First Contact: Impulse Quads

How many impulse rockets/engines would one need on star ship?  I'm going to say 8 quads of primary impulse engines, for a total of 32 impulse engines and 32 impulse rockets. We're defining the difference as sustained power (engines) to burst power (rockets). They are also going to be more build into the hull so they can be maintained largely from inside the ship.

Larger than the Apollo (obviously) and doubled up front to back for better maneuverability.

First Contact: Cruiser Blocked Out

This is an entire ship set up and labeled in cubes based on the size of each element of the ship. It actually took quite a bit of research to figure out how much and how big of tons of different areas of a multi-year star ship. A key feature of the game will be a fully working star ship simulation.

Examples of some elements that make up the ship:

Science

• Stellar Cartography
• Hydroponics
• Robotics 
• Astronomical Sciences
• Cybernetics
• Planetary Geoscience
• Physical Science

Crew Support

• Dining rooms
• Kitchen Galley
• Bar/Lounge
• Waste Processing & Water Recycling System
• Conference Rooms

Engineering

• Secondary Impulse Engines & Rockets
• Thruster Quad
• Engineering Lab & Machine Fabrication 
• Deuterium pump and conditioning system
• Deuterium Injectors

3D-Coat Quick Ramp Up Tutorials

I've been meaning to make a set of video tutorials that run through my top used features of 3D-Coat to get someone who has decent 3D experience up to speed fast. Its not meant for beginners to 3D. The ideal person would already be competent in another 3D package. This is what I always want to find when trying to learn new software. I feel most tutorials spend too much time for me on each tool when I get it pretty quickly and I learn by doing. This is to get all the important bits out there and let you start running.

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyvE_78lUVad49DBdEkdanloFZeWepA5W
(about 1 hour run-time total.)

UV Mapping 3D Coat

UV Mapping 3D Coat from destruct007 on Vimeo.

I wanted to do a quick tutorial on why 3D Coat has one of the best UV Mapping tools out there. Far and away better than anything in Maya or any scripts that help Maya be OK at UV mapping. My favorite is the live updating unwrap previews. I think it gets you to the best UV mapped layout the fastest b/c you can see where its at and how things are going. Maya explodes in the unwrapping or crumples down to nothing, so its often I'm trying to trick maya into working with UV's. Not anymore.

First Contact: Hero WIP6

I went back and retouched the model to fine tune some things. I'm getting close to happy with the face, next step is to switch from voxel to surface mode in 3DC to paint in that last level of detail. But I'll probably just show the backed down hi and low rez game versions next, as I need to start making all the actual game assets and stop messing around finessing the main character...

Preview Eterium Indie game

This is the indie game my friend Andrew and I have been working on for the past year in our spare time.

Background:. Andrew's a programmer who was working on his game for 3 years and I was working on my game in UDK. I got to the point of programming and realized that its too slow to do both art and programming. Writing code wasn't the hard part, polish and bug fixing was. So I looked at Andrews game... God awful visuals b/c he had the opposite problem. I decided to support his project and get things up to a point in quality. My goal was 60-70% of my standards for visual quality on everything. Reason is time, and I can't make all these things w/o an engine. Oh thats right he's written the code from scratch in XNA so there is no GUI for me to work in. Next games are in Unity, and so that will be quite different. He had already bought  DAZ3D models for the main characters and I didn't redo them. I designed and built all the ships, planets and star maps. That doesn't seem like a lot of work, 20+/- ships, 3 cockpits, but it was. I learned a lot. There are 1001 things I'd like to add and change in this game but I am insisting that all major changes from here on out go into planning phase for Eterium 2 in Unity (after the next game "First Contact" working title for mobile). We'd never finish a game if we kept adding wishlist ideas and improvements. The game is pretty fun, and big goals for the next. Anyway take a look, we're going to try to get the demo ready in the next few weeks.

DOTA2: Baby Disruptor Mount

Those Disruptor Mounts are horrible! ...but they sure are cute when they're little! I had some time to test some things and got the idea of a baby Disruptor Mount. I know I should be making items/kits for DOTA2 but I keep having fun with other ideas.

For those who don't know this is what the original Disruptor & Mount looks like.