Famous last words.

This started out as a really simple and basic “we just need a basic pickup truck for the maintenance people and we can repurpose it for the incident response vehicle with just a little bit of extra work” sort of bullet point item. Turns out there’s a hell of a lot more to the humble, everyday pickup truck than I expected.

I did quite a bit of visual research to find interesting shapes and to better understand why trucks look the way they do. Oh, boy. That was an educational experience. It turns out that for a lot of things like cars, planes, and whatnot, there is a “right” shape, and the reason why a lot of things look so samey on the showroom floors is because everybody’s incrementally converging onto that “right” shape for the product, and there’s only so much you can do to differentiate one from the other without straying too far outside of that ideal envelope. Plus there’s human expectation and tastes to factor in.

After several sketches and revisions that ended up in the metaphorical wastebasket for looking too much like ruggedized racing cars or spacey vans, I kept coming back to one thing: nothing says “I am Truck, hear me vroom” quite as well as a truck. So I basically said “Works for me” and then went outside to eyeball the curves and proportions of Mrs E’s Nissan Frontier.

Not because I wanted to base the model on it, but mainly because I just wanted to get a sense of where all the swoops and curves on a modern truck were in 3D space, and then I could figure out how I could translate a similar sort of chunky and attractive roundedness to cardstock without making it overly difficult to build. I wasn’t able to make it as rounded as I’d have liked, but I managed to keep a hint of it on the front end so it wouldn’t just be a sloped box.

Bear with me, this post is gonna be kind of long.

Okay, regular cab with open bed:

That’s supposed to be one of the maintenance vehicles. Just a basic pickup truck with an amber light bar.

4 door crew cab with open bed:

Just to illustrate that there are 2 cab types that can be used with the regular bed.

I then realized that a SUV body would be great for security, customs, and administrative use:

And I wanted a nice incident response vehicle for the fire/rescue department:

It’s basically a crew cab with a fully enclosed bed. The raised, beveled hump is there because I like how it looks, and there’s a second lightbar at the back because I like how it looks.

Same incident response vehicle with regular cab, just to show the mix-and-match possibilities:

I also wanted some sort of utility work truck. The research for that was an eye-opener, and I was surprised to find out that things like fire department squad trucks and so forth basically start out as utility trucks, so the basic work/utility truck platform is surprisingly versatile. 2 hours into the research process, I said “I gotta do one of these.”

This is just the basic utility bed. There’s a whole bunch of other things that end up being installed on work trucks, like little cranes, ladder racks, lube skids, and whatnot. I mean, just tons of stuff. It’s mind-boggling. I’m probably going to have to dedicate a third texture cell just to options for the work truck alone.

Here’s the work bed with a crew cab:

One thing in particular I’d like to do with the crew cab/work bed matchup is dually rear wheels and some sort of bucket crane or aerial work platform.

This is kinda nuts, there’s a ton of variety between the geometric and texture options, and it’s gonna take me a little while to figure it all out.

Want to support this project?

Visit the project page for more details: Spaceport Set I

Just shipped the following new files:

• Limoën Zoom runabout PDFs

The following files have been updated:

• Set instructions: added new instructions for Zoom
• T 3500 tug: now has 4 different numbered variants
• Cut files: GHU cut files updated with a bug fix, new cut files added for Zoom

Other things of note:

• Shipped 4 administrative versions of the Zoom rather than 8. The other schemes are more visually exciting, and it’s unlikely anyone is actually going to need 8 plain white cars when factoring in the consideration that there will also be vans and pickup trucks in the admin motor pool.

I also added the following images to the Spaceport project page:

I’m taking a short 1-2 day break from modeling and texturing to recharge my batteries. I’ll be spending that time doing visual research for other parts of the set and watching some DVDs.

Want to support this project?

Visit the project page for more details: Spaceport Set I

The second test build the other day went a lot better. I had modified the wheel wells and the light bar a bit in response to issues that I ran into on my first test build, and they did the trick. The car is cute, especially next to the tug.

My building skills are still a bit rusty, I still don’t have a dedicated photography area, and I hadn’t used my camera in so long that I’d forgotten how to set it up correctly.

For those of you who use Tombow markers for edging like I do, here are the edging colors I used.

• Tug blue and security car lightbar: Tombow 515
• Tires and other black bits: Tombow N25
• Dark gray areas (tug underside, etc): Tombow N55
• Towbar yellow: Tombow 055
• White and chrome bits on the security car: Tombow N95
• Medium gray areas (towbar hitch, for example): Tombow N75
• Lightbar red (follow-me car): Tombow 772

Your mileage might vary a bit depending on whatever combination of paper and printer you’re using.

I also made a couple more tweaks to the follow-me car:

The lightbar has been relocated to the back, and the static Follow Me placard on the back has been replaced with a digital display that can show other useful messages like “Stop” and so forth. It’s actually much closer technologically to self-illuminating e-paper than an old fashioned dot display or LCD system, but I chose to make it physically resemble a LCD in order to comply with the Coffeepot Rule.

(For the new folks: I came up with that rule back in 2007 on the old Ebbles forum. It states that if you want an audience to immediately recognize something spacey as a coffeepot without having to explain it to them, then it needs to look just enough like a coffeepot for the audience to immediately recognize it for what it is. It reduces technobabble and keeps exposition down to a minimum, saving it for elements that are more important to the plot.)

