insects cause spaceship crash

I’ve been doing more work on the crashed spaceship image that I started yesterday.

The poor player character, depicted in this role-playing game illustration, just isn’t having any luck. First his spaceship crashes on an uninhabited and rocky moon orbiting some frozen planet at the outer reaches of the game universe, and then when he goes out to try and repair some of the damage he is attacked by a swarm of red-eyed droid insects. Of course these little attack droids were probably the cause of the spaceship’s problems in the first place.

This is the sort of thing that is always happening to player characters, whose game master decides that he wants them to crash land on a deserted planetoid and have ab adventure. It’s not fair, but it can’t be avoided. If the game master didn’t make players crash, there is no way they would voluntarily land on this type of inhospitable rock otherwise. Although of course it is mostly science fiction role playing games like GURPS Space where this sort of thing happens.

The insects in the image are produced using Blender, which is working great for me now on my Ubuntu laptop with a Radeon mobility graphics card thanks to the graphics card driver produced by xorg edgers. They are then loaded into GIMP where I messed with the hue and saturation to make them look rusty instead of radioactive, which had the happy side effect of turning the evil little bugs’ eyes red.

Droid Swarm

Stage 2 of the damaged spaceship image here

The great thing is that, because the image is saved on lots of different layers in GIMP, I can work on the 3D model some more in Blender and reimport it and replace the old one with the new. I have set the picture on a crashed spaceship on an asteroid or small moon. Something which happens a lot to the characters in your average role-playing game.

Using Blender to create the little insect droids gives them a very mechanical look, especially compared to the more organic look of the painted spaceman and mountains in the background. Of course by that logic I should also do the crashed spaceship in Blender too, to make sure it has that mechanical look of far future super high-tech stuff.

The background is still very much a sketch in this first image – and the deep space that our player character is adventuring in is just an abstract expanse of green. I’ll liven that up with some green glowing planets and nebula, and perhaps some other space hazards, that the wrecked spaceship crashed into. Perhaps a green ring around the moon, which could even be the droid insect swarm in space waiting for unsuspecting spaceships to come by.

This is a screenshot of the link she had designed for her illustration website…

portfolio link

…as it appears in the blog sidebar. And here is the image block I created, inspired by the one I saw at Luckhaus’s site.

portfolio link image

It’s amazing how much of a sense of the full size images it is possible to get from such tiny thumbnails. Each thumbnail in the matrix of images is only about 40×40 pixels. You can now see the link image in the navigation bar to the left of this post. I hope it will be very tempting, and make you want to visit the main portfolio site.

The images in the matrix are from left to tight, top to bottom;

A mecha – a giant robot design for use in games such as Mechwarrior, Battletech and GURPS. This example is small and swift – little more than a suit of power armour really.

A 3D spaceship – the mesh and renders were created using Blender over the course of several months. The 3D spaceship model is available for download and use on a creative commons attribution license.

A spacewoman – a character for other players to meet as part of a sci-fi role-playing game adventure, or for readers and viewers to experience as part of a book, film or animation.

A lost penguin – a fun illustration, perhaps for a children’s book or other more light-hearted medium.

An illustration of a close encounter – possibly a scene from a sci-fi novel. The astronaut has already been hypnotised by the strange alien being and is in grave danger.

A spacesuit concept sketch – the very early stages of producing the design for some futuristic power armour for use in sci-fi settings, as part of games, animations or comic books etc. The equipment used by characters in these fictional far-future settings goes a long way towards telling you who they are.

A spaceship concept for a game – an initial pencil sketch turned into concept art using MyPaint. This page has both the original pencil sketch (with a few colours and a starscape added in GIMP) and the more finished concept painting done with MyPaint. The difference that can be made to an image using this free painting program is truly amazing.

A dinosaur – a quick sketch done for an art challenge website, but one which I think turned out well.

An elephant – an illustration for a children’s book character. This was done exclusively in GIMP using a Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet, and I think it shows that GIMP can hold it’s own against even dedicated painting apps.

A sci-fi transport – a moon buggy speeding along the surface of an ice moon. This is the sort of artists impression that would be a nice addition to a set of role-playing game rules.

A robot spider – actually a repair drone clinging to the side of a spaceship waiting to spring into action and deal with faults, damage and even intruders. It’s the sort of thing that could make it more difficult for players to board a spaceship they encounter while playing a role-playing game.

A monster – a concept sketch (just the raw pencils) for a monster that might be encountered as part of a sci-fi or fantasy game.

A derelict spaceship – or is it just running silent and lying in wait. The page includes the illustration for this spaceship design and the staistics needed to use it in the GURPS role-playing game sci-fi setting.

