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March 2021

Achilles – Weapon Bay Armatures

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.

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Complete Projects March 2021

Achilles – Weapons Complete

03/13/2021 – I started work on another post about some more design and inspiration elements on the Achilles when I realized I wasn’t quite happy with the shape of the ventral gunpod. That took a great deal of focus for less visible change than I wanted. I also cleaned up the topology on the cockpit canopy, which mostly just means straightening out the contours so that they’re more regular.

To make up for all that humdrum slight change, I also textured the last modular component of the ship – the two large ventral gunpods. Here’s a link to the armaments compilation p3d including the newly textured gunpods. They were a fun challenge as the most complicated shapes I’ve tackled with Substance so far. Since they are the most powerful direct fire weapons these fighters can mount, they deserved a bit more pageantry and detail. I had a lot of fun with the panels and stripes – channeling a bit of Homeworld in them. I wanted to make sure they were recognizable from multiple angles and that they shared a common chassis. Click the render below to be linked to a p3d model of the whole fighter:

Here is a direct link to a higher resolution version of the above render. I made a second render below, clicking that render will link to the higher resolution there as well. Both are taking advantage of Maya’s excellent raytracing – we’re getting close to the time where I can start unwrapping the fighter.

I’m still not entirely happy with the gunpod mounting. I think it needs a more complicated retraction mechanism, perhaps based on a scissor lift. The appeal of that sort of shape is that it would fill the negative space when viewed from the side while the gunpod mount is open. I’ll try to mock up something in the next few days.

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March 2021

Achilles Design

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.

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February 2021

Achilles – Rounding a Corner

02/26/2020 – So progress has been intermittent, as has been the unintended theme of this month. However, I do have some nice things to show off so thank you for your patience!

First of all, I found the actual Substance Painter to Maya’s Arnold Renderer pipeline documentation which allowed me to make a very nice render of my work in progress as of several days ago. Click it to see it in full size.

The associated p3d model of that render is here. The emphasis is on the textured stanchions and the rendered out textures on the hull. That led to a kind of lesson – it takes several hours for me to auto-generate a UV, fix up model errors, and then pack it down and render it out. Additionally, the next day I’ve consistently lost a lot of information in my materials – basically I need to reassign the glowing tron lines. After this last render it was several more hours work fixing this.

The lesson this teaches me is that between the time it takes to make a nicely rendered flat texture for the hull, and the time it takes to fix things afterwards is not worth the results. So I decided to cut that out for now, and try to refocus not on making pretty renders of WIP models, but try to take the model towards the finish line.

With that in mind, the next step was clearing up some of the edges on the engine backpack modules and adding another glowing line to highlight the contours. I also started work integrating the lower main body with the upper main body. I put in some rather bland looking chunky hydraulics, as the “mouth” just opens up vertically. I’m hoping to improve that look a little bit, but for now everything actually fits together and respects space as it moves around. I also added a few extra detail pieces to the big gunpods, in preparation for texturing those. So you can see, the p3d is not looking much worse – just missing the lovely reflections from the Maya render. Click the screenshot below to check it out on p3d.

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February 2021

Day 23 – Slow going

02/12/2021 – To follow up on last week, the problem was something I was able to eventually find but not fully resolve. The issue was this: Maya can animate UV coordinates, and will distort the unwrapped textures on the unwrapped texture sheet. I discovered this by comparing the open and closed version of the fighter from last week. I control the animation on the timeline bar, I’ve keyframed those animations. When I would close the fighter’s wings and play all the other animations, the UV map would distort horribly. When I would wind time back, it would restore itself.

