And now.... content! (3d renders)

[classicdrogn]

In the time I've been offline, I had a bit of a 3d modeling kick. Kinda sorta. All of the following are in the neighborhood of 1200-1500 polygons plus weapons and (for the Skate) super-armor. The Raven's missiles add a ridiculous number of polys because of just how many missiles are in them; for actual use in a game they'd be a single big poly with a partially transparent texture, but these are all basic geometry with colors and in some cases a metallic effect created by messing with the specularity; there are no image maps to be found. So don't go looking for photorealism here, in fact they're kind of sparse by modern gaming standards even if textures were added. However, they are all 100% toy-able, though actually making a toy would require actually making the joints in full detail. So, let's get to the links:

First up, the AG-158 Skate. This is a very Macross-y design, and has been equppied with a Macross-y fold booster in the fighter-form heavy armor version. The armor is called HA-5 Harlequin, but but the hanger crew nickname it "Beamhell" because it mounts a gravatic lensing system and multiple laser emitters (six more like the one mounted in the wrist per arm, plus a heavy on each wing/hip) which allow it to do the "itano circus" with energy weapons instead of missile contrails. It's main role its anti-missile defense close air patrol, hence why it's not fully transformable without ejecting the fold booster - it can use them, but it's not within the primary mission envelope. The same multiple-beam targeting system can be used with the half-dozen spiritia sapping beams mounted inside the "air scoop" on the more humanish form of the (transformable) head, for riot control - energy drained rowdies quickly stop rioting, with no long term damage, even if the energy is useless for non-protodeviln. This is my justification for the two-form transforming head, though OOC it's becasue I don't want to hear any bitching about turret-style versus cone-head style. Don't like the cone-heads? You got a camera turret. Don't like inhuman turret? You got a face and optic band, and the cone-ish-ness is even reduced by the way the face sticks out of it and leaves a "scoop" behind.

















Next, the AG-159 Raven. You know how Gurren Lagann had those flying wing Ganmen, obviously inspired by the real B-2 Spirit? And Macross 7 had one too? Mine's better. Imageshack doesn't preserve filenames very well, but I have most of these named in order to correspond to The Prayer of the Modern Infantry, and will split up the thumbnails accordingly.


Oh great Spirit in the sky


Bestow upon this humble ground-pounder


The blessing of your almighty air strike


Our souls illuminate the target


For your laser-guided affection


For your love is an awesome power


And nothing says "love" like close air support


Amen


Standing beside a Skate - now you see why those extra-long arms are in fact intentional?I'm rather proud of how I got them to fold out flat like that, actually. I thought it would look really lame, but it's pretty good.


Parked - yes, the landing gear actually physically works and fits into the parts it extends from, though the "gear bays" are just a flat-black square added just over the surface of the model and a door. The doors work, too.

Okay! Next, the pure-robot-only-looks-like-it-has-a-cockpit designs, which despite that minor failing I really like a lot - and since they're explicitly intended for the Ninja Robot Space Fighter setting where only the technophobe THIS members use physical cockpits instead of energy-state merge-with-mecha system, they are in fact still originally designed as piloted craft. Now, depending on the player's option settings, one main character (that is, one that has plot attatched instead of falling under the "you can recruit ANYONE in the game if you fget their Reaction score high enough" rule) may be male or female, so I needed two designs. I'm doing the male one first, because it's simpler to explain. This is called the Rowdy Bravo, and is quite obviously based on the classic hot rod style, complete with robo-pompadour and sideburns. (And the main feature of the Bravo is its engines, which feature afterburners so leave a trail of fire and bosster-smoke behind those side-mounted engine pods...) A "Rowdy Alpha" must also exist, though I haven't created a visual design or place for it, and "Rowdy Charlie" is a police version, with a different heead, shorter engine pods, and a different "front wheel" rudder design. Lightbars on the Rowdy Charlie occupy the top hardpoints, obviously enough.













Now, for the female version, called as a model the Kyrie. First, your boss's version, the Angel of Naughty Catgirls, which is seen as a street rod if you have the male boss. (and vice versa - a dialogue if the character is in the active party when you see it the first time has a "heh, you know, I always wanted to do that, but kind of got into this business instead" flavor, but not nailed down enoguh to have been added to my Game Scripts files)












While not so explicit as the Rowdy Bravo, the hot rodding roots can be seen in the exposed and presumably modified engines. The base, civilian version is the Angel of Mercy, just seen in a couple of group shots since it's not all that striking. The first of these showcases in particular the different engine configurations between versions, which are the main variation aside from the number of robo-ahoge and cat-ears attatched to the head.






More prominent in these is the Angel of Accelleration, a sports type modified for mecha-triathlon (air-racing in the open, a robot-form obstacle course, and shooting targets in a simpler but still partly obstructed area) which also has a couple of classic "superhero flying" solo shots. Given the City of Heroes player presence in these boards, I thought I'd give 'em a try.




And then... there's Fury Angel. Did I mention superheroes? Yeah. She's a Scanner who dropped her human name post-transfer, and goes all vigilante because her loved ones got killed in a THIS operation. Pretty much a secret character in the game as planned, unless you go out of your way to look for her a chapter early the only time you'll see her is running in ahead of the party to get blown away and demonstrate the badass cred of one of the THIS bosses.

And yes, those are pink eyebrows. Why do you ask?



Cheers!

- CD

ETA: And that should have been on OPF, dammit, not General. Oh well, it's not really fanfiction either I suppose.

