psCargile

Something about crossing the 50 year mark makes you want to come home from work, plop on the couch, turn on YouTube and watch Trek Yards, Tim Poole, and various young women react to Star Wars and other shows for the first time, instead of getting behind the computer monitor to work on a model. Ideas don't come as often as they used to, and what did I've only shared with a few friends over Facebook messenger. But why be stingy?

These are projects that most likely wont be seeing me return to, like that spherical trek ship, and each little project will get one post. Let's go all the way back to February before the year took a huge dump on us, with a project that was more of a cartoon/comic idea than a ship model. I'll start things off with

Black Space
Because space is black. . . very black.

The idea being a satire and parody of society and sci-fi, under a premise that events are taking place in the 2020s, but in a 2020s of how people thought about it in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, just so I could make social commentary about current events that wouldn't make sense a hundred years from now. A lot of brainstorming was done in FB messenger, in which I wrote:

So I was thinking of some tongue in cheek space adventure project called - dun dun dun - "Black Space". What critiques would say has "so much toxic masculinity that women are in danger of rape."

First there was Buck Rogers….

And then, Flash Gordon….

And now, when we least need him the most… Captain Clive.

Black Space… what Vox says is "[D]eeply disturbing throwback to the worst toxic masculinity…"

Forcing The Mary Sue to fluster "I can't even,"

And what Rollingstone diatribes as "...misogynist, racists, fucking garbage, Nazi fascists hate porn. Not one minority viewpoint is heard! Not one! I've had to review a lot of shit in my time, but nothing so goddamned oppressive, this jingoistic, patriotic, flag waving, America loving, white nationalist, Trump supporting...argh...uhhh...I'm okay…about to stroke out…yeah I'm fine...I'll be better when we burn our copies in a ritual...yeah, we're working on doxing the author…."

Through the neural lace, Musk is now an insane AI controlling his "zombie" colonists through their laces. Fun times on Mars.

"Wait Kitty. We can't go out on the surface of Mars without applying our Cosmic Ray screen."

"Cosmic Ray screen?"

"Yes. It will keep us from getting stupid. Our helmets protect our heads, but our bodies... we'll need to slather up. I have a bottle here. Why don't you go first. I'll help you with those lovely hard to reach places."

"Oh, captain Clive! This will be like going to the beach."


"Oh my, captain Clive! They're eating each other."

"And not in the fun way."

"The settlers...the Muskovites...they're...they're...."

"Yes, Kitty. Cannibals. Drooling, idiot cannibals."

"Can't we do something?"

"Yes. The only thing we can do. Nuke 'em from orbit."

I did say this was a cartoon.


When I had the feeling I probably wasn't going to commit to a full cartoon, I thought about doing maybe a poster and a single comic page that would be numbered as if there were other pages, when nope, sorry. So I had the beginning and the end and would probably try to work in the Cosmic Ray screen, which months after I wrote that idea it was found that rust protects against cosmic rays, which I think could be added to a lotion.

[

i]Join Captain Curt Clive and his stowaway side-kick Kitty as he searches the solar system for the McGuffin, the super secret space probe sent out to do something probably nefarious.


"It's not a catsuit, Kitty. It's a form hugging liner to the vacuum suits."

"Oh. Why aren't you wearing one?"

"Did I mention it was form hugging?"


Captain Kurt Clive, space adventurer. The man that restored the US flags at the Apollo moon landing sites.

John McGuffin, billionaire who's antivirus software opened a backdoor to everyone's technology, flees the law as a murder suspect in the McGuffin 3, last seen in the Kupier belt.

Maybe Clive Custer has a better ring to it.

The ship's computer is W. E. N. D. I., Woman Emulating Network for Data and Information.

Just brainstorming on whether a parody and silly social commentary cartoon like Black Space should include artificial gravity or not and weighing the pros and cons as it relates to cartoon production as in which would be easier, and as I speculated about the glamorous and wildly successful TRUMP Mars Dome, I saw that gravity could be increased under the dome with blackholeium.

I can't pass up a Trump Space Elevator and Condominiums .

Kitty: Whoa. Like real gravity in here.

Capt. Clive: Yeah, blackholium. Very expensive stuff.

[/i]

This prompted me to research the conditions of the flags on the moon. Bleached and practically gone.




But what about the ship, you ask? I had two choices of designs: something more realistic with a variety of landers that would be a bitch to draw all the time, or something simple like the Space Shuttle. My lazy ass leaned heavily on the shuttle and it was off to the internet to see what was cooking in decades past prior to the Space Shuttle. I found this McDonnell Douglas design.



It's a cartoon, so. . . the technical stuff.

The Yankee Rose runs on anti-antimatter. It doesn't react with matter yet, and easy to store, like grain or gasoline. You get it to react by removing the first anti.

FTL: a generator creates a tachyon charge. The greater the charge, the farther you are flung out into space once the charge is released.

The mass/energy, momentum/inertia, and spacetime are all turned to negative values, so....

Pretty much impossible.

As impossible as taking antimatter and making it anti-antimatter for easier storage.

And I'll wrap it up with the following second draft of a possible first page. Rest in Peace Black Space. Maybe I will do a poster one day.

Page 1
Panel 1
On board the Yankee Rose, CAPTAIN CLIVE is watching a news broadcast. Broadcast shows him at the Apollo 17 site restoring the US flag.
Announcer: … Captain Clive continues to desecrate the Moon with hate symbols at several obviously fabricated landing sites, to which the Hague is calling an effort to promote oppressive Americanism.

