Captain's Office

The captain's office on the Adamant.  Available for sale here.

 
Fun times. =)

Dan

Craig Stuart Garfinkle

New music for Plagarus.  In addition to the Amotz Plessner piece (which receives multiple uses throughout the film), another signature tune I purchased rights to recently was from another pretty big heavyweight in the music industry, Craig Stuart Garfinkle.  He has composed work for video games, film and TV. 

The piece I bought fits pretty well with a particularly dark part of Plagarus just before an intense action sequence breaks out.  Hopefully the effect will work like I have in mind.

We'll have to see.

I have also finished upgrading my computer.  It's now pretty much maxed out and can't be upgraded anymore.  Because of this, I figure I've got two to four more years on this machine before complete replacement.

The upgrades:

16 gb of RAM.
New solid state drive for the OS.
New storage hard disk.
New graphics card. An nVidia GTX560TI 2 gb monster.

The graphics card is the big one.  I can now GPU render using Cycles in Blender.  This will slash render times into fractions, and I can produce more shots quicker that way.  Interestingly, I can now also render two scenes at once.  One scene can be rendering on the CPU and another on the GPU.  This should make life much easier. =D

So, yes.  Plagarus is on the roll. =)  Part II is probably going to expand a bit, because right now it's quite paltry and needs help.

Have a great day, everyone!

Dan

Characters for New Film Project

One of my favorite things to do is character development.  I've been thinking of a short film that will happen after Plagarus.

Drannica. =) Yes, almost all of my movie titles are just one word.  And they're usually planets, for some reason. =D

Some characters. (And a couple of familiar faces, if you've seen Plagarus!)

Captain Lostra (Or Lolstra, depending on my mood.)

 

Ah, good old Asitus.  She's not your typical Isus.  She's sly, sarcastic and never takes much seriously.  She and Lethgoshis really don't get along.  A vagrant Isus, by the way, is very strange, if you know much about the typically stalwart and enigmatic species. (Yes, she is glowing.  She's an Us. =) )

Best buddies.  Lethgoshis, a typical Isus (he's an Is), is over 7 feet tall (Asitus is the same height, more or less).  Padoen, on the other hand, was stunted by his mother's drug abuse while she was carrying him.  He's just over 5 feet tall.  After Plagarus, the two friends start a small two-man mercenary business and they travel the Thrassi Republic looking for odd jobs to support themselves.  Lethgoshis has basically taken it upon himself to care for and protect Titus.  It's the bodyguard in him.

Still working on a couple of other characters which will appear in the movie.  But besides these four, there's just the first mate, the helm officer and another Isus bit character!

That's it.

Dan

Adamant Big Shots

1080p orthographic renders.

 

Nearing Completion on Adamant

 

To be honest, I don't know what I'll do after Adamant is done!

Hope you're all doing great.

Dan

Adamant Bridge Update

The bridge is nearly done!

Now working on some other features of it.  Hopefully will be able to upload to the storefronts soon.  Maybe it'll sell?

Then we'll be moving on to the captain's cabin.  Star Trek calls it the captain's ready room.  Which is an interesting name, if you think about it, considering a ready room is where pilots get prepared for flights on aircraft carriers.

Have an awesome day, everyone.

Dan

Adamant Bridge Third Day

Third day of working on the bridge.

The Bridge of the SSC Adamant

Well, it's time to start working on some interiors for our brave space cruiser, Adamant. Interiors are something I greatly enjoy making.  A lot of 3D artists groan at the prospect of building rooms, especially complex ones such as bridges of spaceships.  For those who do it well, however, the results are usually phenomenal.

Me, on the other hand...

Well, let's see some of the past attempts at interiors I've made.

Now, these look somewhat impressive.  I made these a few years ago.  However, there's a problem: my modeling techniques were very poor back in these days, so these scenes were very hard to build, and I didn't do a very good job.  I had to borrow a ton of stuff from other models for the props, and that's also no good in case I wish to sell the model in the future.

I want to build a ship's bridge for the ages, which I would be able to sell on-line with no potential problems.

Loads of work left to do, but this bridge looks pretty good.  I made it wider than the Enterprise - E bridge because the Adamant has a broader beam for the bridge module than Star Trek ships.

Still to do: Lots of stuff.

