role-playing game

Tarazet the role-playing game, back as free pdf download

By The Illustrator | 2010/02/28 22:52 Posted in Illustration, Review, Role-playing game, role-playing game | Comments (0)

Tarazet the Role-playing Game is back as a free pdf download. I can’t tell you the pleasure it gives me to have this game back under development. Every illustration I produce of a spaceship or monster is just more inspiration that gets fed back into the role-playing game background, enriching it, and in the process allowing the illustrations to be based on a more and more substantial foundation. Tarazet is really becoming an extensive source of inspiration for any science fiction gamemaster.

I’m really beginning to get a feel for what does and doesn’t happen, and does and doesn’t work in the Tarazet universe, with is a funny thing to be able to admit about a supposedly imaginary space-opera-type fantasy role-playing game setting. And the pdf version of these role-playing game rules can be downloaded here.

It is a rules-light game system that supports a richly imagined universe of adventure, well at least as much richly-imagined universe of adventure as it is possible to fit into a 23 page pdf game’s rule book. It is however growing all the time. As I create pages with illustrations, ideas and text with the Tarazet universe as a setting I just copy and paste it with a few refinements directly into the pdf. I’ve had a lot of fun coming up with ideas for this game setting, and that even extends to some ideas for science fiction adventures. It can be a chore coming up with new challenges for your player characters and it’s always good to see that this basic necessity has been addressed to some degree in a rules book.

Shark-like spaceship design with exaggerated perspective

By The Illustrator | 2010/02/26 20:11 Posted in Illustration, Illustration Friday, Illustration Friday, Spaceships, role-playing game | Comments (2)

From now on I’m going to be coming at all my sketching from a spaceship or science fiction point of view, because it seems to be what the vast majority of visitors to this site want. Every week I’ve been producing sketches for an art challenge called Illustration Friday, and these sketches are going to be no exception to the new sci-fi spaceship ethos of the site.

The word this weak on Illustration Friday is “perspective” and this seems the easiest thing in the world to turn to a spaceship theme, after all it is very common for a sci-fi artist producing an illustration for their spaceship design to show off it’s vast size by adding exaggerated perspective to the image.

I’ve done something similar in the image above, by exaggerating the perspective of the spaceship in this image I have added to the feeling that it is screaming along – although in space nobody can hear you scream – very low over the surface of an asteroid.

I created this sketch very quickly, which is one of the aims of Illustration Friday, but I’m actually very happy with it. The spaceship looks very dangerous and powerful indeed. I have given it a little streamlining so that it can land on the planets of an unsuspecting role-playing game universe, but it is still very much a large spaceship. It’s very at home in the empty voids of the spacelanes of any game setting.

I wouldn’t be surprised if I make time to work this image up into a finished illustration, using either GIMP, Inkscape, Blender or all three. I might even take time to work out some floor plans, complete the design and statistics and write some fluff about it. I’m really quite pleased with it.

I’ve found a live and active forum for The GIMP, includes art, resources and tutorials, but I don’t like it.

By The Illustrator | 2009/12/28 14:45 Posted in GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Spaceships, Tutorials, role-playing game | Comments (3)

I love forums, whenever you have an IT or computer problem and go Googling for the answer it always seems to come from the kind people who hang out in forums. I’ve been spending a lot of time hanging out in GIMP lately and I’ve been looking for a forum to post my art and find answers to my problems, and here it is. GIMPER.NET – The GIMP Community – Index page. There does seem to be one big problem though. I don’t see any signature links, and when I created one and previewed it – it looked dead. If the site doesn’t allow signature links, then why should anyone create content for them?

Oh well, I guess I’ll have to keep looking for a proper GIMP forum who don’t mind the people who create the content for them linking away to their own site.

In the mean time I’ve been working on my latest spaceship illustration. When we last saw it, it looked like the image to the left, but it has gone through quite a lot of development since then and as a tutorial-like guide I’ll post some of the iterations here.

