Pawns

The same ship as before. It took awhile to find my Easter Island monoliths. They were on an old drive from nine years ago. I used 3D-Coat to give them a new paint job.

It's hard to tell, but the planet in the background is my Earth model. So this must be the Moon here.

Trying Out a Different Art Style

Modeled in Hexagon 1.21.
Painted in 3D-Coat 4.7.37.
Rendered in Vue 9.5 Infinite.
Postwork in CameraBag 2.8.01.

Discovery One in Orbit (a Revisit)

Thought I'd bring out my Discovery One model again for a sunset render. I still need to finish the back end of it. It was modeled in Hexagon 1.21, after first seeing if Amapi 7.51 Pro could do the job better or not. Since I needed to control better where polygons would line up on its surface for me to extrude from, Hexagon 1.21 became the perfect fit for doing this model.

I used Carrara 5.1 Pro for adding creases to some of the edges. Especially for the antenna. In older blog posts, you can see the amount of detail that I used on the antenna. It's a shame the render here has the antenna mostly hidden.

YouTube recently started spamming me with nonsense videos about the hidden meanings behind 2001: A space Odyssey. And that reminded me of my unfinished model.

I probably should finish it.

Amara Ships From Traveller RPG

How should computers see stars in the background? For me, it would depend on the art style one is going after. This background is a very basic one. No spinning galaxy background, such as Star Wars often uses.

Trying Out an Illustration Style

I dragged out my old Carrara 5.1 Pro with WireFrame Pro installed, and imported my Free Trader model to get this vintage illustration look. It's one of the reasons I still have Carrara.

Quick World Test

A quick world test from Paltrysum's post over on Mongoose.

Mostly Finished

I'm finishing up my Free Trader model. Took about a week to build from scratch. Some of those days were spent thinking things through first. I will redo the back end one day, to give the engines more substance than just simple flaring.

Here's a video on some recent changes made.

Smart Material Painting Using a Polygon Brush in 3D-Coat

What a Piece of Junk!

I ran some white-wash over the ship in 3D-Coat, using a smart material. I first tried doing it while the ship was in several parts. But smart materials really do prefer to pour from their buckets at the same scale. Meaning, all the parts need to have the same resolution for their texture maps. It's part of the calculation smart materials do before the fill bucket is clicked.

So I welded the parts together that needed the same white-wash treatment done. They all used the same UV map, which I was hoping to avoid at first. I prefer to have a UV map for each object. But maybe for this model, it wouldn't kill to have one huge UV map. In the meantime, the separate parts that used different paint materials were left as individual objects.

Anyway, this is just the shell body. Ready for the scrapyard.

Boolean Cutting in Hexagon 1.21

I'd forgotten how good it works.

I spent a few hours, playing with different apps I have, doing various draft models of the Free Trader. It will be a lo-res model when completed. Something that I don't want to spend more than a couple days on. Which meant Hexagon would be used. Ha!

Amapi Pro is great at NURBS. But it is a terrible box-modeler, which I was finding worked better for this kind of object. I had forgotten that Hexagon does boolean cutting, which speeds up the modeling process as well. I'm hoping I don't have to do too much clean-up work on the mesh, once I'm done cutting chunks out of it.

Because I'm old-school, when it comes to modeling Traveller ships, I tend to use only the first drawing made of a ship for reference. I have no idea what the back or bottom of the Free Trader looks like, because there is only the one image of it in The Traveller Book hardcover on page 64. Maybe I have some notes that I took about that back in the day still. Otherwise, creative license as usual.

Like all models I make, this one will also be done by eyeballing things. No tracing.

ADDED:
Updated the model some. Getting ready to UV map it.