• Holographic displays, a la Tony Stark, whose computer GUI is just about the awesomest gadget I could possibly imagine for my home office.
• Consoles.  Lots of consoles all around.
• Lights.  Lots of spot lamps.
• Railings.  The crew needs something to hold onto when the ship gets blasted at by vicious alien thugs.

And that's about it.

Dan

Beefing up Adamant

Well, I've been going to the gym lately, and I've noticed that everything looks better with some thicker muscle on it. =D

I've been taking a hard look at the Adamant, and there were a few things that bothered me about her.

I think someone pointed this one out to me, but I ignored it--probably because I'm too proud! =\ The wings are far too flimsy looking. Whereas the rest of the hull is armored like a turtle, the wings are these wafer-thin things that look like a toothpick could tear through. So, in an effort to beef up the wings a bit...

Obviously, I wanted the ship to look a bit more feminine than the Sacrilege or Maller which is the basis for the design, however, I also wanted the ship to look like it could withstand some punishment if battle were unavoidable. The wings really compromised that look. With a few minor alterations, though, I think we can get her to look a little more muscular than what she currently is. =D

This seems to go a long way to getting those wings in better shape.

Dan

The Sacrilege and the Sovereign

I've been working on converting my two favorite spaceships of all time into Blender Cycles. =D

First, the Sacrilege! This is, by far, the baddest ship in Eve Online, as far as I'm concerned. It is also, obviously, the inspiration behind the Adamant. =D It makes the Adamant look silly and amateurish, as far as I can see, but oh well.

The model was imported from the game itself. It's been a bit of a challenge getting all the textures and whatnot to look right, and I've still got a little bit to go before I get it perfect. Obviously, I didn't make it, and it's really got no place here for the most part, but I just thought I'd put it up to show off that I haven't been completely lazy. =)

The second is something I've been working on for a LONG time. This is the model Paul Trenkler made of the Enterprise-E, the awesomest Enterprise, by far. =D It was originally modelled in Rhino, and then saved in .max format. I had to download a trial version of 3DSMax just to get to open the file. And then to export it took a bit of tinkering, which I actually can't remember even how I did.

Then, of course, there was importing it into Blender. Keeping in mind, this is back in the day when Blender was still around 2.3x, and I was using a Pentium 4, it took all night to convert the .3ds file into .blend. In the morning, imagine how thrilled I was to see Paul Trenkler's Sovereign, a ship model I had drooled over for a long time, sitting there, ready for me to play with. =)

Then came the arduous process of texturing the thing. This is the result (in Blender Internal):

And here is the Cycles version, which, in turn, calls on me to once again, completely re-texture!

Finally, since I feel that scale comparisons make things more interesting, and more real, here is a scale comparison of the Sacrilege from Eve Online and the Sovereign class starship from Star Trek.

What do I like to see in spaceship design? I like sleek, masculine designs, which are unorthodox, and are powerful looking.  However, I believe that all machinery and vehicles ought also to express an artistic flair to them.  The finest cars, I feel, down through history have been those that stand out stylistically--smart, beautiful lines and fascinating curves which look good from many angles.  I appreciate Lamborghini more than Ferrari, not because they are necessarily better built cars, but because I like the more sinister edge the Lambo designs have.

To me, the Sacrilege and the Sovereign represent the pinnacle of spaceship style for much the same reasons:

• Outstanding. They are not ordinary rocket ships.  They are not ordinary saucers, and they do not follow the general conventions of general spaceship design.  The designers realized a true, space-borne vessel can look like anything, since there is no atmosphere or any other like encumbrances which stand in the way.  

• Visually Interesting. They started with bizarre extremes: the Sacrilege's deeply dipping nose. The Sovereign's extremely long and thin profile.  These things feel daring, as neither of these design elements are particularly necessary and are not the first thing you think of when building a spaceship.  But they define the sense of the craft, and give it the marked personality which sticks with you.

• Menacing. Both ships look threatening.  They look as if they could hurt you, and you wouldn't want to be facing their might head on. One of the most powerful visuals in Star Trek movie history is this shot:

           
Someone's in for a world of hurt. Aren't you glad it's not you? When these ships are angry, you know it.  They bristle with power and menace.

In the end, this is what I love about these particular designs of starships, and what I would love to be able to produce on my own, had I the talent of the artists who designed the Sacrilege and the Sovereign.

Dan