First I darkened the spaceman character in the foreground of the image. In this illustration the spaceship is to be an imposing presence, but despite that still a backdrop to the foreground action.

Then I moved the spaceship to the top of the layers pile so that I could work on it without being disturbed by the elements of the image that would otherwise overlap it – a really good reason to keep each element of the illustration on it’s own layer. I added windows, greebles and other details until I was happy with it, for now, and then mixed all the spaceship layers together into one spaceship layer and moved it back down to it’s proper place in the stack.

When the spaceship is in its proper place, it is behind a translucent white layer which nicely simulates the effect of seeing something far away through a lot of intervening atmosphere – the colours fade. I darkened the jungle foliage in the background of the image and worked into it to make a little more detail. I also muted the colours of the monster in the image – which is still a quite abstract shape – because it is going to be lowering in the shadows in the completed picture, if everything goes according to plan.

With only a few light-colour trees in the foreground the brave interplanetary adventurer looked as though he was in the open, so I deleted them and blocked in a shape to better represent the jungle clearing feel that I was originally going for in this digital painting. The adventurer was beginning to look a little lost too, so as you can see in the image to the left, I resized him.

And here we have the current state of play with this illustration. The space adventurer wasn’t looking heroic enough, and it seemed strange that he was looking through binoculars into this dense alien jungle where visibility can’t be more than a few meters, so I’ve bitten the bullet and started to completely redesign him.

You can see the very first stages of this image here, and I’ll be posting updates as I make more progress in bringing this digital painting home, so far using GIMP exclusively.

Designing Another Spaceship (with mesh and textures) – Orbiting a Planet

By The Illustrator | 2009/11/12 20:59 Posted in 3D, Blender, Forum Thread, Illustration, Review, Software, Spaceships, role-playing game | Comments (0)

Now that I have my second copy of Blender installed on my Puppy Linux laptop I’ve actually stopped faffing around with disk partition and installing codecs and started modeling again – not Kate Moss modeling, 3D computer generated art modeling. And it seems I’m not the only one, I recently found this this cool thread started by a stats obsessed 3D spaceship designer. Which includes this post from iliketosayblah

i love the stats…i wish all ships had stats…

… and I couldn’t agree more.

This was such an interesting thread to read; it had an argument about physics, it had advice on how to design spaceships, it had a crazy amount of stats, and I learned some new vocabulary. The comments on the meshes that the Blender artist posted included one that complimented the greebles on the surface of the spaceship.

Now apparently, according to Wikipedia,

A greeble or nurnie is a small piece of detailing added to break up the surface of an object to add visual interest to a surface or object, particularly in movie special effects.

Now I didn’t know that, but you can bet I’ll be using these magnificent words a lot more from now on.

I’m going to call the spaceship in this 3D image “The Packard” after the Packard Bell laptop which I did most of the design work on the mesh and basics on. I also produced the jpeg for the texture on the same plucky old laptop in Gimp, which was a pleasure to work with and seemed to be every bit as powerful as Photoshop, even though it opens in a fraction of the time.

There is a lot more work to come on this spaceship. It needs some smoother hull plates mixed in with the basic structure of this mesh, but not too many, because I want it to retain a low-tech feel. It needs a lot more greebleing in the area connecting the bridge of the spaceship to the main body, that’s still looking to thin and aerodynamic, like an airplane, and that’s not what we want at all in this workhorse of the planetary spaceways. And I might even look for another free science fiction table top role-playing game so that I can produce some simple stats to go with this powerful but workaday spaceship.

3D Spaceship Motion Blur, Asteroids and Planets

By The Illustrator | 2009/11/07 19:23 Posted in 3D, Blender, Illustration Friday, Tutorials, illustration, role-playing game, spaceship | Comments (0)

The first thing that jumps to mind when thinking about the word blur – well at least in my science fiction steeped mind – is the motion blur of a spaceship rocketing through the interstellar void. (Blur is this week’s word on Illustration Friday the art challenge website – see the left-hand column for the link).