The display is textured in the nighttime mode (where it looks more obviously like a digital display) rather than the daytime mode, which is not illuminated and looks a lot more like the old bright red text over fluorescent yellow placard.

Okay, I’m done messing with the cars, and I’m currently spooling out the PDFs for the Zoom. There are currently 36 cars in total. 28 are unique, the remaining 8 are alternates. Here’s how it breaks down:

• 8 security cars with unique roof numbers and license plates, in both white/blue and yellow/blue variations
• 8 customs cars with unique roof numbers and license plates
• 8 admin cars with unique roof numbers and license plates
• 4 follow-me cars with unique roof numbers and license plates

As a bit of fun trivia, I actually went and generated several thousand new and unique license plates for various localities on Eyesore. I used a variation of the same license plate scripts I used to generate the plates for the Noir 2520 aircars I did over at WWG, then pulled out just the plates for Downport. I have a folder full of Downport-registered plates, and I’ve been issuing them to each car one at a time.

Second bit of fun trivia: many of the other localities are named after project supporters. Those plates will be issued to civilian and non-spaceport vehicles.

I also found a minor goof on the cutfiles for the ground handling unit while building one of my own–a couple of the wheel unit pivots on Frame 02 had cut lines where there should have been perforated lines. I’ve fixed that, and will upload the new ground handling unit cutfiles at the same time that I upload the Zoom files.

After I’m done doing all of the unique Zooms, I’m revisiting the tug and adding more unique numbered variants. There will be 4 tugs in total. As with the ground handling unit’s cutfiles, the new tug variants will be uploaded at the same time as the Zoom files.

Okay, back to the grindstone for me.

Want to support this project?

Visit the project page for more details: Spaceport Set I

Before I get started, I gotta say this: you guys are awesome and I really appreciate all the thoughtful input that you guys have been providing thus far. You’re making this a better set with your involvement, and thank you for that!

Right, on we go. The customs scheme has been tweaked. I got rid of the golden yellow border trim around the text, then lightened and saturated the green a bit more:

In addition to that, I overhauled the follow-me car scheme completely. I wasn’t happy with it before, so I attacked it again this morning with fresh eyes. The follow-me car was missing the bumper numbers and I also changed the size/font of the door/roof numbers to match the regulation font used on the tug. I also added back the letter code to keep things as uniform as possible.

“M” is the letter code for self-propelled ground support equipment like tugs, tractors, and follow-me cars. That’s why the tug has “M 03″ on the sides, and the tweaks to the follow-me car scheme bring it back into line with that. This almost snuck past me completely, but The Chimp Helmsman’s comments in the previous post brought it all back to mind.

Okay, I also did a boring plain administrative vehicle scheme. It’s basically a factory fresh white Zoom at the lowest trim level, with bumper code stickers, the rear retroreflective hazard paneling, and a roof number.

The letter “A” is the code for general purpose vehicles. I know it’s a very plain and boring scheme, but it’s included just for the sake of completion. The black plastic trim strip on the door is a little nod to my first car, which was a white 1991 3-door Honda Civic hatchback with black plastic trim.

Okay, assuming there aren’t any more texture tweaks needed, I only have to add one more detail (the recharging port on the vehicle), do one more test build to make sure it’s not as scary as it was before, then I start putting together the beta PDFs and get them ready to ship.

After this, I’m doing the van. That won’t take as long because we’ve already figured out the various liveries, so the hard part is already done. I want the van to be a cute little thing sort of like a VW microvan, and it’ll be done in the administrative, security, and customs schemes.

Update: Some folks were surprised that I didn’t use chevrons for the follow-me car. Here’s why:

That’s just what follow-me cars look like.

Want to support this project?

Visit the project page for more details: Spaceport Set I

I test-built a security Zoom the other day and it was kind of a scary build in a couple of spots, so I had to tweak things a little bit. The one change that’s actually visible is the light bar’s increased height. I was a little bummed to lose the low-profile look, but the folds were too closely spaced on the original lightbar. I doubled the lightbar’s height to fix that.

Also, bonus content!

I did a Customs scheme (to make life a little more interesting for smugglers/adventurers) and a follow-me car scheme:

That second scheme was inspired by photos of real-life follow-me cars.

I’m also toying with throwing in a plain white general purpose scheme for administrative use. The way I figure it, if the facility vehicles are sourced by contract and in fleet quantities, then they’d likely simply buy a bunch of white Zooms and then slap on the appropriate decal kits, and the admin cars would just be leftover, unadorned white Zooms that have only had their bumper codes applied.

UPDATE: Changed up the customs scheme. Tomas mentioned the Dutch customs vehicles used the same basic paint patterning as their police cars, but in a different color, so I hit up Google for images of the Douane vehicles he was talking about, and modified the oblique Battenburg of the security car to resemble it.

Here it is:

It’s basically the same retroreflective white side decaling as the standard security scheme, with green and golden-yellow oblique checks instead of blue, and the text is now green bordered with golden yellow instead of blue bordered with white. I like it, and I think it ties in better with the rest of the vehicles like this.

Want to support this project?

Visit the project page for more details: Spaceport Set I