Panel 2
Announcer (cont.) The US Prime Minister had this to say:
Broadcast clip shows USPM, saying: "We condemn this flagrant display of hate speech on the Moon, which is shared by all nations of the Earth, under the flag of the United Nations. No one nation is more special than the rest.

Panel 3
Broadcast clip continued.
Reporter: Are there any plans to knock the flags over?
USPM: He'll just come back and replant them. At some point it will become cost prohibitive. If we only had someone to stand up to him….

Panel 4
Announcer: In other news, billionaire John McGuffin has evaded authorities who have issued a warrant for his arrest in the sex trafficking of minor robots to his private habitat in the Virgin Galactic satellite constellation, what authorities have dubbed Pedo-bot Station.

Panel 5
Announcer (cont.) It is believed he is running for deep space aboard his yacht, McGuffin 3. Police sources say suppressed testosterone levels remain too low to substantiate an interplanetary chase.

Clive: Hmmm… if I were to capture this McGuffin, maybe the media will lay off.
Nah...who am I kidding. But it's something to do.

Rebuilding some stuff. Might leave the nacelles as is with no exposed "guts".

Yep, there's a bit of a difference.

A single wide mobile home is another way to show scale.

Some redesigns and rework.

Another project I started last year I hope to get around working on again.



One thing I like about late 1960s sci-fi is how gonzo they were. I mean, Zardoz had a flying head. I suppose if your technology can let you ignore drag and gravity you can build aircraft that are giant heads. With an open mouth. Why not? The Alpha 7 from the movie doesn't have a conventional spacecraft look. And in Jean-Claude Forest's comic the spacecraft don't look much like spacecraft either. More like balloons. When you theorize that technology is so advanced as to not be considered, you can let the aesthetics take over. No idea what powers the Alpha 7, or how it moves superluminal. It just does what it does, that includes moving through solid rock as well.

A Barbarella project is perfect for Blender. You can do the ship exterior, the character (Using the MBLab add-on if you don't want to spend time building and rigging your own) and the interior with all the shag carpet thanks to the hair particle system. My initial intent was to do the Alpha 7 as presented in the movie. All I could go by was screen caps. If there are any prints, I didn't find them online. And as one might expect, I ran into the same problem that plagues most movie/television ship, the interior set is scaled higher than the exterior set. And the closet aft of the side window does not have an exterior component. Plus headroom issues with the angle of the viewscreen. And once I have to modify the design to make it work, I might as well modify the design all over. Why not make it a little more spacecraft-y?



These engine modules are a design I've been drawing and using since the 1990s. These are low-poly stand-ins that will be rebuilt. The domes rotate to project their propulsion force, whatever the hell that might be.



I like a good blackbody heat glow.



I want to add some artistic flare to the design as well so that it doesn't just look boiler plate. The arc panels flanking the keystone will have some bas reliefs, maybe of Barabarella's exploits and victories. And over all filling blank space with functional details and panels. As I do not like iris doors as pressure doors, and because making an iris door that opens and closes is more work than I want to do, these simply roll open.



Maybe the last thing I do is make an actual outfit for the poor girl. Give her some boots. How does Barbarella get into and out the Alpha 7? Stairs? Ladder? Nope. In the movie, she crash lands, so all she has to do is step down. But there would have to be a means to get up to the door. I like the idea of the ship floating above the ground, like in Star Wars, so this platform extends out which she can step down onto, and then the platform floats away and down to the surface. I use keyshapes to stretch the outboard face of the platform away form the inboard face. The part you stand on is material that expands and contracts, because gonzo sci-fi. I have an animation that shows this.

That's it for now. Maybe in a couple of months I'll get back to it.

Trying a different sensor dome with subsurface and translucence, with some mesh lights inside, and roughness texture on the side.

Some more detailing. Don't know if I like the navigation light as it seems redundant with the larger glowing sensor array.



Took forever to find the right combination of render samples, light path bounces, and denoise settings to get this dark render to look good. (2500 render samples, default light path bounces (12, 4, 4, 8, 12, 0), denoise radius at 9pxs, strengths both at 0.60. Bought a Dell PC with an NVidia GPU just to run 2.8. This was about a 10 minute render. Can't image how long it would have been on the old laptop with only 4 CPU threads running.)

Had to find a tutorial on how to do render layers in 2.8. Its now View Layers and they are associated with Collections--nice how we can have objects in more than one collection. Now if Blender developers would make it so we could only apply glare filters to light sources and not everything else in the scene, that would be nice.



I cut in a large panel on the side, but as it was flush, the panel line was invisible in the render, so I decided to delete it and not bother with it paneling the bridge. I might add a few more smaller ones here and there, but the outer skin can be manufactured as one single piece, so seams aren't necessarily necessary. I also did a Boolean cut for the turbolifts, but there were ugly shading artifacts around the edges even with subsurface set to 4, so I undid that. I could try a data transfer for that surface, or later apply the modifier and retopo--if I want to get that deep into it.



Eevee renders

without compositing


with compositing

Not happy with the engine "guts" I'm going to redo those, work on a shuttle mock-up to work out docking options, and create a human scale figure to stand around and wave at us.

Cargo hold doors. I don't plan a lot of close up renders, so I don't plan to add a lot of details in this area. I don't have to make the cargo hold and working doors, do I? I don't want to. They drop down and slide away and all that mechanism is inside.