I decided a blur of a spaceship was a fine idea for my picture for the art challenge site and got going with my preparation. To make my interstellar void I started looking for NASA images of space, such as this NSSDC Photo Gallery: Asteroids where I selected a nice asteroid, or this Gimp fan’s selection of images where I downloaded the big old planet in the background of the illustration.

I wanted the asteroid I downloaded to be in the foreground, so I had to turn it into a png with a transparent background. I used a particle system to make the segment of the planetary ring in the background, loaded up my planet and then set to work on the mesh for my spaceship.

I made two duplicate copies of the 3D spaceship mesh, one to act as the outer hull, and the other to act as bits of metal structure that poke out from it. I had the most fun with the texture for the outer part of the spaceship. I was inspired by the surface of the asteroid, and I wanted to give my spaceship a skin with a similar texture so it could easily hide in an asteroid field. In the illustration the asteroid field is a ring of debris surrounding an unlucky planet after its moon has been blasted to bits.

I was just considering what set of table top RPG rules the spaceship would best fit with, and if there were any new free science fiction rules sets I could root out when one of my posts was commented by an RPG enthusiast with some free RPG links on his site. Up With Role Playing Games. The links are in the left hand bar, I do like a good collection of links.

The only thing left to do was load the render into Photoshop and add some windows, a plume of atomic fire coming out of the engines and of course the motion blur that was the inspiration for this image – thanks to Illustration Friday.

The only problem was, I liked all the detail on the surface of the spaceship so much that I couldn’t bring myself to blur it more than a tiny bit around the edges.

Oh well…

Flying Back to Live Writer for my illustrations and posts after BlogDesk and ScribeFire

By The Illustrator | 2009/10/11 21:42 Posted in Illustration, SEO etc, role-playing game | Comments (0)

This is a subtle piece of art for Illustration Friday based on the idea of flight. It is a light and crystalline mechanoid which is an idea I have been playing with for role-playing games and a 3d illustration.

I’ve abandoned ScribeFire for writing this 3d and illustration blog again because there seems to be some confusion about a "tracking pixel" being added to every post created with it. As one internet pundit pointed out this is open to all kinds of abuse and the company that created ScribeFire seem to be anything but forthcoming about what this "tracking pixel" is for. And on top of that there was no spellchecker, for me as a very visual and artistic person (read bad speller) that’s a deal breaker.

I got BlogDesk working. It was simple in the end, I just left the blog ID box blank and everything worked fine. Although it still has the Word 2000 issue BlogDesk Forum :: View topic – MS Office 2000 Setup starts with BlogDesk. But before making the switch I thought I would give Live Writer this one more try.

Of the blog clients I have been playing with Live Writer is the prettiest, most intuitive and most powerful. The only problem has been its continued inability to upload smoothly to this WordPress blog about 3d and creative stuff.

But after troubleshooting the blog with FireBug and removing pretty much all the widgets that I thought I could live without – which has made the blog much faster loading – I thought maybe Live Writer would be more successful in its dealings with the blog. Here’s hoping.

Features

By The Illustrator | 2009/09/18 17:45 Posted in Editorial, Features, Other Systems, Review, SEO etc, Spaceships, role-playing game, spaceship | Comments (0)

All blogs have permanent bits outside the usual day to day business of posting and this one is no exception. I have decided to call these bits a feature section and divide it up into different themes.

Role-Playing Game Art Gallery

This collection of game related images, illustrations and renders has been made a more permanent feature of the site because this is basically the best of what I do. I really enjoy imagining the outlandish visuals of a role-playing game and trying to capture the results in an illustration.

The Mongoose Traveller Sci-fi RPG

Traveller has of course been one of the leading lights, in all its many incarnations, of table-top sci fi role-playing games since the very beginning. When I found the free to download designer’s pack on the Mongoose website I was so excited that I produced a lot of content to use in Traveller games, all in one burst of creativity. It can all be found in this feature section of the blog.

