Role-Playing Games

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.

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…

another render of this spaceship

A big blue light in Blender 2.5, quick and dirty

By The Illustrator | 2010/07/25 16:08 Posted in 3D, Blender, Vega Strike, spaceship | Comments (0)

Looks more powerful with a... light!

Hello from Starbright Illustrations. Visit my 3D sci-fi spaceship game site here.

I wanted a big blue light for the side of my spaceship model, to make it look high tech. I had already added a bunch of other greebles, boxes, panels etc, but a nice square illuminated panel would make an interesting change to the usual greebling I thought.

But the question was, how to do it?

I knew the look I was going for, a sort of backlit plastic panel sticking out of a dark are in a recess on the side of the spaceship, but I had no idea how to go about it. Instead of my usual plan, just Google up an answer, I decided to do some experimenting for myself.

First I used a transparent blue material for the panel and put a bright light behind it. The results were less than optimal, with the light flooding out over the rest of the model, and not looking particularly blue either.

That's not right, it looks like spaceship damage.

I tried altering the settings on the light, and altering its position but always ended up with a dim panel not much different to the other ones on the spaceship, or something that looked like an explosion.

It was then that I had my great idea. In real life the source of the illumination for raytracing has to be inside the model, but Blender isn’t real life. What if I place my source outside and point it down at a panel with the hardness turned right down.

I’m very proud of my solution, and it only took me a couple of hours to come up with it. Of course if I had gone straight to google the solution would probably have been findable within minutes – but I wouldn’t have learned as much.

Blender – make transparent spaceship bubble canopy

By The Illustrator | 2010/07/06 22:04 Posted in 3D, Blender, Role-Playing Games, Vega Strike, spaceship | Comments (2)

You can see the pilot through the canopy.

More and more like a proper spaceship.

Progress with the Blender spaceship. Now you can see inside through the transparent bubble canopy. I must admit that, although I have made things transparent using Blender before, I couldn’t quite remember how to do it again.

lots of spaceship complexity

It turns out that there is one tiny button that needs to be pressed to make things transparent. Of course before you can push the button you have to move a slider, switch on two extra panels full of controls and set those, oh and make sure you are using the right lights. But after you have done all that it’s really quite simple.

I followed the tutorial at the Blender wiki here. It took a little while to find this link, and it wasn’t till I went to the old dependable blenderartists.org that I ended up on the right track.

Looks like a pimple, but it's where the spacepilot sees out.

Pushing all the buttons and sliding all the sliders enables raytracing, which makes the model looka whole lot better, but it also means that it takes three or four times as long to render. Even these little 500 x 500 pixel images that I’m rendering to illustrate the blog and keep everyone at the Vega Strike forums up to date with the progress of the spaceship are now taking something like 20 minutes to render.

Of course now that the spaceship has a see-through canopy it means that it needs at least the suggestion of a pilot peeping out through it.

Edit. And here he is.

pilot in spaceship

Spaceship, now without weapons

By The Illustrator | 2010/07/04 21:31 Posted in 3D, Blender, Role-Playing Games, Vega Strike, spaceship | Comments (0)

Where did the guns go?

In the latest twist of fate for the 3D spaceship model I’m designing here at Starbright for the Vega Strike game we have decided that it should lose the guns. You might think it sounds a little strange that a bunch of space gamers want to voluntarily strip their spaceships of guns, but it is to make it possible to add many different weapons mixes to the same frame, so it does sort of make sense after all. You can read all about all the thinking that has gone into this spaceship design here at the Vega Strike forum.

I’ve also been worrying about those thrusters out on the ends of the wings, but this article on the physics of space battles indicates, it’s not such a ridiculous place for them to be.

I think I’m approaching a definitive layout for this spacecraft with all the elements it needs pretty much in place: just a lot more greebles, some more obvious hard points and a pilot to go. There is also some work to be done yet on the mesh of the spaceship, making it more even, getting rid of triangles, simplifying where possible, flipping normals etc, etc, etc but I’m still having a good time.

Latest pics of 3D game spaceship mesh as it hits 2 month mark

By The Illustrator | 2010/06/30 18:21 Posted in 3D, Blender, Vega Strike, spaceship | Comments (0)

with new mass drivers

This Blog has been telling the story of this 3D mesh in Blender for two months now. That sounds like a lot of time, but I’ve only been able to work less than every other day, and only for a few hours at a time. The amount of work that goes into every little change and refinement to make this spaceship more accurate to the game standard spaceship is enormous.

empty area 1 for game engine controlled turret

I’ve also noticed a new button in Blender. It seems that no matter how long you use this software there are always new surprises in store. It is a little button that makes a screen grab of the window you are working on. “Render This Window” it says helpfully as you hover over it with the mouse. So expect lots of pictures of work in progress like the one above from now on.

second turret space

These two renders of the mesh as it is being worked on show the locations of a new feature that was asked for by the Vega Strike game community. The design process for this spaceship is heavily influenced by the feedback I’m getting on the Vega Strike site forum thread that I started.

cool, powerful game spaceship

I rendered this image of the spaceship just because I thought it looked cool. It does also give some idea of the complexity of the mesh that I’m building here. I’ve been assured that this won’t be a problem for the game engine.

I must admit that I’m not so sure, but I’m consoling myself with the idea that if the spaceship should turn out to have way too many polys for easy inclusion in the game, at least there’ll be some interesting posts to the blog while I try and sort the problem out.

More powerful version of the 3D game spaceship

By The Illustrator | 2010/06/26 16:49 Posted in 3D, Blender, Role-Playing Games, Vega Strike, spaceship | Comments (0)

Even more spikes, yay!!

