A few days of feeling meh

 I caught a cold from one of my children. It's not a dreadful cold, just one that knocks you a step back and robs you of any chance of an A-game in anything. 

I've become a bit unfocused, but I've done some playing around and learning. I may have started a new ship project when what I should be doing is finishing off existing projects to a higher standard.

I should go back to the Boulton and redress the ordnance. Build the Gordon-Class sub-ship. I should do another tidy-up of the Shift Carrier. 

A space truck...

I'm unsure where this fits in, but I like it. I will finish it.

Space...

I did some practice space scenes. I felt like I'd taken a step back with the lens flare. I may need to actually read the documentation as it looks excessive to me now.

Physical Addons renamed PCO as Planets. Makes sense.

World Creator released a brilliant update. There are some incredible new filters. One, called scattering, actually embeds scatters into the terrain geometry. This looks like it could be great, although I notice that when you carry the geometry into Blender, it looks a bit less effective because it needs massive polygon density to look its best.

Traditional scatters with Geo-Scatter

Moon Again

Shift-Carrier first pass completed

 

I tripped myself up badly when I used instances for the passenger pods (hidden under those bullet-shaped bonnets) on the right-hand side. Moving the ship model causes the instances to move independently. They float off in a random direction. I'll learn how to use instances properly before using them again.

Test Video!

Shift-Carrier Commonwealth - Cargo containers

 

I got part of the way into the cargo section. Spy those little crates attached ahead of the big water balloon thing. I'd have to a lot further except I had house work and shopping to focus on today.

Kraken of space...

Nearly done.

Once this initial build is complete, there will likely be a lot of optimisation and instancing. The render takes a long time to start, almost certainly because of the massive polygon count.

Shift-Carrier Commonwealth

 The Commonwealth is progressing...

The Water Rings pack a serious polygon count, I can tell you...

Apparently, I got the length wrong. It's going to be another 400m in total length...

New project, new True-Terrain 5 release

 We got another TT5 release. This looks like it's getting close to a final version heading into general availability. There are now a lot of really lovely presets that make getting great results as easy as a couple of clicks. Previously, you needed a maths degree and several days of experience experimenting with noise filters.

Quick Luna terrain test

True-Terrain 5, with its powerful new water system

New Project

So, the Boulton-class ship is waiting for a final cleanup. Instead of working on it's sub-craft, the Gordon-class Sloop, I decided to go big, very big.

I will tackle the giant interstellar ships from the Terran Republic novel: the Shift Carriers.

Illustrated below is official art by Ian Stead that featured in the second edition of the first novel, Fire with Fire

Ian did a great job of producing tight, easily understood schematic drawings and illustrations. I'll approach it differently, with a bit more artistic freedom and make the ship way -- way -- way more detailed. Also cinematic.  I don't recall doing a ship that's 2000m long. 

The design follows some of the hard SF theories used in the Avatar films.  Power comes from matter, annihilation for power and Fusion. The ships are equipped with big radiators or heat sinks and use suspended animation to keep passengers frozen during relatively long transits.

Art by Ian Stead (https://www.artstation.com/biomassart)

Main truss segment

This truss/cage forms the spine of the ship. Two transit tubes, each 3 m in diameter, are included.

The central truss runs the whole length of the 2000m-long ship. Here's one side of the main drive block. This section is about 500m, so about a quarter of the overall length.

Drive block

Engines and pipework

I need to place the power plant at the forward end. It stores anti-matter, which requires zero-failure magnetic confinement, or the ship instantly turns into hot particles.

Boulton holding station...

 I've reached a culmination point with the Boulton. I'll go back and fix and improve things at some point, but for now, it's kind of done.

I will build the two Gordon-class Sloops that will attach to the back of the Boulton. I may also make a quick video.

Folded away

Folded out

Flare!!!

Boulton's on patrol

Commonwealth Ship Moran

More Boulton-class

 

I thought that I might have had it finished today. It wasn't to be! Some of the finer details got messy, so I'd backtrack a few times. 