The D20 System

My musings on this game system, and more specifically, how it can be used in science fiction role-playing environments such as Traveller. I like the fact that the D20 system is popular and simple. Once I have created a spaceship illustration I like being able to generate the information needed to use it in a role-playing game quickly, and D20 is a good solution to this need.

Spaceships Gallery

My favourite subject for both 2D and 3D illustrations is spaceships. This feature section of my site brings some of the images of spaceships produced for various reasons across my site together in one gallery. These are some of the best spaceship illustrations I have produced, but they are by no means the only ones.

Cautious Spaceship hiding in asteroid field

By The Illustrator | 2009/08/22 18:37 Posted in Illustration, Spaceships, role-playing game | Comments (1)

Here is a picture of a cautious spaceship hiding out in an asteroid field. It is entirely made from a doodle scanned into Photoshop and coloured in with vectors.

And there’s more where this came from, just go to the main art laden index page, or check out some related posts.

Triceratops-Looking Spaceship

By The Illustrator | 2009/07/13 18:06 Posted in 3D, Illustration, Spaceships, role-playing game | Comments (0)

Here’s another RPG spaceship sketch for the Starbright Spaceship Sketchbook. These spaceship designs are intended for use as inspiration and generic illustrations for role-playing games. This spaceship has a lot of pointy bits sticking out of the front because I was reading Moby Dick before I drew it and it is intended as a Space Whaling Spaceship, now I just need to sketch a space Greenpeace spaceship.

This is that post I was talking about. What happened was that Windows Live Writer saved it as a draft on my blog server, not on my local machine, that’s why I couldn’t find it. It is a thing of beauty though and well worth the wait I hope you’ll agree.

This week’s word for Illustration Friday is shaky, and initially I didn’t know what illustration to come up with in response. Usually I remember an old game-related or editorial illustration lying around on my hard drive I can use, or I can think of a subject for a new illustration; but shaky had me a bit flummoxed. So I looked shaky up on Wikipedia for some inspiration, there was nothing interesting on Wikipedia, but while I was using Google to search it I found an article about a space elevator.

Now I’m already a big fan of spaceships – I’ve produced loads of 3D spaceship illustrations for RPGs – and I’ve also been interested in space elevators since I read about the concept in the work of erm… you know… that guy who wrote redemption ark – I wish I was better with names. Any way I immediately decided to produce a 3D illustration of a space elevator; I’ll probably write up a page of role-playing game stats for it as well so that it can be integrated into my science fiction table-top RPG, Tarazet.

Anyway producing a nice rendered 3D illustration of a space elevator suitable for use in RPG rule books is going to take some time. So in the mean time I have produced a quick 2D sketch in Photoshop as a place keeper until the work is done. I’m currently working on an ambitious – probably too ambitious – 3D animation project in Blender so it might take even longer than usually expected. But at least there is the sketch.

Spaceships Are Hollow

By The Illustrator | 2009/07/10 19:09 Posted in Illustration, Spaceships, role-playing game | Comments (1)

It’s time for Illustration Friday again, and spaceships are once more on my mind. I haven’t given up on my cat animation – oh no – it’s just that spaceship designs come so much easier to me.

Anyway this week’s word on Illustration Friday is “hollow” and this immediately reminded me of the predicament of hurtling through the voids of space in the hollow tin can of a spaceship – an all too real feeling for the brave adventurers of the future, and almost as real for the players who roll them up for use in an RPG.

As an ex player of science fiction role playing games I have designed and made illustrations for a great many spaceships over the years, and I just can’t seem to kick the habit. I might come up with fewer statistics for role-playing games such as Traveller than I did way back then, but I’m still sketching just as many spaceships.

This has given me the idea to start a spaceship sketch book as part of the spaceships section of my website and so have an easy little corner to upload all these generic spaceship sketches without having to bother about coming up with RPG stats for them first.

I typed “spaceship sketch book” into Google to see if anyone out there was doing the same thing and I found this very nicely designed science fiction art site. I’ll have to be working very hard to compete with high quality work like this.