There was no solution that could be deployed to fix that. I needed to delete the history of all of these objects after UVing them, except that would break the connections needed for the animation. Unfortunately that means there’s no good way to bake the texture for use on two different objects quite like I would want. I had to ultimately bake both models separately. Click the render to view a p3d of the result:

The rest of this week was one with limited progress. I did however start experimenting with SpeedCut, and I think that was pretty exciting for more intricately detailed surfaces. The Achilles will likely never need anything near that complex – at least not for its exterior. SpeedCut might come in handy if I wanted to do the cockpit interior. For a project like the Achilles fighter, the camera will never be close enough and the action never slow enough or on a big enough screen for me to need to model in the finest of panel lines. I did, however, spend some time working on the interior of the “shoulder”, where the wing animates. I did end up using SpeedCut for that as well, though it’s admittedly difficult to see.

Below is a link to a p3d of just the new wings – you’ll note I’ve aligned the reverse thruster there with the shoulder. There’s also included the main stumbling block this week, which was been getting stanchions for the missiles that I like the look of and also work with all the animations. I suspect I will need to do yet another version of it before we’re done, but it’s been demoralizing to keep plugging in concepts I like that don’t work with the existing model.

I’m going to try to experiment more with addons and plugins for Maya this coming week and write more regularly about what’s interesting there, as well as continuing to work on the Achilles.

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February 2021

Day 22 – Many Small Lessons

02/03/2021 – One of the exciting things about the Freespace Achilles fighter project is that it’s really pushing the bounds of what I know and forcing me to think intensely about how to accomplish things. It also is full of rather grim Maya learning experiences. I’ll start with the goods: click the render below to go to a p3d that contains the Achilles in both its open and closed configurations:

So what happened with the lower fighter? Well, the plan had been to better showcase my work on the internal missile bays and with the animation by having the two ships side by side. However, there’s a catch. Part of dealing with Maya is that it’s important to regularly clear history on an object – Maya remembers everything that has been done to an object and shows you a projection of what would result of that. This gives you an unprecedented ability to ctrl-z your way out of a disaster, but it can also lead to what can only be described as ‘chaotic’ behavior and regular crashes. However, deleting history also involves deleting the connections within the Maya file structure that define animated movement.

Add to that, I wanted to bake the glows and ambient occlusion into the texture for the p3d preview. However, Maya has an upper limit for how many objects it will allow you to unwrap onto the same sheet at once, so I need to merge all of my subobjects in order to unwrap them. And I had a bunch of missiles and energy weapons in the file that had already been unwrapped and textured that I wanted to not re-unwrap, despite the fact that they were all mixed into the file structure along with the objects I wanted to merge together. On top of this already complicated problem, I also had set up the big wings such that there was no way to unlink the missiles from them at all – that’s why they’re not there on the folded up version below.

Another thing that happened to make all of this even more challenging was regular crashes attempting to clean up the mesh, linked primarily to a huge number of extraneous verts that I had inadvertently added. And as you can see, all of my efforts to unwrap the Achilles and duplicate it within the scene were for naught, because sometime between creating the duplicate, posing the duplicate, and freezing transformations, the unwrapping somehow got lost. I had unwrapped the original completely and mirrored it, and confirmed that the unwrapping for the complete object was working – after all, the top fighter looks fine! I’m chalking that one up to an unfortunate Maya bug. Instead of tilting at that windmill for another few hours, I decided to keep moving for the rest of the week. To sum up that unfortunate series of events, here’s a list of lessons learned:

  • Extra verts added through a subdivide can be painlessly removed by bandboxing an object and just deleting. Maya won’t remove anything required to define an edge
  • Maya’s Multi-cut has options to delete at various origin planes – for example, when trying to cut the fuselage in half I tried to use the cut-YZ plane button, except that targets the middle of the object, not the x=0 YZ plane. The way around this is to use it to target as close as possible the actual x=0 plane and then merge the resulting verts together.
  • However, we can also take advantage of this behavior from Multi-cut. All I really want is exactly half of the fighter, so if I have overlapping geometry as long as it’s centerpoint is at x=0, the cut-YZ plane button is going to work perfectly without any workarounds needed.
  • Never attempt to Boolean together complicated geometry as Maya will regularly vanish your geometry altogether instead of combining it.
  • Always cleanup and merge any geometry before attempting unwraps, as the automatic layout tools don’t know what to do with zero-length edges that cleanup will often generate when fixing nonmanifold geometry.
  • Since transform nodes are preserved when combining objects, you can combine multiple objects that animate around each other and preserve the object hierarchy. Be sure to always animate transform nodes, and never geometry itself, because you can drag and drop new geometry onto transform nodes without having to redo animation work.
  • Never ever parent geometry to geometry

