Some more imagery for my ongoing Traveller campaign. This is an outpost left behind by the Ancients, who disappeared from the galaxy over 300,000 years ago. Parked outside is a small freighter converted into a troop carrier/gunship. On the crest of the ridge is the remains of a gun emplacement that was salvaged long ago. On the northern side of the ridge is a mysterious bowl-shaped cavity that opens from a tunnel in the mountain.
This article will serve as a repository for deckplans I create for my ongoing Traveller RPG campaign. I have no idea how many plans I’ll wind up making, but here’s the first, a 200-ton merchant vessel:
I was in a terrible rush to get it completed, which is why it’s so spare. Still, it’s got a nice old-school look to it, and I do have a version with a grid. I suppose I should have put a scale on there, but this will have to suffice: She’s about 90 meters from stem to stern and about 30 meters in width at her widest point. She’s a bit more than 6 meters in height.
She has two hardpoints on the “shoulders” behind the bridge, even with the upper deck, but there are no weapons installed. The heavy lines separating the galley/bridge section, the cargo hold, and the engineering section are bulkheads. The Air/Raft is a small, open-canopied, flying car with a gravitic drive. It can be used as local transportation while planetside, or it can be flown in space if the occupants wear vacuum suits. The air/raft is capable of achieving orbit under its own power, and its range is virtually unlimited.
The second in this series of deckplans is the ubiquitous Class S Scout ship. There are dozens of variations on this deckplan out there. I took what I liked from all the ones I could find, and I made modifications to suit my own purposes. As I have not concerned myself at all with the Traveller canon, I have no idea how close this is to an accepted configuration. It will do for my game, though.
Now, for the details. The scale is 1.5 meters per square, making this craft 32 meters in length and 25.5 in width at the wingtips. It uses 6 meter long, articulated landing gear with adjustable-width pads that permit it to land on a variety of surfaces ranging from very rough, rocky terrain to soft sand, and it can settle on an incline of up to 25 degrees and remain level. In addition, this permits it to deploy its air/raft from underneath, and also to accept tall cargo loaders (although the cargo itself must be less than three meters tall in order to fit in the hold). The air/raft (not pictured here) is similar to the craft described above, except that the Scout Service raft has a pressurized cabin, so the occupants do not necessarily need vacuum suits (although standard procedure mandates them, anyway).
The ship can be operated by a single pilot, but a full crew consists of pilot, navigator, gunner and engineer. In a pinch, the staterooms can also be converted to double-occupancy in order to accommodate four more crew or passengers, although doing so obviously reduces life support from sixty to thirty days.
The Imperial Interstellar Scout Service can provide several supplementary pods that fit in the cargo hold and modify the capabilities of the ship. Each of these pods occupies the entire cargo hold, and some of them replace the elevator door and extend below the hull of the ship, reducing the ship’s streamlining. A supplementary supply pod can double the ship’s life support capacity. A weapons pod turns the cargo hold into a weapon bay, typically carrying a missile rack. A sensor pod can transform the ship into a powerful electronic warfare tool, allowing it to serve as an Electronic Warning And Control (EWACS) vessel or to jam enemy sensors. A boarding pod consists of a magnetic grapnel and an assault airlock, as well as an additional locker full of marines’ weapons.
This is the Hoffer’s Wake star system from the PC Game Independence War 2: Edge of Chaos. It’s in a style similar to the in game navigation system.
I’m working up the map for a tabletop roleplaying game I’m going to be running, so I intend to release an additional map modified for that purpose. Namely, I want to adjust some distances so that the notion of putting space stations around Griffon is plausible. The current numbers dictate that the planet has an orbital period of a little more than half a day and a surface temperature of over 1300 degrees Celsius.
I will probably also make maps detailing each planet and asteroid, and possibly a few deckplans and surface maps of noteworthy locations.
Adobe Illustrator. The font is Calibri. Independence War is property of Atari Games.
And here’s the modified version:
And the environs around Griffon, the closest planet to the Alpha star:
Touchdown is the second planet in the system:
Alexander and environs:
The Badlands Cluster of the Spinward Marches:
The Coyote System:
Iroquois:
Fans of the video game may have noticed that as I go along, things are getting increasingly inaccurate. Part of that is because it’s easier to fit all the planets on if I move them around a bit. In addition, the Traveller game is generating some data that doesn’t necessarily fit neatly into the existing Edge of Chaos world. So apologies to the EoC crowd—my first priority here is my roleplaying game. Some day in the distant future, perhaps I will update these to better reflect the universe as reflected in the video game. But don’t hold your breath!