ETA2: I also wanted to mention, your boss (male or female) and Fury Angel are the only characters aside from Player McPickaname that you can keep through the whole 5000-year timeline
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[Star Ranger4]

hmm... Still using Doga?
Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky?
That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry-
NO QUARTER!!!
-- "No Quarter", by Echo's Children

[classicdrogn]

No, Blender. I'm just vastly underutilising its power. Like hopping in a rally racer to go a block and back to the supermarket underutilizing. When I intentionally st out to make high def, high poly images they still end up looking blocky, so I stick with the low-poly where I build it one vertex at a time from a cube and get results that are honestly not that different. Of course, I should take the time to texture them as well before moving on to different projects, but given that they are at least theoretically for a game even if I've forgotten more programming than I remmber at this point, I salve my concience with teh thought that there's no point texturing when I don't know what engine limitations might or might not apply... and, too, I've never yet gotten into the IK skeleton rigging to make character animations of the humanoid forms, and fully expect at least some changes to the way the models are physically set up. Everything here is forward kinematics using numerical input on the joints to go from one mode to another, or to put them in poses through painstaking trial and error - hence why the flight poses and group scene have the wrong, pre-differentiated engine/backpacks on the Angel of Mercy and Accelleration variants above.

Well, that's kind of a lie - I have set up one skeleton, on a human model I made with multiple targets so it could morph from male to female with the push of a slider, but got bound up in modeling the head and never actually played with it much. Trying to set one up on a mechanical-looking arm just for practice frosted my shorts because I couldn't get it to work like they were solid parts instead of mooshing around like a flesh creature - there's default settings I didn't manage to alter properly apparently. The stuff about setting a stride bone and cyclic animations to do a walk cycle, and have them follow a path.... yeah. Seen the tutorials, nothing but confused, mah sim-pal mod-als make me hap-py. Duuuhr... what was we talkin' about again?

In short: Could do a lot better but it's too damn confusing for my one or two day interest cycle to get much of anywhere on the learning curve when the transformation and low-poly geometry like this already take 8-10 hours per character. If I wasn't such a punk, I'd probably have cooked up something with these in the Blender Game Engine already, if only because... damn, I want to play this game I keep talking about. A whole lot. Even if the random-generated infinite universe is too much to manage in BGE, at least the bones of it could be implemented.

- CD, on the other hand, 1500 poly models means rendering is seconds-per-frame, and not many of them, rather than minutes or hours. About 30 for that medic/sport/catgirl group, less than half if I turn off the "city" prop
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[classicdrogn]

One more - this is the underside of the Mercy Angel version, showing a more likely hardpoint configuration for its usual role - arcana resonators. With this setup, one of each type, at a minimum it has +30% qi, 3x qi regeneration speed, +25% effect of High and Dark arcana (spontaneously cast, qi-powered wizard-y spells and "ninjutsu,") casts each Wild Arcana twice per expended spell, does +5% damage with Body Arcana (qi-powered martial arts moves, specifically excluding fireballs and so on as they're Dark Arcana) and has 2% damage reduction from a reinforced "battle aura." With maximum upgrades, 10x that in all respects. (Yes, that means you can cast a Wild Arcana as a single action and have it actually cast ten times over - after as much as 5000 years to tweak the system, you should have learned a few tricks.)



High is blue, Wild is green, Dark is yellow, and Body is red. They also come in white, a Universal Resonator, but base for that is half-strength in all respects (meaning you only doublecast Wild Arcana 50% of the time) and maxes out at 8x the base, and in Black or Purple, which also boosts all types of qi powers to the same extent as the dedicated type but only for damage-inflicting (black) or healing/defense (purple) purposes. Still, it's a "better than bad" solution for a character who wants to improve all their qi-using powers while preserving hardpoints for conventional weapons, or for those frame designs with less than the standard four hardpoints. Since they're Light options, I could actually gang them up in pairs to go on the Kyrie's Medium wing points with an adapter, and that would allow using two more Light hardpoint packages on the front/hip hardpoints. A normal sidearm would not be out of order for a combat medic (though the Shootin' Iron plasma carbine as equipped on the others might be considered overkill for the purpose, I say there's no such thing) or else still more resonators, to max the magetillery potential.

For those familiar with Mekton Z+, they'd probably be some flavor of ESPer Lens, but difficult to quantify by that paradigm, since the system at scale-of-the-mecha is inherent in the setting's version of Merge Control. Not having that advantage is one of the reasons THIS fears Scanners (their human-to-machine process is a permanent variation of the system) and Merge-piloted mecha as much as they do.

- CD, yes, I realise nobody but me actually cares. It just helps me clarify my ideas to write them out, and this way there's a remote backup of sorts as well. And maybe someone will enjoy reading it.... somewhere....
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[Star Ranger4]

Ah! Yes, blender can be intimindating, but for myself its been the only 3d program to use for a while.

the easiest way to fix the 'moosh' problem in blender is to 'weight' each solid section so that its assigned to one and only one bone.

Cant help on the walk stride stuff, I've never understood it worth a darn either.
Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky?
That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry-
NO QUARTER!!!
-- "No Quarter", by Echo's Children

[classicdrogn]

Yeah, Blender is groovylicious, except when you want to try to do something you've never done before with it, and then the wiki-only documentation becomes a pain in the ass. That's the biggest part of whats to blame for my slow progress in it, since I've been offline so long that now its a habit - but for my next 3d kick, oh yes, next time I shall have the docs to hand. MUAHAHAHcoughhackwheeze... Unfortunately, I've tried to play Yo Frankie on this machine and it was just barely a useable framerate, so an even more complex game even if at a lower level of model detail is probably out of reach. Plus all of these are built on a scale where the head is a bit larger than a 1-unit cube, which means I have to find some way to work sliders aside from "type in the amount of x/y/z displacement" so I can scale the things down, because as far as I can tell that's supposed to be a meter for the focus lengths/aperture sizes/particle and physics engines/etc.

- CD
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows