Category Archives: News

Yet more work on the Interceptor

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Update time!

After some discussion with other WWG designers, the classic scheme got a few minor changes and the addition of a police shield behind the door for a splash of color:
It’s just a small, indistinct, and generic 7 pointed star with the suggestion of a city seal in the middle, but it adds quite a bit to the overall effect.
The UK version of the Interceptor has had additional work done to it as well. I changed the base color from silver to white, and split up the retroreflective decaling at panel lines and around openings so that it would look more like decals applied to a stock paint finish rather than paint.
The reason for changing the base color back from silver to white was to further differentiate it from the European scheme, which I based upon the blue-over-silver police vehicles in Germany, Poland, and elsewhere:
Also, I threw in a couple of little extra touches. The UK and European versions have a different license plate setup from the blue and classic versions. I even used the correct fonts and stuck with a familiar appearance for the plate backgrounds.
(Ignore the ABC123-ish plate numbers, those are just placeholders for effect.)
Yeah, I know, they’re flying cars, they probably should have barcodes or some other spacey looking crap on the back, but I like to ground crazy stuff like flying cars in reality, at least a little bit, by adding some familiar and contemporary touches. It’s an extension of my belief that if you want people to recognize some sort of fancy SF contraption as a coffeepot equivalent, it should look a bit like a coffeepot so people get the point straightaway instead of having to waste time with boring and unnatural exposition from characters.
Besides, I don’t think number plates are going to go out of style because the old “Did anybody get the plate of the truck that hit me?” thing doesn’t really work if pedestrians have to chase after vehicles on foot with barcode scanners or some silly shit like that. I figure the cars have ID transponders in them that police cars and flight control systems can interrogate, and the plates are just a visual convenience or fallback measure. Sometimes the simplest things work best, and that’s why they stick around even though you can replace them with something that would make Rube Goldberg golf clap.

More work on the Interceptor

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I got some more work done on the police Interceptor. Additional detailing and a start on some other variant color schemes. (Click on the images to see full size versions.)

Default blue/white color scheme:

Classic black/white police scheme, still a work in progress:

UK version with retroreflective Battenburg livery over silver base coat:

I’m also in the early stages of scratching out an European scheme, which will be blue over silver.

A few days’ worth of breaktime doodling

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Something I’ve been picking away at during my breaks over the past few days.

I was going for something that was inspired by the Blade Runner spinner, the floating police cars from The Fifth Element, the Carbon Motors E7 police car, a dash of Blue Thunder, and an extra serving of Syd Mead on the side.

A black/white color scheme immediately leapt to mind, naturally, but that sort of bored me a little because…come on, that’s too easy. A bit of research and some trawling through photos of police schemes from around the world later, I decided I wanted to do a retroreflective Battenburg scheme. The colors were easy once I settled on the scheme: a blue base color because of the aforementioned Blade Runner/Fifth Element/Blue Thunder influences, and white is a good trim color for this shade of blue. You can’t see it from this angle, but there are also yellow/red hazard panels on the back slope.

I wanted the lines to be as clean and sleek as possible, so all of the lights are low profile. That’s where the Carbon E7 police car influenced the design–there are lights at each corner of the vehicle, on the top and bottom. That way, they’re equally visible from above, from below, to the sides, from the front, and from the back, which you’d kind of want with a flying police car.

Still not done, mind you, but I figured you guys would like to see it anyway.

Wash Me

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Grunging things up a bit, as that’s another WWG signature element that Denny requested I play with.
I wanted to split the difference between the Ebbles and WWG levels of grunge. I thought my first attempt was fine until I parked a Brio in a backdrop created from elements of an upcoming Titan set–to my surprise, the vehicle looked much too clean and a bit out of place, so I went back and dialed up the grunge until it started to harmonize with the environment.

Before

After

It looks like an old beater that a college kid bought for 500 credits, which works just fine for me because I like the future to look a little bit lived-in.