Month: March 2021

03/22/2021 – Over the weekend I spent a little time working on some details on the rear of the fighter. This region had always been chunky and without much to indicate functionality, so I’ve added what will be two large vents, presumably for dumping waste heat in the form of coolant. They can be viewed below:

The next area I was drawn towards, somewhat in spite of my own better judgment, was the cockpit. For the majority of the project this has been a thick opaque canopy over an otherwise undetailed portion of the fuselage. I was struck by two opportunities. I want to eventually render a sequence in Maya using this fighter – having a modeled cockpit will be necessary. The other opportunity was matching the UI of Freespace to panels within the cockpit. You can see how that turned out below:

The detail that bothers me currently is the struts for the instrumentation panels. I wanted them to be as unobtrusive as possible while still connecting to the fuselage. One iteration I experimented with had the instrumentation panels attached to the canopy instead of the fuselage and that just seemed a bit bizarre, though I may return.

There’s huge opportunities for iterating on this space – it could be the project of many weeks adding in pedals and carefully sculpted ergonomic interiors, but this really only needs to be good enough, not perfect. Here’s a render from Maya’s raytracing of the current fighter:

The other major change today was removing the belly pylon entirely. Without it the fighter still has an intimidating and aggressive, solid profile but feels less haphazard. The above version of the ship can be viewed in 3d form here.

03/19/2021 – Spent today merging the skeletal structure developed yesterday into the main body geometry while also merging the cowl into the weapons bay and refining a number of minor flaws with the shape. This should result in a good balance between how much UV mapping real estate will be consumed by all these details and how many verts it will all take up. A happy accident was that just as planned long ago, the gunpod could be swapped out for a single Sunflare heavy missile as below:The original plan was that the belly gunpod bay would come completely off and the missile would be rough mounted essentially directly to the roof of that internal bay I’d been modeling – hence why I’d spent so much time working on details for what was normally almost invisible in the standard configuration. However if (and only if!) the missile is loaded in after the bay is fully open, the gunpod cover can stay!This required some re-engineering of the winglet that was mounted there. I had wanted to lengthen it anyways to heighten the connection between the Achilles and the Perseus, and it needed a few fixes anyways. After some experimentation, it was shifted to the tail due aft of the animated weapons bay door, right above the main fuel tank. The base was remodeled for added functionality, now it has a bracket gripping the pivot point from two sides and I’ve roughly modeled in (but not separated the geometry) so that there might be a barbette and turret for the belly fin to rotate and use its thruster appropriately. And with that geometry for the underside of the entire fighter is nearly complete. The final rough patch is the upper back above the main fuel tank! Here is a p3d with the fighter as it stands.

03/18/2021 – Today was spent adding more structure to the interior of the Achilles weapon bay, now that I’m liking the look of the armatures powering the opening and closing.The first addition was “ribs” to go with a central spine supporting the four arms. From way back in developing the internal missile bays, looking at reference images of F-22s with open weapon bays indicate this is typically what these spaces look like. Adding tons of cables and various outlets and electrical boxes would be the next order of business for a truly detailed implementation, but I don’t think that’s necessary for right now.Once mirrored, the structure looks like this. This is fine, though you can see that there’s some annoying clipping left to take care of before it really feels engineered and precise.This was an iteration I quite enjoyed. Pulling the cowl forward so it was flush with the upper hull and felt really integrated, and then carving out a void for the “wrist” of that armature to slide into. Unfortunately making everything rationally interact proved a bit harder.These final two images don’t do it justice, so I threw together a quick p3d model one can go to to see the space put together. Using the Boolean command to combine the main body with the upper receiver was not as easy as I would have hoped – it produced a lot of geometry that needed laborious cleanup and may still yet prove to be a source of a lot of frustration and disappointment. However, there are now tracks the arms run in, everything fits together nicely without any unsightly clipping, and I’m quite pleased with it. Whether or not I add any further details, we’ll see. I’m hoping I can continue finalizing and prettifying the remaining pieces of the ship at a good pace!

