s an explanation of how to customise the interface short cuts. I switched off the circle select short cut “c” and replaced the “.” short cut for centre view to cursor with the newly freed up “c”as you can see in the screen grab above. It took a while to find hidden among the huge list of short cut options in the preferences window but now that I’ve got it changed it’s made me very happy. I’ve already used it like a bajillion times.

Be Vewy Qwiet, I’m hunting tris, again

By The Illustrator | 2010/08/22 15:57 Posted in 3D, Blender, spaceship | Comments (0)

let's flush them tris out

As usual the latest renders and the blend file for this spaceship is at the dedicated game spaceship model project page.

I’m aiming for a completely triangle free model. I’ve been reading my offline ebook of theBlender documentation wiki and I discovered that it is possible to select all the triangles on your model from the selection menu.

I’ve heard in a few places now that for games triangles on your mesh are bad, your mesh should – if possible – consist entirely of quads. In theory when you use the triangle select option not a single triangle should rear its ugly head.

Well guess what happened when I selected the triangles on my spaceship model. That’s right it lit up like Christmas tree!

triangles, and lots of 'em

It’s not as bad as it looks and it’s actually quite fun finding a solution that will turn each triangle into a quad. I can often do it by reducing the geometry on the model in fact, so it has become part of the simplification process. But it’s a job that has to be done. Apparently with all these triangles any game engine that has to draw this spaceship on the screen is going to be producing shading artifacts. So here’s to zero triangles.. sometime soon.

I have also been producing some details which fit into a single quad. With just four vertexes at each corner these details are really easy to duplicate and pepper all over the surface of the spaceship model.

single quad mesh greeble

With little bits of easy to attach eye candy like this the greebling process should be over in a jiffy.

integrated into the mesh

Franklin deicated page, now with renders and a blend file

By The Illustrator | 2010/08/20 11:12 Posted in 3D, Blender, spaceship | Comments (3)

high poly spaceship version

original low poly version

I’ve spent some time working on the project page for my latest spaceship work in progress. Before my little makeover it included just two images. It had an image of the latest render on the project and a render of the model as it originally very low poly appeared in the game.

Now the page has lots of nice renders of the spaceship from different angles. There are orthographic and perspective images of the front, underside, top and side. Each time I do renders all I have to do is update the image files for this page with Filezilla to keep everything nice and current.

I’m also including the latest blend file on the page in the same way.

Blender Wiki as eBook in Kindle format

By The Illustrator | 2010/08/11 18:46 Posted in 3D, Blender | Comments (0)

I found the Blender Wiki to read in .mobi format (on a Kindle for example) on this cool archive site

I’ve been looking for a good meaty book about Blender to read offline in Kindle format (I don’t actually have a Kindle, but I do have Mobipocket on my dear old Windows smart phone, and that uses the .mobi Kindle type file). I find that reading a manual from cover to cover while I’m travelling to work and back gives me a real insight into the things I’m finding out by learning by doing. It’s amazing how much stuff sticks. You find yourself with a problem using the software and suddenly remembering, “Oh, I read about this in the manual.”

I usually search for this type of material as a PDF and then convert it to .mobi, but I wasn’t having any luck with Blender. Noob to pro didn’t format well as a .mobi file for me. I use Calibre on Ubuntu to make my files and put them on the phone’s micro SD card. Blender Art Magazine also gets garbled when i try to turn it into a Kindle file. I had seen that the Blender Wiki was being made available to download as a PDF by a dedicated Blender fan (thanks to Blender Nation), but I couldn’t even get the PDF to download without being corrupted. A little more searching brought me to the archive site, and not only do they have the same file, they have a download link for a nicely formated .mobi file. I’m actually looking forward to my next tram ride to work.

Andolians – a faction for the Vega Strike spaceship game

By The Illustrator | 2010/08/08 20:56 Posted in 3D, Blender, Role-Playing Games, Vega Strike, spaceship | Comments (0)

a sprinkling of stars

The spaceship I’m building for Vega Strike* (read all about the spacesihp construction process here) is intended to be an Andolian design. Andolians, “…in their distinctive, black environment suits..” are most terrified of computer viruses. Quote from this page of the game Wiki. And there is another great page of Andolian stuff here, an art guide to the game faction. They wear these environment suits to keep the electronics integrated within them secure.

