spaceship

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.

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

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.

spaceship camera view

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.

full render with border detail

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.