03/16/2021 – I believe I’ve finalized the weapon bay design. I still need to add details. Pictures below.

Work started by reorganizing the weapons cluster inside the main body. The barrel shaped base was good but didn’t leave enough room for the weapon modules as I had developed them, and concealed a lot of their geometry. I intend to return to the shape in time, but for now I’ve moved to a slightly expanded arrangement – in part to fit the armatures I made yesterday.The next step was rebuilding the weapon bay’s armored cover – it had always been a rather haphazard, bulbous lump so something a bit more purposeful was a goal.Here you can see one arrangement of arms, nestled rather close around the top of the gunpods. I rather like this fully compacted arrangement with everything flattened, but it ran into some issues fitting alongside the very tall gunpods.

I did some experiments with moving “shields” attached to the elbows – this was all to fill in that negative space once the bay was opened. This sort of worked, but caused more problems fitting everything together. Instead of free floating animated shields, a three-quarters solid cowl was put in place. Additionally the armature was adjusted so instead of resting flat, it was resting with the arm slightly bent to increase the height. This means the mounting braces can be fixed directly to the ceiling of the internal weapons bay and no longer compete with the gunpod for space. There’s very slight clipping for now but that can be fixed with minor adjustments.And this is the final form for today’s work on the housing. Top view is with the full main body, bottom view has half of it cut away. The four arms are still present (and have enough room to possibly add more or bulk them up further) but there is a large shell with grooves that conceivably are tracks for the covering to move up and down. You can also get a good view of the remodeled gunpod covering, which hopefully will look a lot more purposeful. One thing to do is a bit of finalization on the perimeter of the gunpod shell, it’s had the main body roughly subtracted from it so it fits together but still doesn’t feel like it’s been engineered.

03/15/2021 – This will be a shorter post detailing the work I did yesterday evening and today. I was inspired by some of the armatures in the Dreadnought teaser trailer along with scissor lifts for the interior of the Achilles’s weapons bay. Here’s some progress screenshots from throughout the day:

The structure came together very rapidly which was quite nice. The teeth of that inset gear structure were made using SpeedCut, the rest of the details using Maya’s basic Boolean functionality. It’s less apparent in the following screenshots but the elbow joint is slightly different from the other two: Those two are the motors that are rotating their respective upper and lower arm pieces, with the elbow simply allowing both to rotate and thus translate.

There were several net gains for adding in detail like this. One, it’s always wonderful to include functional detail in the model, especially in points of interest. Anything animated is going to naturally draw the eye, and the ventral weapons bay with the giant superweapon in it is a natural place for the eye to be drawn. Two, my instincts as an amateur are often to create what’s good enough for the videogame environment – it’s almost impossible for the player to see into this bay like this. Stretching my muscles with higher fidelity artwork is nice practice. Three, with the bay open using simple elevators there’s awkward negative space between the main body of the ship and the belly bay. Adding this in fills in that negative space with interesting visual detail. The trick is making it fit without aggressive clipping.

I experimented with a number of possible locations – this one is awkward as it’s on the outside of the bay. It would be covered whenever the bay is not in use, but it’s still not exactly heavily armored and feels rather haphazard / slapdash. There’s also a good view of the altered elbow joint in the above screenshot.

This was the position I was most strongly considering at the end of the day. It doesn’t clip into anything too terribly but would still clearly need adjustment to really fit in. The weapons bay itself slides up to fit over the main body of the fighter slightly, so the fact that this armature I’ve modeled is linear is a problem. Tweaking the lower or upper arm so they’re not in line might make it fit a lot better.

03/01/2021 – This project has probably been somewhat enigmatic, so for this post I wanted to break down the inspirations as well as write on the design of the ship, both from a practical perspective and from a story perspective.

The biggest visual inspirations are the VF-2SS from Macross II, the eponymous Silpheed, and lightfighters from Tron Legacy, all displayed below in that order.