Ottawa:
I cleaned out my Facebook profile recently, and it seems that I had linked a lot of my blog posts to Facebook videos. Since those videos no longer exist, I am deleting the associated blog posts. The ones that I feel a little less embarrassed about showing will go onto my Vimeo account eventually, and I’ll make new posts about them then. Or maybe just one big post with all of them.
In the meantime, if you really miss something, let me know, and I’ll see what I can do about restoring access to anything that happens to have been popular. How’s that for optimism? At a guess, I’d say that you shouldn’t hold your breath that old material will reappear.
Stereo “3d” movies have made terminology a bit confusing recently. When I refer to 3d, I mean the virtual 3-dimensional Cartesian system that exists inside the computer. 3d artists create objects that exist in that space and can be looked at from any angle (within the software, of course). When I use the term stereo, I am referring to what viewers often call a “3d movie.” It gives the illusion of three dimensions by tricking the viewer’s eye into believing that objects on the screen are at different depths. That’s not really 3d, though, since no matter where you stand in the theater, you’re going to see the same image. That is, you can’t get a different perspective, even though it feels like you should be able to. So, vocabulary lesson aside, I give you:
There are surely a number of other jobs associated with 3d in various facilities. These are merely the ones I am familiar with. Of course, the same is true of all of the other categories I’ve been describing with these posts.
When you’re dealing with CG, there are two “art environments,” so to speak. There is the 3d world in which objects are modeled and animated, and there is the 2d world of the screen. Things are getting a little blurry in that regard, what with stereoscopy becoming more prevalent and 3d functions becoming available in the compositing software, but it’s still a somewhat useful division with regards to categorizing artists.
These processes are not limited to film and integration with live-action material. Compositors often work alongside motion graphics artists for CG commercials or help to make game cinematics. Matte painters might even be involved in creating backgrounds for game levels.
In addition, there is a degree of stratification in these jobs. That is, there are several levels of compositors: Junior Compositor, Compositor, Lead Compositor, Compositing Supervisor, 2d Supervisor. The same holds true in most film production jobs.
*I know at least a few of my readers aren’t familiar with the tech-speak, so there’s a glossary at the end of this post.
Part of the internship program at Zoic Studios involves a project created by the interns. Our piece is a Doritos commercial featuring a werewolf. It’s a bit ambitious, but I think we can manage to at least get it looking passable. Anyway, I’ve created a low-resolution facial mesh to match our actress, which should be good enough for tracking her face. I plan to make a blendshape to morph to the wolf, but it’s going to require quite a bit of sculpting to make it look good. I still need to run an experiment, but I think I can set up a shading network to do a soft-edged wipe between two displacement maps in order to transition between the detailed versions of woman and wolf. If it works, I’ll definitely post a walkthrough of the process. For now, here’s my preliminary mesh:
I’m a little unsatisfied with the topology at this point; there are too many poles for comfort. I might retopologize it in Topogun after I’ve done my sculpt.
Here’s that glossary. The terms are listed in the order I used them in the article:
Resolution: The number of vertices (that’s the plural form of vertex) in comparison to the total area of the object. In the picture above, a vertex is any place where the lines cross one another. The higher the resolution, the more detailed the model can be, but the more difficult it is to work with. A low resolution mesh like this would be fine for a video game, but it won’t work for integration with live footage.
Mesh: The matrix of lines that create a CG model. Often roughly synonymous with the words “model” and “geometry.”
Tracking: The process of matching the movement of CG objects to live action footage. Also called matchmoving. In this case, we’re going to be tracking the movement of Meg’s face so that the morphing wolf’s face will “stick” properly to her head. Creating an accurate model of her face first will help the software to create more accurate results, although I’m sure I’ll wind up tweaking it by hand quite a bit.
Blendshape: You take a mesh, and you make a copy of it. Then you distort the copy into a new shape (the face smiling, for instance). You can then create a relationship between the original and the copy so that you can simply move a control to cause the original to morph into the same shape as the copy. This technique is typically used to animate CG characters’ faces, but here we’re going to use it to actually transform woman into wolf.
