01/27/2021 – Well that was not a planned break. I’ve continued working in that time frame, but let posting fall by the wayside. My apologies – I’ll dive right in to the goods.
I continued working in Substance and it is an absolutely amazing and wonderful program. I was motivated to continue working on missiles and direct fire weapon modules for the Freespace fighter I’ve been working on. Click the preview below to go to a p3d file that compiles all the fully textured weapons I’ve made:
A couple of notes from working on the missiles – they’re an absolutely wonderful starter object for both modeling and texturing as they tend to have a simple shape while still giving a lot of room for creative freedom. They’re also good for practicing unwrapping in a sane fashion – this was an unbelievable opportunity to really level up my skills from November where I was unwrapping the Shahraba painfully slowly. Maya has a utility for automatically unwrapping an object, but it’s not particularly intelligent about identifying and stacking up similar details. Plus, I want the text to be mirrored for the various warning decals and identifying labels, so I can’t just have it mirrored left to right. There were also lots of useful lessons along the way. The silliest one is that Substance remembers where your object was in the scene before you exported it, so if you move the object around then change it, you have to put it back where it was before reimporting it into substance.
Since this Achilles fighter needs to be part of a large and consistent visual universe it was helpful to identify parts of it that could be completed to serve as visual and stylistic anchors. A big complaint I always had with the canonical Freespace ship designs is they had Battletech style box missile launchers instead of any kind of rails or internal bays, coupled with a fantastic diversity of weirdly shaped projectiles. With a full family of missiles modeled out, from the teeny tiny light missiles heavily inspired by Macross to the super heavy anti ship missiles, making truly functional geometry that can be added to multiple ships is now trivial. Something I am hoping to achieve is a look that is flashy and fantastic with the anime and Tron inspiration, but still has a lot of functional and logical details on a closer inspection. Something that Homeworld nailed was this mix, using the super flashy, super saturated color scheme of Chris Foss and combining it with a streamlined functional shape. We’ll see if I can pull it off.
I added in these now-textured weapons to the work in progress Achilles fighter as well, linked below:
I’ve already completed an internal missile bay with animated doors that aren’t in the above linked p3d preview, and have plans to finish up the main body that I hope to complete in about a week’s time.
Till next time, hope everyone’s having a better year than the last one!