For the missiles, I was heavily inspired by the recognizable near future look of the weapons from the anime Yukikaze, as seen below:

The ship is of course also meant to be a part of the Freespace universe so it has some elements that are inspired by the GTF Perseus and to a lesser extent the GTF Myrmidon, shown below:

So with that barrage of primary references out of the way, time to elaborate. The VF-2SS is part of a long line of transforming fighters within the Macross franchise, all strongly inspired ultimately by the real life USAF F-14, in particular the 103rd Strike Fighter Squadron. The technological marvel of the F-14’s swing wings captured the imagination of the people who went on to make Macross – compare the F-14 with the VF-1 from the foundational Macross series below:

The VF-2SS is a perennial design touchstone for me as it’s still got strong visual similarities to real life jets like the F-14 but has a more fantastic and ornamental quality to it. Whenever I sit down to design something that evokes elegance and speed, I often find myself cribbing the distinctive dark ridged panel directly behind the cockpit canopy of the VF-2SS, as well as the curved fuselage and the V-shaped main body. It’s entirely fair to say that first and foremost the Achilles is a love letter to this specific design. Ever since my infatuation with Homeworld I’ve preferred science fictional designs that are visually enjoyable from the front, top, and side. The VF-2SS possesses one of the most dynamic side profiles of all the fantasy transforming space fighters from Macross. Like all good creative endeavors, Achilles began life inauspiciously as a product of frustration with what already existed. Freespace is interesting in that it typically features extremely chunky ships, most unsatisfying of which is the GTF Hercules Mark II.

The Hercules II is interesting because it has a very recognizable streamlined fuselage and canopy – it wouldn’t look out of place if you cut that fuselage out and put it on a Macross ship! However it’s body is a lumpy blob with circles on it to suggest missile and gun ports. In terms of gameplay, the Hercules II was sluggish and unresponsive – hardly fitting for its namesake! So the Achilles began life many years ago as a few lines of text in a configuration file for a mod in Freespace Open – without any planned design or shape, it was going to be an iteration on the Hercules. One of my pet peeves I’ve talked about with Freespace is that its missiles have fantastically diverse shapes but all come out of these nondescript ports just like the ones on the Hercules II. So my Achilles design needed wings, if nothing else to serve as mounting points for missiles. Macross came to mind immediately, thinking about that jet like fuselage on the Hercules II, and from there the ship’s basic plan began to take shape.

This leads nicely to the Silpheed. This design is sleek and aggressive when viewed from the front, but with a dynamic shape when viewed from the side – it’s not nearly as flat or planar as you might be lead to believe by the front view.

Just like the VF-2SS, it is clearly evocative of modern jet planes. It has two roughly triangular wing like shapes extending to the side, with a roughly triangular general hull plan. However it’s body is split into a Y shape when viewed from above, and the chunky components have a deliberate lack of streamlining to imply that it’s meant for a space environment. It’s a design full of symbols to explain that it’s futuristic but not so far that it is totally unrecognizable. You might not be able to imagine it plunging into re-entry like the Space Shuttle does, but its white coloring and stubby winglets also evoke that real life vessel as well.

For the Achilles I wanted to tap the Silpheed to channel some of the functional chunkiness of Freespace designs while also bringing in the kind of flashiness that best comes from anime and japanese videogames. The gigantic super cannon’s placement underneath the main body is pure Silpheed, as opposed to over the shoulder like Macross tends to. The in universe predecessor to the Achilles, the Hercules, is a heavy fighter so the split-Y body plan of the Silpheed was also a way to stretch and enlarge the design. It also was a way to add a lot of functional details.

