3D

Yay! The UV Unwrap is Done!

By The Illustrator  |  2010/09/26 11:04 Posted in 3D, Blender, spaceship  |  Comments (0)
spaceship uv

the UV unwrap of the spaceship

OK! I finally got to the end of a UV Unwrap. This is where you take a 3D model and peel it like an orange, so you can paint on the peel (the UV unwrap) and wind it back on. Because my model is a spaceship my UV unwrap doesn’t look much like an orange peel, it looks more like a paper pattern that you could glue together to make a model. In fact if I added tabs to the cut-out sections you could probably do just that, but it’d be a bit fiddly.

So when I open this image in GIMP (GIMP turns it from SVG to JPEG but that seems to be expected) I can paint pretty colours on it and then wrap it back round the model in Blender. This gives the 3D model colours much more controllably than is possible in Blender itself. [I might be wrong about that part, I just found out that Blender has an integrated paint program too - integrated paint program, integrated video editor and of course all the 3D tools, is there anything this amazing open-source application can't do?]

OK so after fooling around in GIMP for a couple of minutes I had a very basic coloured image, just as a test.

colourmap for spaceship

Looks like modern art!

I’ve left the lines indicating the shape of the cut-out areas of the spaceship as ghostly shadows so it’s a little more obvious what’s going on in this image. I just turned down the layer they are on in GIMP to achieve this, normally I would turn this layer off entirely before getting GIMP to make a JPEG of course.

And here’s what it looks like if I wrap these simple colours round the spaceship.

spaceship with colours

The spaceship gets a new paint job

And this technique isn’t just useful for colours, I can add shadows, bumps and grooves and lots of other stuff this way. So the next task is to see how good I can get this relatively simple model to look using these techniques, before transferring them to my much more complex 3D spaceship model.

Zero Punctuation blipvert

By The Illustrator  |  2010/09/24 11:10 Posted in 3D, spaceship  |  Comments (0)

One of my spaceships just turned up on Zeropunctuation.

It’s used in a blink and you’ll miss it kind of way, but it is there.

I had never heard of Zeropunctuation, but someone from the Vega Strike community noticed it and tipped me off in the forums. Of course I immediately dropped everything and went looking for it.

It turns out that Zeropunctuation is a part of the Escapist website where they do a sort of video blogcast that reviews games. It’s funny in a video games magazine sort of way (I’m talking about the humour, anyone who has ever read a video mag will immediately recognise the nerdy, childish humour) but it has a strange format, they don’t seem to have any visuals from the games they review, just these yellow background animations.

When I read in the forum that a picture of my spaceship had been used I assumed they were reviewing Vega Strike (the game the spaceship is intended for), but it’s actually a review of another game entirely. And the reviewer hates the game, which I think always makes for the most entertaining reviews.

He really lays into the game and finds fault with the plot, the game play, the concepts and all kinds of other stuff. It’s really quite entertaining, and for me there’s the added pleasure of seeing my spaceship suddenly turn up and disappear again about half way through.

I still haven’t finished this spaceship though. I’ve reached the uv unwrap stage, but it is turning out to be quite a difficult task, so I’m practising a uv unwrap on a much simpler spaceship first, like a doctor practices giving injections with an orange.

GURPS Spaceships Design Spreadsheet

By The Illustrator  |  2010/09/22 02:02 Posted in Illustration, Role-Playing Games, spaceship  |  Comments (0)
GURPS Spaceship

A spaceship with full GURPS rules

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GURPS Spaceships Design Spreadsheet – Steve Jackson Games Forums. Thanks to ericbsmith for this, If you are designing a super-high-tech starcruiser, you should probably be using something a bit more advanced than a pencil and paper, and this spreadsheet sure is advanced.

And on his website he has a cool book full of Aliens.

I’m still sketching lots of spaceships and it’s nice to be able to come up with GURPS stats for them quickly. I ended up creating a much simplified flow chart sort of thingy instead, to really speed up spaceship numbers crunching and design.

So putting the starscape generator for GIMP I found yesterday, and my new GURPS spaceship design flow chart together, I give you the P-Lifter class support spaceship. I’ve made a page for it on the content part of the website. A page with spaceship illustration and proper full GURPS stats.