I wanted to break up the mission section so I made these big boolean insets. They look nice and structural but because of the way the hull tapers there's a slight inconsistency that makes the feature less convincing. I put point defense turrets onto the top edge of the insets, then inside the insets. It was getting way too cluttered. I decided to append the previous version of the hull for now. There was just a bit too much detail all over the place.

Insets

Clutter-bug

The cabin section has been rebuilt to be consistent with the command module. Previously, it was angular in profile, while the command module at the front is curved. I fitted frames on the front lug where the spin habitats rest when folded in. 

Clutter back

The current challenge is to fit the ship with a lot of ordnance, including sensor drones, decoy drones, combat drones, and missiles. The problem is that it quickly looks like a mess. I looked at aircraft pylons, but you don't get the right look on a big hull. It seems like better inspiration comes from military ships of the ocean, which manage to festoon their decks with clutter but make it look right.

Before downing tools, I quickly looked at the design with a space environment...

Boulton progress

 I had a few things to do today. My eldest son, Noah, had a day off school, and my youngest son was due back from his first residential school trip. 

I got up early to get some modelling time in. The Boulton is getting there. I'm mostly happy so far. I'm intrigued by how I'll get the thing festooned with ordnance without it looking like a mess. Not to mention the pair of Gordon-class Sloops (forward missile and comms control sub-ships) that dock somewhere near the back, one on top, the other on the bottom.

Easy and crips surface markings through Boolean black magic

The rectangular cabin section needs cleaning up.

There is a lot of nipping and tucking to do. This has been built at speed without all due care, and as a result, there are countless places where the symmetry isn't super. It's the cost of doing very high-speed business. If there is anything noticeable, I'll clean up at the end.

Next up: Tighten everything up, sort out the alignment of elements, and work on more tiny details. I may spend a session building missile drones and launch pods, then the Gordon-class mini-ships. I think I should return to the books and re-read a space battle or two for inspiration.

Blast from the past

Some sketches from the first time I took to the Terran Republic...

Boulton's back!

 So I've been trying to build a starship from Charles E. Gannon's Caine Riordan: Terran Republic novels. It's the Bolton/Boulton-class cruiser.

The previous attempt was back in January this year. See these previous posts. I was pretty happy with how it was going but not happy enough to push on. I decided it was time to return to the Terran Republic, and I'd still like to build a shift carrier, a giant space vehicle very similar to the Earth ships that appear in the Avatar movies.

On with the Boulton, for now:

January's version:

More curvy but not as dagger-shaped.

Today's efforts:

Spin habitats folded in.

Spin habitat folded out.

Back to the Heavy Rig

 I returned to the recent space vehicle project—the Heavy Rig from Orbital Elements. Last week, I spent hours trying to rig the container folding system so I could animate all the containers folding in and out. It didn't go well, so I took a break. I'll need to start with something simpler and do more practice rigging before having another go.

In the meantime, I decided to bring the updated folding system into the animation scene and incorporate the missing sub-vehicles, two drone landers that can detach and deliver containers to surface installations.

The idea with the lander was to riff on the Eagle from Space 1999. 

A sketched idea

Ultimately, I wanted something closer to the Eagle, but not slavishly so, particularly with the main truss element.

That's pretty much what I was looking for...

Serious high-poly oopsy

So the cloth bagging, surely an essential element in NASA-like space vehicle modelling, looked great. It looked better than the earlier cloth elements I'd created with Fluent's cloth maker. When I saved the scene, I was shocked that it was nearly 1GB, which is about ten times larger than expected. It turned out those bag elements were absolutely huge polygon hogs. I optimised them so they're about 10% of the original polycount but with a slight loss in baggy quality.

A first pass at the materials. Nothing too snazzy as these vehicles will be attached to the rig, so not all that visible.

In place, on the rig:

A tad over-exposed, but it sells the configuration.

And animate!!

There's a small flaw. Some mesh blocks are spinning with the camera for some reason. It's enough to discourage me from sharing, but I'll render the sequence again tonight with those so-and-sos removed. I might try to add a planet into the background.

Terrain testin again

Testing the water

 

Added some visual interest...

Lighter and with a subject called Arte. Hi, Arte!