This is cropped from the side view of a previous p3d I’ve posted. I’ve tweaked the linked p3d model to actually load into this exact view. Here we see the side of the split Silpheed style tail of the Achilles, where I’ve placed a number of glowing 0-shaped lateral thrusters. Without any atmosphere to drag against, turning in space requires thrusting. This is meant to allow both turning and lateral sliding while maintaining the same direction of thrust. Those same limbs also mount forward-facing thrusters:

This is because in a vacuum the only way to slow down is by thrusting in your direction of travel. Having engines facing to the front allows a spaceship to slow down without turning around and firing its main, rear-directed thrusters. They can also be used to rotate the ship, by only firing one set. You can also see that the same model of engine in these braking thrusters is used in the main engine modules, seen below.

These backpack structures house the four clusters of engines that provide forward thrust for the ship. The Achilles has between a third to one half strength on its forward thrusters, compared to the big rear thrusters. As the fanproject it was a part of developed, the Achilles acquired more of an identity and more distinctive gameplay: a heavy interceptor, akin to the Cold War era MiG-31 – capable of extreme linear speeds and acceleration to quickly respond to bombers at long range. This is also why the three large fuel tank structures were added in protected locations, slung under the belly and in the backs of the Y-shaped legs of the ship – an attempt, in addition to the abundance of visible engines, to communicate the ship’s role as a long-range, high speed interceptor.

All these screenshots of the actual Achilles model leads nicely to the question: what is Tron doing in the list of inspirations and references here? None of the linked Freespace ships have anything beyond a few small bars of glow on them, so doesn’t the Achilles represent a huge departure from the visual language of the universe? There’s two answers to that. One, Tron looks simply awesome – and the way that it looks awesome is very useful. Everything’s outline is clearly highlighted and easy to track especially against a black background like space. Direction and motion is clearly communicated as well – once you know that unlike most modern jet aircraft everything in Tron is forward swept, you know where everyone is going even without the trails. The second answer is in the enigmatic antagonists of the Freespace universe, the Shivans. I’ve done a fighter of theirs before that I called the Sharabha, The Shivans do use this Tron coloration, and they use it for the exact reasons that I listed above: It makes them identifiable and distinctive for the player of a Freespace game against the dark background of space. They have an eerie, stained-glass pattened glowing red texture across most of their ships:

Within the universe of Freespace, the Shivans are presented as an uncommunicative and eldritch threat. The Shivans make their introduction to the story as humanity is having WWI style dogfights with their local competitor alien species, the Vasudans. Space fighters on both sides look like militarized rocket ships, and the weaponry seems (and feels) primitive – slow firing bolts of light and unguided rockets. Next to that, the first Shivan incursion’s vanguard are fighters with invisible energy fields that render them all but immune to the weapons of either combatant in the Human-Vasudan war, and also render them invisible to the radar technologies of the era.

This is the point where the original Freespace game hooked me, as it was one of gaming’s great moments of raising the stakes. The player’s first encounter with the Shivans is not that hard to survive and you can actually triumph against this foe without too much trouble, but the story sells well the idea that the Shivans come from a far more advanced technological base. They earn their nickname after the capital ship leading their invasion force punches through the entire Vasudan military without any weapon the now desperately co-operating humans and Vasudans have slowing it down. From the Bhagavad-Gita, quoted by Robert Oppenheimer, these antagonists get their name (and by association, a semi-divine quality) “Shivans” after they become destroyers of worlds.

The second game in the franchise opens with a cinematic reinforcing the tone of the whole universe as morbid and stark. Freespace’s antagonists are unknown, uncommunicative, possibly uncaring. They’re straight out of a cosmic horror story – except one of the other things that happens in these games is that (largely) through the heroic action of the player, a number of Shivan ships are captured and some of their technology is reverse engineered and deciphered. So with the Achilles being a product of another generation of technology beyond the first Shivan war, now human ships are starting to more fully resemble those of the Shivans as more and more of their technologies, and presumably their actual components, are used in these ships. Tron-like aesthetics have always been one part of the Freespace universe, just confined to the eldritch antagonists. This Achilles fighter is in part an attempt to depict the evolution towards a more level technological playing field.