When I was producing the illustration I came up with a nice new trick. I scanned in the sketch and replaced the white background with transparency as usual, but then I duplicated the spaceship.

I used one duplicate for the thicker black lines around the edge of the spaceship, and the other duplicate, turned down to about 50% transparency was used for the more delicate lines suggesting access hatches, windows and other assorted greebles on the surface of the spaceship hull.

I’m quite pleased with the effect, and it’s real easy and quick to do so you can expect to see more of it in my 2D GIMP images from now on.

After having fun making 2D images it’s now back to creating a textured 3D spaceship model. And of course once it’s done I’ll be getting out my flowchart to come up with some stats for GURPS.

New 3D Spaceship model with Blender 2.5

By The Illustrator  |  2010/09/19 19:22 Posted in 3D, Blender, Illustration, spaceship  |  Comments (0)
low-poly spaceship

Simple low-polygon spaceship ready for texture

My model for the Vega Strike game still isn’t finished, and I’m beginning to think it’s a little too ambitious for my first proper UV unwrap. So today I created a nice simple spaceship model, in just a few hours. It has thousands fewer polygons than the Vega Strike spaceship (it has fewer polygons than some of the greebles on the Vega Strike spaceship).

So my idea is I’ll quickly do a UV unwrap on this simpler model, and also make a texture for it. Hopefully after this dry run I’ll be better equipped to have another crack at the more complicated model. The simple model won’t go to waste though. I’ll release the blend file as creative commons content and use it for an RPG illustration.

I just got hold of GURPS and GURPS spaceships and I’m doing some spaceship designs as I read through the rules. I’ll be posting them as soon as they are done and this simple spaceship should make a nice illustration for the first one.

Here’s a fun little animation showing the model being built, one extrude after another.

I’m making a new logo for my website, as part of a concerted drive to get the whole crumbling edifice to the standard where it can be used as a calling card, portfolio and show reel all rolled into one. (here’s a page with the new look) I needed the new header logo to have a a transparent background, but I wasn’t sure how to make that happen in GIMP. It turns out it’s quite easy. The Gimp: Making Colors in a GIF Transparent.

UV Texture in Blender 2.5 without seams, am I crazy?

By The Illustrator  |  2010/09/10 18:46 Posted in 3D, Blender, spaceship  |  Comments (0)

The UV unwrap is going well, and I haven’t needed to put any seams in place. In Blender 2.5, (I’m not sure if the previous system was the same, or if this is all new) all I have to do to UV unwrap is select faces from my model in the normal 3D window – the UV unwrap window is gone, that’s one definite change -

select faces in the 3D window

Just select faces in the 3D window

and see them appear in the UV editor.

3D window UV window

3D window on the left, UV window on the right

Once I’ve selected a nice little island  of faces I just pin it in place and go back for some more. It’s very intuitive.

The yellow and black arrows in the render is my own UV test pattern. I was using this file from a Second Life tutorial. In World Texture Tutorials for Linden Second Life Immersive Alternate Reality Game. Tutorials © Robin Wood 2005.

But the reason I’m not happy with it, or the automatic pattern that Blender generates, is that they are not very directional. It was pointed out to me on this page from the development thread for this 3D spaceship at the Vega Strike game forums that a directional pattern would be a good idea, and I can only agree.

Using a texture with a direction to line the spaceship up properly will make it easier to later add things like micrometiorite impact scratches in the direction of travel. And this functionality is one of the goals of the Vega Strike game, as explained in this UV tutorial.

It was easy enough to knock up a jpeg in GIMP to use as the directional test pattern and import it into Blender. The hard part is going to be getting all those little arrows to be the same size and to line up.

spaceship render with test pattern

Arrows going every which way

3D spaceship with first test texture

By The Illustrator  |  2010/09/08 15:05 Posted in 3D, Blender, spaceship  |  Comments (4)
first test texture

3D spaceship with test texture

As I said yesterday, I’m in the very initial stages of giving my 3D spaceship model a proper skin. Stage one was to create a test pattern skin for the model to see where the skin needs to be pushed and pulled before it can be painted.

