To streamline things a bit further, I’ve begun consolidating the workbench into the Genet Models forum. That way, you guys don’t have to run all over the Internet to stay abreast of what I’m doing.
Link: Genet Models Forum Workbench
Things of note: I added recap posts for the 4 completed models and a recap post for the Samson trucks. I’ll be picking things up from there.
I mentioned in the comments of a previous post that our little old lady neighbor ended up in the hospital from a fall last week, and we’ve been looking after her Chihuahua since then. She’s not a particularly well-behaved dog and is not really socialized to people other than her owner. She went uncharacteristically nuts on me and chewed up my hands when I tried to fasten the leash to her harness last night. I mean the berserk kind of nuts, like she was channeling Cujo or something. That was a bit of a surprise, because she’s normally shy and annoying, not vicious.
So, right now I only have partial use of my right hand, and I’m on light duty until it heals up. It’s currently at less than half of normal strength and my dexterity is a bit shot. I think the bite hit or came pretty close to a nerve. The dog seems to have mellowed out a little bit today–I walked her around the block without her trying to take a chunk out of my ankles, so that’s something. 
I can’t believe this. I’m a 375 pound bald guy with a goatee who is routinely mistaken for a biker or a convict by strangers, and a 10 pound dog kicks my ass. Granted, she took me by surprise and I was going out of my way not to hurt her, but still…I got my ass handed to me by a Chihuahua. I’m never gonna live this down. 
Okay, some project updates!
My last 2 revisions and test builds of the Zoom were time well spent. I need to shave an additional millimeter off the length of the belly plate, move a few glue flaps around, and do one more test build to see if that did the trick, but that’ll need to wait for my thumb to recover some of its strength. Those modifications will pay huge dividends with the truck, van, and other vehicles.
Texture redetailing for the Percheron and Crotale is still underway. I expect to have some screenshots/renders to share as soon as we’ve put the Zoom to bed.
Since the injury to my right hand currently means I suck at doing almost everything for the moment, I decided to just do some housekeeping and backing up on my computer that I’d been putting off for months.
While doing that, I found some goofy personal projects I worked on last year. Since I’d shared one recently (the helicopter gunship in a previous post), I figured I’d share another one here.
I’d been working on a sort of cartoony Lego-ish block figure for a few years now, and I had forgotten how far along it actually was. This was my fourth revision and the closest I’ve come to what I really wanted.
I had started with a “naked” figure, which is technically not actually naked, but the principle applies:
The hair is removable, like a helmet. Hats and helmets are supposed to fit over the hairpiece. All of the limbs are jointed and swivel in at least one axis, including the hands. The torso and legs plug together. In practical terms, this means parts are completely interchangeable.
This is an alternate version in swim trunks and a one piece bathing suit. It was a logical extrapolation from undergarments. I’m also mixing up the hairpieces in the following images to show the different colors.
Okay, we’re into full-on costume territory now. I had some Marines in woodland and digital camouflage:
I had intended to do similarly styled xenomorphs, facehuggers, a xenomorph queen, supporting characters, and a powerloader as well. I don’t remember why I didn’t start on them. I probably ran out of time or a programming gig came up.
And here are some Spacefleet redshirts, showing one of the several other ethnicity options that I had done:
According to my notes, I was supposed to do red, yellow, blue, and green variations of those guys, along with a white and gray flag rank variation. Also, variant hairpieces with pointy ears, or separate stick-on pointy ears.
I also found some notes for doing a small town sheriff (Winchell S. Donutt), his deputies (Nina Eclair, Russell Bear Claw, Duncan Donutt), an assortment of small town folks, some white-robed cultists who worship Escarganth The Space Snail, a high priest of Escarganth in black robes with a snail hat, and a giant spider-legged robosnail exosuit with a little bubble in the front through which you can see a tentacled alien snail working some levers. Yeah, I know, I’m kind of bent.
I had also apparently planned to do a zombie themed set, because I found some zombie skin color studies amongst the various Photoshop layers in the texture. The goofy placeholder face here made me chuckle:
The world these block people lived in was supposed to be built out of a variety of blocks, in keeping with the theme, but I recall not being super keen on folding up a billion paper blocks, so I probably would have ended up splitting the difference and going with a more Playmobil-esque playset paradigm with some interchangeable parts.
That was a pretty funny blast from the past. I’m thinking about revisiting those guys later in the year and modifying their geometry so they can be 3D printed at Shapeways. I haven’t decided if I want to go for the full color sandstone option so I can use the existing textures, or print blanks in a smoother material and do inkjet decal wraps, or if I want to convert the painted texturing into actual surface relief and then hand paint the 3D prints. I’ll worry about that later when I get around to it. 
This is another multi-project update.
Pickup received an enclosed work box:
The enclosed workbox is another one of those amazingly versatile things with a zillion uses. I think that concludes the basic “get those over with now” options for the pickup, and I can move on to the more exotic and purpose-specific options. Also, we’re at the point where “this truck” and “that truck” are just gonna get confusing, so I named them. The pickup is the Samson, and the big truck is the Atlas.
Speaking of which, this is the Atlas-based refueling truck:
I’m still experimenting with the area where the options mate up with the chassis, so I haven’t modeled rear fenders and stuff like that yet.