It’s an interesting concept, like the technological implant using people in the books by Alastair Reynolds. Some of his characters are forced to spend their time in a sealed hovering box, for fear of infection.(He has a website on Tripod, and his books are really good, he doesn’t have any of his stuff to download on his site but there is stuff available, six great short stories here at freesfonline)

And as you can see in the art guide the Andolians seem to take this aesthetic of security and protection as a running theme through their culture. Their spaceships and buildings all have thick slab of armour on, armour against the usual things that can damage a building or spaceship, but I’m sure it also has the ability to protect IT and implants from sabotage and infiltration.

As I’m sculpting the spaceship – the basic shape is now pretty much fixed, so this is a process of adding detail and moving individual vertexes – I’m trying to make the armour look thicker and the passengers more well protected. I think the spaceship is looking more and more Andolian all the time.

My spaceship now has a sleek brushed aluminium look. It’s not a texture, just the material with the softness turned way down and reflectiveness added at a value below 1 to make the reflections blurry.

*What! You haven’t finished that yet? I hear you cry. Well the problem is that I’ve learned so much about manipulating meshes since I started that when I go back to a section of the spaceship to add greebles it’s awfully tempting to do the bad mesh over. In fact that’s what I’m mostly doing, but once this process is complete it should be read for unwrapping and textures.

I’ll have a P please Blender

By The Illustrator | 2010/08/04 18:44 Posted in 3D, Blender, spaceship | Comments (0)

Spaceship interior with spacepeople

Today I was making a cute little spaceperson for the inside of my spaceship. I wanted to make sure that they were the same size as the pilot, who is already attached to the mesh. So I duplicated him, and then realised that I would have to split him away from the spaceship mesh to work on him better (to add a mirror modifier). The problem was I didn’t know the keyboard short cut to do this, and I couldn’t find it in the interface menus either. Not a real problem of course, not with Google to fall back on.

Here’s how to split a 3D Blender object mesh. The shor tcut is P. Tee hee. Unfortunately I find the letter P endlessly amusing. It’s my sad British toilet humour coming to the surface again. (P sounds like pee, tee hee). But I’m not the only one, ‘Can I have a P please?’ became the catchphrase of this 8os British quiz show host. So this is one keyboard short cut that I shouldn’t have too much trouble remembering.

Once the bit of the mesh I was interested in was separated I just added a mirror modifier, did the work I wanted and then clicked the apply button to turn the mirrored geometry into real geometry.

Then I had to stitch the two halves of my spaceman together vertex by vertex, but I think that usually wouldn’t be necessary. I’m hoping that that was just because I turned clipping on late and was working away from the origin. Any way..

Here is the new blend file with little spaceperson models to move around.

Magic Hour look for Spaceship mesh, in Blender 2.5

By The Illustrator | 2010/07/31 18:30 Posted in 3D, Blender, Vega Strike, spaceship | Comments (0)

Magic Hour

I’ve been messing about with the lighting in my Blender spaceship scene. I’ve now got a nice purple light coming in at the model horizontally, as though it is just climbing over a planet’s horizon, someplace in the outer reaches of the Vega Strike game universe. The magic hour look. Or at least that’s the idea.

I’ve also got the new ‘spikey’ engine housings in place. These are a design feature of Andolian spacecraft.

Cold and grey spaceship render

grey spaceship

As you can probably see, this render was done before I started messing about with the light rig. The spaceship render is much flatter and greyer. It has a sort of icy beauty, but I much prefer the more colourful render.

I’ll be doing a bunch of renders with the new lighting, and hopefully more greebles, panels and navigation lights. Rather than bore you all with a new post every time I do a new render, I’ll just edit this post and add them here.

I’ll also just add blend file links to this post as progress is made with it. The current blend file for this spaceship is really starting to get where I want it to be. I can see myself doing a UV unwrap pretty soon if everything keeps going at this rate.

Well until the next edit….

Edit–

Another render…