As you can see from the above render, my spaceship skin needs a little bit of adjustment before I can start painting it and create the finished texture image.

The whole spaceship should be covered in squares, and it is, but the squares should all be the same size, and they shouldn’t be twisted or squished. Here is where my model needs a little bit of work. Well not the model itself, that’s pretty much done, just the skin that’s going to be wrapped round it to make it colourful and realistic.

On my spaceship some of the squares are so big they cover an entire wing and some are so much smaller that nine or ten of them fit on to the spaceship’s nose. If I were to paint on to that skin now some bits would look close up and pixilated and other bits far away and squished.

And the skin is so untidy it would take me ages to work out what bit on the skin was what bit on the model before I could even fire up GIMP and start creating attractive patterns of paint and realistic looking detail.

To get to this point I’ve been following this Blender 2.5 UV unwrap video tutorial. It played without sound for me, but I still pretty much got the idea. Now it’s back to the Vega Strike game model tutorial for hints about how to tidy this mess up and create a proper image texture. Right now the image file looks like a plate of spaghetti but hopefully I can make it into something logical and recognisable.

Starting UV unwrap on my 3D spaceship

By The Illustrator  |  2010/09/07 17:45 Posted in 3D, Blender, spaceship  |  Comments (0)
spaceship in need of a texture

It's nice but it needs a texture.

OK, this time for real, I’m actually starting the UV unwrap on my spaceship so that I can put a proper skin on it. I’ll be following the Vega Strike 3D model unwrapping tutorial so that the Franklin can be used in the Vega Strike game. (I’m calling it the “3D VIP Spaceship Model” for the purposes of the creative commons license. Just in case it is decided that it should be some other spaceship instead of the Franklin.)

Among other things the Vega Strike guide recommends this very concise little tut on how to use the live unwrap and test pattern. It’s so small it fits in one forum post.

One of the reasons this has all taken so long is that setting up video for my website in a HTML5 compliant(ish) way has been a bit time consuming. For example today Ogg was broke on my Ubuntu Firefox. Even the example video on the Mozilla ogg page wouldn’t play. Neither would the Ogg – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Of course this was making it difficult for me to check if I have successfully created and uploaded a functioning ogg file. (I can’t upload an ogv file because my stupid Yahoo hosting server tells computers to download it rather than play it – (unless that’s another symptom of my broken Firefox. Hmm..))

Anyway, the only solution was for me to install the new Firefox, Firefox 4. Apparently faulty ogg playback on Linux was an issue with 3.6 versions of Firefox, and that has since been solved. And I have to say, that although I was forced into this upgrade by broken Firefox functionality, I still like the new Firefox. Just not as much as I like Chrome.

I downloaded Chrome (it’s called Chromium on my Ubuntu lappy) to test the webm files I was uploading but I was very impressed indeed. It’s as fast as lightning and I didn’t have to download a bleeding-edge-beta just to play a video file. It looks great too. I’m very tempted to tick that box and make it my default browser.

I want my short spaceship movie to look like a car ad

By The Illustrator  |  2010/09/06 18:55 Posted in 3D, Blender, spaceship  |  Comments (0)

I want my short spaceship movie to have the aesthetics and production values of a car ad. Something like this futuristic ad, that I found on YouTube.

Some immediate changes that I’m going to make are using the phrase ‘Introducing the all new’ to replace ‘presenting’. It also might be a good idea to come up with some kind of slogan. Here they say BOOT UP. LIFT OFF.

I’m definitely going to need better music too. And the text in the car ad is even shinier than the stuff in my video, chrome instead of gold, and it flies in from odd angles, you just get time to read it and then it explodes away.

I’ve seen a bunch of ads like this and I think the style would really suit a far future product like a spaceship. It’ll certainly be a much more interesting way of showcasing the model than a few renders and a bit of dry text.

Here is the latest version of the presentational video for my 3D spaceship model, so you can judge for yourself how far is still to go before it comes up to this real-world standard.

Once the video – and perhaps more importantly the model – are complete this movie will make a great basis to build a show reel around.

Matroska for my Blender animations?