Nothing much to show, but texturing of the new Percheron options is underway. All of the new options except for the jump pod fit into a single 2048x2048px texture cell, so there’s not a huge amount of work involved.
I took part of Sunday off from the various projects to do some personal stuff. A few of you guys are fans of Defiance Games’s plastic figures, and while I was aware of them before, it wasn’t until all the talk in the comments that I took an active interest in what Defiance was up to.
They released plastic marines this year, and they’ve got alien bugs and female marines coming up. I’ve been the token male in the family for years, and I’m not about to tell Mrs E or my stepdaughters that they have to make do with Private Dirk Beefslab or Sergeant Chesty McHair during the “pick your figure” phase, so I’m hoping Defiance delivers on the female marines.
With the prospect of actually owning some plastic marines of both genders plus zillions of bugs by summer’s end in mind, I decided I wanted some vehicles and scenery to accompany them. I didn’t have a ton of time to spare yesterday, but I was able to make a respectable start on a helicopter gunship:
I drew influences from the AH-1 Cobra and the A-10 Warthog, and I wanted something that wasn’t an Avatar-style tiltrotor, a Caprica-style vectored thrust VTOL, or a conventional helicopter in zorty makeup. After messing around with a bunch of different permutations of rotorcraft, I settled on a dual-rotor configuration where the rotors were stacked in the middle of the fuselage and the stub wings grew out of the rotor shroud.
I liked how funky it looked, so I ran with that ball. The thing is about 12 inches long!
I’d also like to do some sort of Osprey analog. I don’t have any real idea how that’s going to look just yet, but I plan to mess around with some ideas the next time I take some time off.
Got a bit more stuff done yesterday. I modeled, unwrapped, and blocked in the colors for 2 new underwing options and a jump pod.
Percheron configured as a jump scout:
You can see the new 2-tube air-to-air missile pods on all 4 underwing stations, plus the jump pod on the centerline.
The jump pod isn’t standard equipment. Partly because it costs an eye-wateringly huge amount more than the plane it’s attached to and partly because jumping is significantly more dangerous than gate travel. The job of a jump scout is to jump ahead alone, reconnoiter the destination point and make sure it’s clear of obstacles and enemy activity, and then report back so a gateship can jump in to open the other end of the hyperdimensional tunnel for the rest of the fleet.
Nutshell: jumping gets you anywhere you want at high risk, while tunneling is much safer but requires an active gate at both ends of the tunnel. Civilian/commercial traffic uses fixed system gates, military fleets bring along multiple jump-capable gateships.
I also did pointy-nosed Hind-style 90mm saturation-fire rocket pods as an additional gunship option:
They’re on the inboard underwing stations. I’m not sure how they’ll look until I texture them. If I can’t make the angle-cut tube openings in the nose cone look convincing, I’ll just flatten the fronts.
I also did a couple scale checks to make sure the ordnance also fits the Crotale and Apsara:
Just as I guessed, 2 underwing stations on the Crotale and 4 on the Apsara.
I’m leaning towards doing a separate set of underwing weapon systems for the Crotale and Apsara for the sake of aesthetics, because the beefy gunship-sized rocket and missile pods look a bit huge on the Crotale. Then again, the Crotale isn’t really supposed to be a ground attack aircraft anyway, so I guess it just needs to look good with air-to-air armament.
The ground attack pods look fine on the inboard stations of the Apsara, but the outboard wing stations look better with smaller and lighter weapon systems. Plus, I’d like to be able to squeeze six underwing stations onto the Apsara so it’ll be more like a F/A-18.
I think I’ve sorted out all the new bits I wanted, so I just have to start detailing and weathering them.
Visit the project page for details: Project: Hangar Bay
I’m between chores right now, so this is just a quick update for today.
I remodeled the Percheron’s wings a bit. Instead of being sharply triangular, they’re a little more like those of the Haflinger now.
The Haflinger was originally intended to be a direct Percheron replacement, but since the Percheron has recently had new life breathed into it with the various upgrades and texturing overhaul, the Haflinger became a personnel/cargo shuttle instead. To better reflect that, I’ve modified it. It’s longer, wider, and the proportions have been adjusted a bit.
It’s now capable of carrying 22 passengers in the back plus cargo down the centerline, and there’s room behind the cockpit for a pair of side doors.
It’s a bit over 10 inches long and almost 8 inches wide. I haven’t made any firm decisions on how to arm the Marine combat shuttle version, but I’d like at least a couple of rocket/missile pods and some sort of funky centerline gun pod that looks like a conformal belly hump with a streamlined minigun turret at the front. Or something like that, anyway–I’ll figure it out when I start fleshing out that model’s geometry a bit more.
The Apsara is also larger and heavier than the Crotale now. As with the Haflinger, it was originally intended as a direct replacement, but the pylon system on the updated Percheron got me to thinking that it’d be nice to have a fighter that was large enough to mount at least 4 underwing pylons and maybe a centerline pylon as well. The Crotale can manage 2 wing pylons at the most due to its small size.
I guess the difference between the two is supposed to be something superficially like how carrier-based aircraft have gotten larger and heavier over time.
Visit the project page for details: Project: Hangar Bay