The split tail is pretty much done, though there’s a bit more to be done at the intersection of the lower aft hull and the split tail. The next big steps are going to be redoing the wings, and then likely unwrapping and texturing the two big gun pods. One of the regular crashes that occurred while attempting to unwrap last night was with one of the big guns, as it is composed of many subobjects for various panels. Until next time!

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January 2021

Day 21 – January Update

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!

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Complete Projects December 2020

Day 20 – Shadowhawk Missile

12/23/2020 – Well! After getting my feet wet with the Spectre missile yesterday, today I decided to try and do the other, heavier missile mounted on the Achilles fighter. Substance is an absolute joy to use – I wish I could export certain types of configurations from one project to another, but I’m still learning the program.

My previous warnings of updating less frequently while traveling are likely to come into effect from here on in – but if I finish things I’ll be sure to post them as long as I am able. Click the screenshot below to take a look at the completed missile in p3d!

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December 2020

Day 19 – Spectre Missile

12/22/2020 – I’ve gotten less done than I’d like over the weekend due to a health issue that I expect to be resolved in a few weeks – I still intend to work over the holiday but I expect to make one post a week instead of two as I previously targeted. My apologies. To shake things up a bit, I decided to take one of the remodeled missiles on the last p3d link and explore texturing with Substance.

The below link is the result of about six hours of work or so – Substance is perfectly good at painting detail lines in normal maps but I decided to make a (relatively) high poly version of the missile instead and bake its details onto the texture. The resulting model is not flawless – this wouldn’t work on the big screen for example, not without a higher resolution to reduce some of the weirdness with the way the unwrapping.

But, after all is said and done, Substance is a simply awesome tool that allows for some really, really gorgeous work to be done in a big hurry. I wish it had rectangular and polygonal marquee tools so I could precisely apply materials to fixed regions, but that’s not a big problem. Click the screenshot below to take a look at the p3d model of the missile with the new texture:

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December 2020

Day 18 – GTF Achilles Part IV

12/18/2020 – Was out of commission for the vast majority of yesterday so I didn’t get as much done this week as I wanted. Nevertheless, the direct fire weapons have been modeled and placed onto the model, and I remodeled the older missile models. There wasn’t really anything wrong with the older missiles, they were just fairly poly intensive for details that could be easily implemented with Substance painter. I also modeled up a heavy anti-ship missile and used a more intelligent technique to unwrap the fighter.

On the previous SF Shahraba project I manually unwrapped the ship. While discussing it with other Freespace fans, they mentioned my hand packing of the ship was not as efficient and that for any modern texturing process using Substance, I’d need a tool to automatically unwrap it. Something I’ve been doing on this current project is whipping up quick p3d models that nonetheless have efficient texture mapping. Today I realized the method I’d been using for automatic unwrapping was highly inefficient: I was mirroring the fighter, then telling Maya to automatically unwrap and pack everything. This resulted in no stacked identical details, so the top of both wings had to share the same texture sheet. This time I reversed the steps: I unwrapped everything, arranged the pieces, then mirrored the symmetrical details. The results speak for themselves in the p3d model linked below: the texture detail around the gun muzzles and on the deferred lighting in particular is a lot better quality. Since I haven’t split the fuselage in half nor the belly gunpod, it’s not quite double quality – but it’s a huge improvement. Click the render below to go to the p3d file to check it out.