By The Illustrator  |  2010/09/04 19:15 Posted in 3D, Blender, spaceship  |  Comments (0)

matroska_logo

I want two versions of my presentation video, for the 3D spaceship model I’m building. A low quality version as an inline video in my posts (and on the 3D model’s dedicated page) and a higher quality version that people can download if they want to have a really good look at the model.

So obviously I’ll be creating the high quality version first and simply transcoding a low quality ‘YouTube’ version from that.

So what format to pick for my video? Even I know VHS and Super8 are old news, but what are the kids using now? After reading more than I really wanted to, and certainly more than I thought I would, about video codecs I’ve come to a decision. Website after web site, forum after forum kept saying the same thing.

“If the file sharing scene is an indicator for future trends, the next ‘big’ container format to replace AVI will not be MP4/MOV, but Matroska.”

(this quote from) FFMpeg QuickTime H.264 export only works in VLC…? – Blender Artists Forums.

So my high quality version will be an MKV file.

I’m also still trying to get the best results from my ogg player. I’ve decided on ogg/ogv (same thing, different suffix) for the web version of the promotional video because it is open source. I will also need an mp4 version for all the poor people locked into either the Microsoft or Apple empires.

Now this sounds simple, but it has been a giant pain in the fundament to get hold of these lawyer infested codecs (the code you need to make the file). In theory, now that I have negotiated all the hacks required to get this non-free lump of computer code included in Ubuntu (which is forced to ship without this stuff to make the lawyers happy), I’ll be able to make an mp4 file that will play in most people’s QuicktimeTM (upgrade to the Pro version or it’s pretty useless) or Flash (don’t get me started, who’s got the thousands of pounds or hundreds of hours required to learn how to use that pile?) Or it might be more complicated than even this confused picture, according to this web page about codecs and such.

It says to

  1. Make one version that uses WebM (VP8 + Vorbis).
  2. Make another version that uses H.264 baseline video and AAC “low complexity” audio in an MP4 container.
  3. Make another version that uses Theora video and Vorbis audio in an Ogg container.
  4. Link to all three video files from a single <video> element, and fall back to a Flash-based video player.

Don’t ya just hate lawyers and copyright?

OK, rant over, back to work on getting my inline web movie player to work across as many browsers as possible. (So far it’s working in Firefox on a Linux machine, Firefox on a Mac and Safari). Then maybe I can get back to doing something creative.

An evolving animation to show off the 3D spaceship model

By The Illustrator  |  2010/09/03 18:17 Posted in 3D, Blender, spaceship  |  Comments (2)

Up to now, as I’ve been working on my spaceship model and as it has been evolving, I have been showing off my progress by producing a few renders here and there, like the spaceship renders on this page.

But… I’ve been thinking, instead of a few still images like these, it would be better to produce an animated movie of the spaceship rocketing through space. The spaceship will bank and roll as it flies so that you can see it from every angle and get a much better feel for the model than a series of still renders can provide.

To succeed in using an animation to show of the model, instead of renders, I’m going to need to overcome a few hurdles though. I’ll need to produce png image sequences quickly, which means I’ll have to find some way of cheating and expediting the rendering process. Even five minutes per png image is a long time at 25 images per second, or 24 I haven’t quite worked that out yet. It seems that changing the antialiaising setting from 8 to 5 makes little difference to the quality. And if I render at 400 pixels by 200 pixels the video renders ‘quite’ quickly.

I’ll also need to make the model in the animation file a proxy model of the real evolving model, so that it updates and changes automatically when the original is revised and improved. I think that was successful – but I haven’t really tested it yet.

I’ll also need some music. Luckily I’ve gone looking for music for my animations before, and I’m quite confident I’ll be able to put something together. I’ll use a bit of classical guitar for now, but in the future the soundtrack is hopefuly going to be more futuristic.

Using ogv as a format means the video will only show up in Chrome, Opera and Firefox for now. But apparently there is a way to fall back to another format, AVI. MOV or Flash. So I’m considering adding this functionality.

Hopefully now the model and promotional video will evolve in tandem to make one kick ass presentation in the end.

And don’t forget the spaceship is creative commons open content. If you want it you can download the blend file containing the 3D spaceship model from this page.