Dannage

No work done on the vending machine, sorry, but I've been distracted with replacing the gunship from this era. I actually animtaed them spinning but I can't attach videos here, so here's some screencaps... Uhm, the new one is up top...

Got back home and spent a good 25 minutes blocking her out in 3D. Now I don't know whether to do a proper model of her or simply use the blocked out version to draw over, for random pictures which will never amount to a web comic.

I so nearly did a vending machine but this thing is about 600 metres long so pretend I did it but it's tiny.

This is another re-model of an old ship. An unforeseen consequence of going back to the start and rebuilding the 'earliest' ships, is that some features have started to creep in which make later designs feel a bit more fluid. Entirely unintentionally, there are pieces of this ship I've looked at and gone, huh, that is a much more natural progression from the first rockets to the later fleet ships, and oooh, this component is like a proto version of that bit in later ships... ooh, it's like stuff makes sense...

Hope everyone is surviving lockdown. I've been rebuilding some of the old ships, from my 'old' fleet.

Funny thing is, the middle one of these took about an hour to build whereas I think the model it replaced took about 5, despite the fact that the replacement looks bulkier.







I'd have put these on the discord but everytime I post anything on Discord Howie keeps flooding it with awesome Star Wars pictures.

Last one for today, but here is the filled in bottom layer, or Deck 11 as we call her..



This is all various forms of waste reclamation, recycling and some fluid tanks. The little tiny nubbin bits are Atmospheric scrubbers, which suck in air and clean it, then blow it out the other side. Again, there is some molecular cleansing and then storage and re-use here, where possible.



Then on Deck 10 we have a little bit of corridor space and walling going on, with the lowest deck for the two main elevator shafts. These two shafts are the only ones that go almost all the way through the ship, most others tend to be 3-5 levels each (Which will mean in the event of catastrophic failure, no 700 metre lift plumments of death, which is good. Also slows down any invaders.

some of the fluid tanks from Deck 11 had to go up through to this deck. There's a lot of fluid needs storing for long space journeys! A few atmo scrubbers on this deck too, and in reality all those doorways would have bulkheads. The internals of UNITI ships are a little more like submarines, in that they have a lot of physical walls, instead of forcefields, for when hull breaches occur.



The two shuttles are roughly the size of Galaxy Class Type 6 shuttles, perhaps a tiny bit bigger. They fill up the main shuttle bay and this serves to remind us we have a small ship here, just 209 metres long if memory serves. There will be more shuttle/drone bays in the upper superstructure. Think of these as visitor shuttle bays.

There's some funny looking stuff at the front there, those are the maintenance crawl-ways, or Maintways as we call them. These are just the bottom half of them as the top half crosses into the floor space of Deck 9. On the plus side, out of shot, there are also ladders to get up there.

Have been talking about doing a little smaller side story in the UNITI universe, so repurposed an old Star Trek Design I once did for an RPG group, coincidentally named the Unity! There might be some of the old pictures of it knocking around here in an ancient thread somewhere, but I redrew her to bring her into the UNITI space by making her more like the Parallax.

Okay, today tonight I mainly figured out how to add objects not in the 0.0.0 co-ordinate (i.e. I moved the 'cursor' to a new location) and figured out roughly how to texture a bit, with some basic colours. I'm a long way off doing anything decent, but I'm better today than I was yesterday.

Hello. I've half filled a lever arch folder with text, sketches, ideas, and fiddly bits. I haven't figured out how to make this interesting enough for more people to want to take part yet, stories, youtube videos, pictures and various things don't seem to have appealed (Even my attempts at paying people for work have not panned out!) Obviously the most important job opening is head of marketing.

Anyway, here's some shots of the Eden. If anyone wants to model another 'realistic' design, 2 more came 80 years after this one. (And pre-date all other human ships in the IP)

So I did make a ship after this, but somehow it ended up being a quarter of the size it was supposed to be, so I decided to park that and use it for a civilian ship later. I don't have many civilian ship designs, and it seems sensible they might 'copy' military designs after the fact.

Anyway, I decided to restart, and start with a detailed bit, having a go at making some gun turrets.

Had a brief panic attack about 90 minutes in when Blender just closed... But thankfully it has an autosave feature... *mops brow*

So here are some practice gun turrets, plus vending machine...

Okay, I finally gave in and loaded Blender up again. I had real trouble with the interface around the 2.7 era, but 2.9 seems to feel a little bit less anti-me. I got really fed up with everything I was doing in my 20 year old version of Max, looking a bit naff, lighting and materials wise... Whilst I could probably have done more in post, if I'm going to teach myself new stuff at this age, it should be in a more modern tool.

I spent a couple of days getting irritated at not being able to do anything other than accidentally move or delete a cube, but this evening I have sort of got the hang of some basics again and look, I turned a cube into a moderately rubbish looking plane.

I also managed to figure out roughly how to get the model into a camera shot....

It's extremely daunting the idea of learning a new tool from scratch, but I remember how supportive you lot were *or your parents were* when I started out *cough* years ago in Max, so I hope to be able to get back into doing proper models of spaceships any year now...




Yeah, I still got to learn a lot about materials... and merging multiple primitives, and mirroring them and joining vertices and all sorts... Oh this is going to be a long ride...

Just to repeat something from a 'wanted' thread (I couldn't even convince people to let me pay them to build stuff!) if any of you lot are in South East UK, and especially if you are using Blender, let's get together (post lock down) and do some collaboration.