After I had some teeth pulled last month, I had a nagging fear that I’d be condemned to a diet of mashed potatoes and pudding for the foreseeable future, but I’m pleased to report that that particular fear turned out to be baseless. My mouth is healing up nicely, I no longer have tooth pain, and it’s really nice being able to eat solid food again.
I’ve also apparently been adopted by a cat again. I have no idea how this happened, but now I have a little buddy hanging out in my office with me all day. 😆
The last 2 weeks at work have been a rather interesting study of contrasts. Last week was one of those incredible table-flipping shitshows where it felt like absolutely nothing was going right at all. Flaky hardware, balky tools, script conflicts, gremlins, and a bunch of other issues just boiled over, and it was horrible.
I ended up gutting the offending subsystem, completely redesigning it from scratch, and then things started to finally fall into place nicely. The week after that was the polar opposite–I had success after success and things were just behaving wonderfully again. Weird.
I also found out that one of my favorite modeling tools, Silo, had been updated recently and managed to get in some 3D modeling time. I’ve been slowly building up and detailing a spaceship model, adding a little bit here and there whenever I have a few minutes to spend in Silo.
Man, I really missed being able to push some polygons around for fun. I wish I had a 3D printer so I could print out my stuff in plastic and push it around on the table while making wacky spaceship noises.
Hey! its great to see you’re putting out some 3D after a while 🙂
I’m currently working with SILO too… it a very nice tool, has problems on its own, but license is unexpensive and works great.
For 3D printing I went for Shapeways and I.Materialise… both are expensive but results are spectacular! 😀
Good thing about shapeways is that you can make some tips for your work… I got lucky with the XWing miniatures models: https://www.shapeways.com/shops/toposolitario with a lot of orders (which is good even if my markup is pretty low) And I even went for technical pieces like this one for an Airsoft replica (which had a LOT of prints): http://i.materialise.com/shop/item/6813a3fd-342e-4011-8a1b-d08d795bb3b4
I totally suggest you to go for a quick 3d shop in shapeways (Ebbles Miniatures riding again!), it is unexpensive and you can get true happiness for every single print 😀
Here some photos of the models printed, with shapeways you don’t really need a printer, and quality is much better than home printers: http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/927968/dx9-and-class-container-3d-printed-real-not-render
Keep up the good work! 🙂
Looks good!
How big is it suppose to be? What’s ithe ship’s role?
TOPO: Hey, nice to see you around! Shapeways is an interesting idea. I haven’t checked them out in a while, but the last time I did, I found them to be kind of expensive and it seemed like you’re kind of at the mercy of their machine operator when it comes to important details like the build orientation and surface finishing. I’m kind of a control freak so it’s hard for me to leave that in somebody else’s hands.
Your models look nice! I’ll be studying Shapeways’s design guidelines and I’ll probably do a test model print or two to see how things turn out. 😀
Hans: The ship’s currently 311 meters long. The little speck on the uppermost deck that I forgot to hide is a 2m tall human scale reference. I spent way more time experimenting with different tools in Silo and playing around with new modeling techniques than I did in thinking through the actual mechanical design or backstory of the ship, so it’s mostly an off-the-cuff, made-up-as-I-go-along design that seems to be very loosely based on the configuration of impeller drive Honorverse ships. 😆
The other intent of this model, before I got carried away with a mad desire to cover it in billions of greeblies and nernies, was to serve as a more polished model asset for a little point defense simulator I knocked together over the span of a couple weekends, which you can see a Youtube video of here. The cheesy white placeholder art in that little game is supposed to be replaced by the upper surfaces of the ship in question, with actual point defense turrets instead of placeholder spheres and cylinders.
I’m kinda weird, I just decided one weekend that I wanted to code a search radar, a fire control tracking radar, a gun director, a laser turret, and then sit back and see what happened when I let them work together against incoming missile threats. I’d like to, eventually, make it into an cute little game where the player can paint and assign targets to the turrets and put it up as a freebie. 😆
The other reason for sticking lots of surface detail on the thing, incidentally, is because I’ve been wanting to play with some neat techniques for projecting the geometric detail of a high-resolution model down onto the texturing of a lower-resolution model, which has some interesting potential applications for papercraft models.