This is another multi-project update.

Spaceport

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.

Hangar Bay

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.

What I Did On My Holidays (with apologies to Terry Pratchett!)

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.