One of the most things about creating this spaceship for Vega Strike (the open-source space simulation game) has been the warm glow of being part of the open source community. The players and developers on the Vega Strike forum have been hugely helpful in the creation of the spaceship. The forum thread where this spaceship has been making its slow progress towards being included in a future release of the game has now reached eight pages and has included discussions of the most intricate details of the game element design process. It has been absolutely invaluable to me, and there is still a long way to go.

launch bay under construction

I’ve also had a little success getting the game to work on my graphics cardless laptop. It turns out that you can force a game to use the ordinary cpu to calculate all the usual 3D tomfoolery. I found a link explaning how for my Ubuntu linux box, it’s a simple line of code, the same one that I have been using to keep Blender working on this box. It is really slow and jerky, even for a relatively simple game like Supertux, the linux downhill penguin racing game, but you never know, I might get the actual Vega Strike game working on my hopeless old laptop yet. If not it is still a lot of fun creating spaceships for it.

Here is the blend file.

Spaceship for Vega Strike, more hard SF

By The Illustrator | 2010/06/13 01:15 Posted in 3D, Blender, Role-Playing Games, Vega Strike, spaceship | Comments (0)

New spaceship ‘wings’

I’ve managed to get a couple of hours to hunch over blender and work on my spaceship model for the Vega Strike space simulation game.

The spaceship now has more ‘realistic’, hard sf wings. Well they are not wings exactly because this is not a streamlined atmospheric spaceship design. So these features are more locations for radiators, thrusters and of course, because this is a computer game, rockets to shoot off at any opposing gamer you might not happen to like.

spaceship cooling system takes shape

I started with one liquid-droplet radiator for dumping the excess heat built up while dogfighting, and doing just about anything else as well. I decided it would be a modular system and easily copied and pasted the system across the ‘wings’ of the spaceship.

I also took the missile system and built it into the base of the wing.

feature repeated across the mesh

There’s still a long way to go with this model, but hopefully this is a step in the right direction toward getting it included in the game.

I’m including the Blend file as usual, but bear in mind that there are still a lot of triangles and other flies in the 3D model making ointment. There are also an awful lot of blank expanses that will be getting a taste of the greeble.

With all the polygons the file is getting quite big. Download the blend file for this game spaceship here.

Getting the spaceship for the Vega Strike game crowd just the way they want it

By The Illustrator | 2010/06/05 21:47 Posted in 3D, Blender, Role-Playing Games, Vega Strike, spaceship | Comments (4)

And the way they want it is realistic. No tractor beams and a big old radiator to get rid of excess heat. Seeing as my model has a wing like 1950s bomber I guess that means a little bit of redesign work will be required.

like something out of a 50s ‘B’ movie

Deleting the two heavy tractor beams from the rear wing of the spaceship model was the easy part. The next question was what does a spaceship radiator look like. This ask a scientist website tipped me off to the Google search terms I should be using to find my answer,

"space vehicles" + "radiative cooling".

spaceship wings deleted ready for a redesign

So I typed my search words into Google. If the game community wants this type of technical spaceship design who am I to deny them. Any reading this nerd stuff about spaceships is fun too. It turns out that a liquid droplet radiator is less susceptible to damage, from hostile fire or micrometeorites and lighter than a conventional pipe radiator. Here is the NASA paper (a PDF) where they talk about this amazing technique. It is basically a bar which shoots droplets at a cup where they are collected for reuse. Instead of a big pipe system at the surface of the spaceship, or even sticking out on a sail of some sort just two holes, a notch and a puncture, in the armour.

It would take a lucky attack from the enemy spaceship you happen to encounter as you play the game to knock out the radiator. A radiator made of pipes or sails could be badly hurt by even a badly aimed shot from the random nasties you are bound to encounter as you play the game.

They will look great as greebles on the surface of the spaceship too. Slightly raised apertures with holes in them and quite complex guidance systems to make sure none of the droplets are lost.

Vertex in the wrong place on your 3D mesh? Just snap, dot and scale to slide it.

By The Illustrator | 2010/06/02 22:43 Posted in 3D, Blender, Role-Playing Games, Vega Strike, spaceship | Comments (0)

spaceship model for the game

In the months I’ve spent getting to grips with Blender the free 3D modeling suite I had long assumed that once you left the x, y, z orientation you had to place vertexes by hand because you can’t lock the direction of movement anymore, turns out I was wrong.

The edge of the wing on my spaceship model for Vega Strike is so perfect right now that I didn’t want to mess it up as I repositioned vertexes along it. I didn’t want to ruin everything by trying to move the vertexes by hand, so I went Googling for a solution. It turns out that this isn’t in the least bit difficult to do and the first hit on Google had an explanation that made perfect sense to me.

As usual blenderartists.org had the answer.

here's me using my newly learned technique

It also explains how to easily change the pivot point of the virtual environment you are doing your modeling in, and that was something I didn’t know how to do either.

I’ve had to be awfully inventive to get as far as I have without knowing these two simple techniques.

I’ve been doing some more work on the grabs on the underside of the spaceship and sorting out some of the access hatches on the nose of the spaceship.

the underside still needs more greebles

lots of detail on the side

closeup of the docking mechanism

spaceship from above

Here is the latest blend file for this spaceship project.

I’m still trying to find the answer to my space game problems. Dark Orbit claims to be a 2D game, which in theory I could play even with my rubbish gfx card. It also claims to be free, so I guess it can’t hurt to give it a try. I decided to go to the website and sign up for the game, but proceed with extreme caution.

Everything seemed to work fine, but the big problem was speed. It took forever to download everything it needed to start the game. I’ve come across this problem before with browser games and with my connection on my old lappy it’s a deal breaker. I can’t wait 20 mins for Dark Orbit to load every time I want to play, so the search for a space simulation game that won’t crash my 3D card challenged computer goes on.