Category Archives: Workbench

The 24 Hour Challenge

I put on a little challenge for myself over the weekend: design a scenery item, from start to finish, in 24 hours or less. The rules:

The model cannot be just a simple box build.
The model must go well with the other projects I’ve been working on.
The model must cover at least one full 6×6″ tile.
In order to successfully beat this challenge, the model must be ready to build before time runs out.

After 23 hours, plus change, this is what I ended up with:

Podtel 6. Helping space hookers spread space herpes since 2136.

It’s a seedy capsule motel belonging to the Podtel 6 chain. There are 24 efficiency-sized pods, each with its own balcony, stacked in 4 rings of 6 pods. The rings aren’t glued on, they slip over the core structure like doughnuts on a stick. I imagine each pod is basically just a single open space containing an airplane-style bathroom, a small closet space, a nasty bed that probably hasn’t been changed in weeks, a really tiny table with burn marks on it, a couple of mismatched chairs, and a slightly dented flatscreen on the wall for watching overpriced softcore porn and so forth.

It looks the way it does primarily because I didn’t want to do a boring box build, so any practicality or realism issues that I overlooked can be blamed on that. I’ve included a taxicab in the render for scale, so you can see how big the thing is. I also took a few minutes to accentuate the obnoxious glowing animated advertising screens and blinky lights on the thing in Photoshop.

It’s in PDF format and ready to build right now, the instruction graphics have been rendered, and there’s at least one “box art” style render for it. I didn’t think I was actually gonna beat the clock, but I surprised myself. I also don’t think I’m gonna give myself another one of those challenges for a while, because that was kind of intense.

I also haven’t decided what exactly to do with this thing yet. I’m gonna have to think about that some, since it wasn’t at the forefront of my mind during the challenge.

DMC-Northstar HL 300 completed

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The weekend didn’t really turn out the way I thought it would. There was a neighborhood watch meeting/social that Mrs E really wanted me to attend on Saturday, but she forgot about it until 2 hours before it was supposed to start. It took four unplanned hours out of my day, and I just couldn’t get back into my coding headspace at all. On the bright side, I did get to meet some nice people and eat some decent grilled burgers, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.

(Coding is very heavily reliant upon short-term memory and concentration, and it’s very easy to forget what you were doing if you’re suddenly distracted. There are a couple of good blog posts explaining that phenomenon here. In a nutshell, distractions completely wreck my productivity–it’s not “just a couple minutes”, it’s more like 2 minutes of distraction followed by half an hour of trying to get back in the zone.)

I ended up working on the taxicab instead just so the rest of the day wouldn’t be a total loss, and by the time my bedtime rolled around, I was so close to done that I decided to spend today finishing it up, along with some bonuses.

I decided I wanted to go for a sort of General Motors thing where the same base platform is re-badged at different trim levels and given different names. There’d be the midrange luxury trim level with chrome accents and nice interiors that private citizens and car services would buy, and then there’d be the nasty and cheap trim level that appeals to tightfisted rental companies and taxi companies. In addition to that, there’d be a police version.

This is the upmarket version, the DMC-Northstar HL 300, with chrome accents and leather/wood interiors:

This is the stripped-down economy version with all-plastic interior and hose-it-out plastic upholstery, the Stercus:

BONUS CONTENT BONUS CONTENT BONUS CONTENT

And this is the Stercus with police package installed:

In addition to all that, there are 3 editable versions included. One for the fancy HL 300, one for the regular Stercus, and one for the Stercus with police package.

Update: Ever have one of those moments where a whole bunch of things just kind of serendipitously flow together and you get to kill a lot of birds with one stone? Yeah, I just had one of those moments.

Mrs E needs a new pair of shoes, I want to test out a new download delivery service named Pulley because the way it works seems ideal for sending out review copies and comps on the new WWG storefront, you guys have been very patiently waiting in the face of months of endless teasing for something new to buy, and I happen to have something that fits the bill much earlier than I originally intended, thanks to The Weekend That Did Not Go As Planned. Nice!

So, without any further ado, I present you with a Pulley-powered buy link for this model:

(Link removed because my Pulley trial expired. Thanks for helping me test it, everyone!)

If you snap it up, let me know how Pulley worked out for you. It’s really slick and no-fuss, but I want to see how it works under practical circumstances. It should take you right to PayPal, and once you complete the transaction, you should see an email appear in your PayPal email inbox with a download link in it.

Taxicab WIPs

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We’re in the home stretch as far as the new WWG storefront is concerned, so it’s going to be crunch time for me between now and launch. Before I fall off the radar, however, I wanted to leave you guys a little update to tide you over while I’m scarce.

My current spare time project is a taxicab. I also plan to do patrol car and regular sedan variants.

I didn’t get to spend much time on it because I’ve been busy with work stuff, so it took a while to get to the point where there was something to show. It still needs door handles and some other details that I haven’t gotten around to doing yet.

Ignore the goofy medallion number–I use the characters ‘9’ and ‘M’ as quickie placeholders because they’re the widest number and letter pair, which makes figuring out font sizes and lettering dimensions a snap because any other series of characters will fit within the same space. I’m going to be using Photoshop’s data-driven graphics functionality to create several different versions of the same skin with different medallion numbers later on.

Editable models

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I’ve been getting a *lot* of requests for custom schemes for the Interceptor. Unfortunately for most of the folks requesting extra schemes, I’m not gonna spend the rest of my life doing every single police scheme in the entire world for $2.50. Fortunately for these folks, though, I did make it easier for them to do their own schemes.

It wasn’t easy, but I managed to figure out how to do editable versions of the Brio and Interceptor that supported a lowest-common-denominator subset of the Photoshop file format that any paint package capable of reading PSD files should handle fine. That means you can open them in free paint apps like the GIMP, or inexpensive paint apps like Photoshop Elements or Paint Shop Pro.

As long as you don’t touch the topmost two layers in the PSDs (page frame and texture), you can color all you want or paste logos and stuff into the layers below them. The results won’t be exactly the same as if I did it myself because my normal layer setup is a lot more complex than that, but it’ll come reasonably close-ish, and you won’t have to extract anything from PDFs or do anything more complicated than flood filling or using brush tools.