Category Archives: Paper Models

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.

Pain in the glass

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Practicing the newfangled WWG way of doing glass. (Clicking takes you to larger images.)

Not sure what I think of it. I mean, it looks a bit more like real glass now, but it’s…different from the cheesy old hand painted non-metallic-metal effect that was part of my artistic style, and that’s gonna take some getting used to. Oh, well. You know what they say: when in Rome, do as the Romans do.

Of automotive colors, job transitions, and so forth

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 Continuing the Veloce Brio work-in-progress…
I mentioned in a previous post that I had some rules for this model that I wasn’t allowed to deviate from for the sake of verisimilitude, and the biggest one was to try and think like an automotive stylist rather than somebody who designs military/industrial equipment. The second half of that is in choosing colors.
Over the years, I’ve had a selection of “safe” colors that I used across most of my models. Instead of using those, I decided I needed to change things up and do a manufacturer-specific palette for each vehicle. For the Brio, there are 12 colors–6 of them are bright colors, and 6 of them are more toned-down colors. I even gave the colors cutesy manufacturer catalog names.
The bright colors:

Nebula Blue

Quasar Green

Pulsar Pink

Plasma Purple

Flare Red

Solar Yellow

And the standard colors:

Midnight

Gold

Storm Gray

Olive

Silver

Ice

And there you have it, the manufacturer-specific palette for the Brio. For each vehicle in this series, I’ll be doing the same thing, and each palette will be different. That way, when you have a whole bunch of vehicles done and you put them on the tabletop, there will be a pleasingly realistic color variance across all the different makes and models. Not all vehicles will have 12 schemes–each vehicle is going to get whatever selection of colors makes the most sense for it.
I’m also in the process of working out a few details with Denny on the subject of releasing this model. I have to stress something right now–this wasn’t originally intended to be an actual release, but it kind of suddenly turned into a full product before I knew it. I pinged him the other night to explain things and asked him what he thought of releasing this model, and he liked the idea. 
He had a few suggestions that I’m still working through, and then there’s the matter of transitioning from the old Ebbles branding to the new.
Yes, I even have a picture for that. Well, two.
Model Frame

Instruction Page
I’ve incorporated the official WWG page key and whatnot into my frame templates, which you can see above. I think that wraps up the transition to my new job.
Now, the reason I emphasized the fact that this was essentially an accidental product is because in the future, when I know something is actually intended to be a WWG product, there’s a good chance that I’m going to be posting the Workbench articles for that product on the WWG forum instead of here.

Damn you, Adobe!

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Photoshop CS1 on a 64-bit Windows 7 machine: Buggy, crashy, aggravating.
Photoshop CS5 x64 on a 64-bit Windows 7 machine: Runs like a dream.
Argh. Looks like they’re still gonna get my money in the end.
On the bright side, I don’t need to cough up a whole thousand anymore. Having worked extensively with the CS5 tryout for the past several days, I’ve found that the 3D and animation tools in CS5 Extended pretty much don’t get used at all, because they’re really rudimentary and lacking compared to what can be done in a standalone 3D app, so there’s no sense in paying the extra premium for a half-assed set of features that I’m not gonna use. That means I can get by with just regular old Photoshop CS5.
What brought all that on? Oh, just this.

 

 

These models have all been re-developed in Ultimate Papercraft 3D, now include machine-cutting files, and have also received a bit of a texture refresh. Nothing major, I just updated the layer styles and colors to use the 2010 styles and swatches.
Currently working on:
Yes, that’s a Marine haze gray scheme–I found a couple of hidden layer groups with Marine decals, so I enabled them and updated the colors for the fun of it.
I love my new machine. I have antialiasing, anisotropic filtering, and a bunch of other things enabled on the GeForce GT540M for Metasequoia’s graphics profile. That means bigger and prettier screenshots with fewer jaggies and nasties.
Speaking of which, I also found a treasure trove of abandoned models that never made it to release because of technical limitations back in 2007. Even though my dearly departed desktop workstation was capable of handling textures larger than 1024x1024px, I was still using Pepakura Designer to unfold my models, which did NOT support larger textures. So, larger models required workarounds or design compromises, which frequently didn’t really work out and resulted in models being abandoned and forgotten. Here are some of those lost models, which were supposed to go with the Hummingbird and the battlesuited Marines in 2007:

 

 

 

You can kind of see how they’re related to the Hummingbird visually, as they all have prominent countergrav pods on the sides, which all resemble each other a bit as a visually unifying hook.
Since I wasn’t able to do all of those models at the time, a couple of more manageable models also got axed because there just wasn’t a line left after cutting all the other models out of it:

 

Now, all of those models also had civilian counterparts. Those civilian counterparts predated the military models by a couple of years, and were supposed to be my half of a collaborative project with Denny Unger before it got scrapped. There are already entirely too many images in this post, so I’m just gonna pick one of them, the Veloce Brio:
Denny textured a slightly older variant of that to look like a yellow space Volkswagen as a test. No photos of the prototype survived, but it was a really cute little thing, and at one point, Matt Lyon demanded that we slap an Autobot insignia on it. The project was shelved in favor of Wormhole shortly after that first test model.
Normally, that’d have been all she wrote, but Denny fished it off his hard drive recently and passed it along to Paul Senior, who re-skinned it, and now it’s part of Paul’s upcoming Streets of Titan release:
It was really nice to see the Veloce Brio again after all those years.

Not all of our collaborative works were abject failures, though–I also did the geometry for the original Lair of the Dragon God 2.5D dragon as a commission job for Denny. He added the frills, horns, and some additional detailing, and knocked the ball out of the park with the texturing. Things sort of came full circle again earlier this year–when the Dragon God set was converted to TerrainLinX format, yours truly was also responsible for the additional dragon color variations. My favorites are the green/yellow and black/red ones.