Sculpting: In the real world, you can sculpt using clay. In CG, you can use software that emulates clay to add details to a model.
Shading network: An abstracted visual representation of the math the computer is using to emulate how light interacts with a surface. A shader tells the computer whether the surface is glossy or matte or fuzzy or reflective. A shading network is several shaders hooked together that work together to completely describe the material.
Wipe: A moving transition. Remember those dorky-looking transitions from Star Wars? That’s a wipe. If the edge of the transition is sort of blurry, that’s soft-edged.
Map: A 2d image that is applied to a 3d surface to modify the way it looks.
Displacement map: A tool for adding detail to a model without having to increase its resolution or actually move any of its vertices. Since maps are 2d images, there are ways of manipulating them that won’t work for 3d objects.
Topology: The layout of the lines on a mesh. Good topology uses mostly four-sided faces, and the lines flow smoothly around the object. Bad topology will make a model very difficult to animate.
Pole: A vertex with fewer or more than four edges connected to it. If you look just to the right of the eye on the above image, you can see two poles right next to each other. Notice how they appear to disrupt the flow of the lines.
Retopologize: To modify a model so that the topology is different, and hopefully better.
Topogun: Software that is designed to help the artist retopologize a model without losing its details.
A friend of mine recently asked for some guidance on getting into CG, and I wrote up everything I currently know on job titles and career paths. It seems like a waste to leave it in a private message to him, so I’m putting it up here in the hopes that others will come along and expand on and/or correct what I know, and maybe it can be a resource to other people thinking about getting into CG. So without further ado:
Illustrators and related jobs
For all of these jobs, a strong knowledge of Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects is recommended. Flash is also a good idea, particularly for game or web development. InDesign is also likely to be very useful. In addition, many illustration jobs become easier with some degree of 3d knowledge (Maya, Cinema4d, etc). And, of course, traditional art skills are indispensable. Software is easy to learn in comparison.
If, like me, you get annoyed at always fiddling with the export settings in After Effects, you should take the time to set up some templates and change the defaults.
In the Render Queue window, set up your Output Module with your desired default settings. I typically use a TIFF sequence with alpha channel. Once it’s set up, click the drop-down arrow next to Output Module and choose the last option: “Make Template…” You’ll get a window with two boxes in it labeled “Defaults” and “Settings.”
Give your template a name in the Settings Name window, then in the Defaults box, choose the template as your Movie Default. After Effects will now use those settings as the default whenever you export a Comp.
Now, if you’ve ever tried to use a TIFF sequence from After Effects as an image plane in Maya, you may have had some difficulty getting it to work. AE’s default naming convention is fileName_####.tiff. Maya doesn’t like that underscore; it only understands an image sequence if the frame numbers are delineated with a period, like so: fileName.####.tiff.
Click the drop-down arrow next to Output To: in the Render Queue, and choose “Custom…” You’ll get a window called File Name Templates. Set up the Template like this: [compName].[#####].[fileExtension] and check the “Default” box.
Now, whenever you set up a TIFF sequence, you’ll get file names that Maya can use.
edit: I’ve been doing some research on file formats (post on that topic coming soon), and I’ve decided to stop working in tiff. I’ve had problems with it in the past where I couldn’t open an image I created with a PC on a Mac, or I couldn’t read tiff sequences created by Nuke in Premiere (don’t use DEFLATE compression—Premiere can’t read it). Tiff certainly has some useful features, but there are so many different flavors that compatibility becomes an issue. Instead, I intend to switch to Targa for wider compatibility or OpenEXR if I need high bit depth and/or more than four channels. The only gotcha to that is that if you need transparency with Targa, you need to tell AE to render 32-bit files (four 8-bit channels). I don’t know why the Targa export specifies bits per pixel when everything else is in bits per channel, but there you go.
Here’s that shell casing composited into the shot. That’s right, all that detail I put into the model is completely lost because it moves so fast and is all blurry. Still, it was good practice on a very simple little prop.
I did some color grading as well. I may have crushed the blacks a bit too much, but I think the roll-off of the highlights on James’ head looks pretty good. I might need to gamma it up a bit more to bring out the detail in his coat. Or maybe I just need to recalibrate my monitor; who knows?
Gunplay shot update from Bryan Ray on Vimeo.
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