An aircar – the sort of thing agents of the future use to travel from scene to scene of their adventures, be they in film, fiction or gaming.

A spaceship dogfight – two sister spaceships vie for advantage in some far-future conflict.

Stay on target!

I’m really enjoying discovering what MyPaint can do. I’m enjoying it so much that it is stopping me from playing with Alchemy, the other free art app I just found and downloaded. I’m painting a spaceship with it. The image still has to be tidied up in GIMP, but that isn’t deterring me at all.

I’m very pleased with the way the concept-art-looking image for the spaceship turned out. The 3D render is blending in with the painted background quite well to give a real feel of action and adventure.

I am imagineering the background to a game for these sci-fi illustrations that I’m doing. I’ve decided on a game as the imaginary product of this work, because there will eventually be just too much to fit into a movie or animation. The concept art needed for a movie – though quite extensive – will pale in comparison to the art needed for my game. The game is of course imaginary (and will hopefully remain that way – I’d hate to have to come up with the boring bits required to make the idea work, such as computer code, rules and game balance).

It’s all I can do to find time to daub half-heartedly at my graphics tablet now and again. Doing something clever with Java or some table-top rules on top of that to get the game to actually work in the real world would be just too much to ask. But just because this game (I’m calling it Tarazet) is just imaginary, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t enjoy coming up with the concept illustrations for it. It’s good practice, and it’s the sort of thing I’ve always been into. Of course there’ll always be time for some other more ‘out there’ stuff too.

First I opened the render in GIMP and removed the background white colour. I added an alpha channel to the layer (to enable transparency), selected the white bits with ‘colour select’ and then clicked ‘clear’ to get rid of the white area and replace it with a transparent background instead.

transparent background for spaceship image

In this screen shot GIMP is telling me the background is transparent by giving it the grey checkers pattern that has become standard across image processing and painting software.

Then I saved this as a png file (png supports transparency) and loaded the file into MyPaint. Then with MyPaint I could add background and foreground detail on different layers to start building up a concept art style image of the spaceship.

Watch out for those rocks!

Refering to my little ‘Doug Chiang’ pdf is inspirational in this process of course, along with a lot of other reference and tutorials from around the web. There is still a long way to go with this illustration of course, but it wouldn’t be a blog without these glimpses behind the scenes and progress reports. At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

spaceship needs concept art techniques

This spaceship picture got to a state that I like quite quickly, but it didn’t look very concept arty. It looked crisp and it was easy to see what it is but when I look at concept art tutorials things are more expressionist (if they are showing Jackass at the Museum of Modern Art, then I can use the word expressionist about about sci-fi concept art). There are more details but they are indistinct, and there is an awful lot more going on with the light.

So I grabbed up the stylus of my graphics tablet, opened my work in progress file in GIMP, added a layer and started to do more digital painting.

A lot of the concept art tutorials I have come across so far actually use Photoshop rather than GIMP, but they are probably written by well paid digital artists who are working on concept art for movies and games. I don’t only use GIMP because it is better for people on a budget (being free) but because I actually quite like GIMP too, I’ve use Photoshop before and I prefer the quick loading small size of GIMP. That’s actually quite important on my very limited spec lappy. Anyway back to the art.

first new concept art effect

A lot of the tutorials talk about the effect of atmosphere between you and distant objects making the background of the painting recede and the foreground pop out.

Of course space doesn’t have any atmosphere, but I though it might be possible to produce a similar effect by putting a new layer with some black ‘space’ between the foreground spaceship and background planet.

There might not be any scientific basis for it but it is a really nice effect and it really helps the spaceship to grab your attention. The spaceship becomes the star of whatever movie or game the concept art is intended for. In this instance the ‘game’ in development is a fake called Tarazet the role-playing game, just for the sake of argument.

spaceship really ‘pops’ now

Now there still isn’t enough going on with the light, so I decided to darken the spaceship considerably, but leave the edge where the reflected light of the planet it is fleeing hits it really bright.

the shadows ar maybe a wee bit too dark

Oh no! To the untrained eye it looks like the painting is ruined, but the shadows that seemed to have swamped everything else are in fact on a separate layer. I just turn down the opacity on that layer to get the shadows just the intensity I want.

opacity slider

Here I’ve turned the opacity down to 78.9%. This is still very opaque and not a lot of the detail of the painting on the layer below shows through this dark shadow, but this really helps the image.

Suddenly in contrast the edge of the spaceship looks eye-hurtingly bright, just the way it would appear in the harsh environment of space. I’ll keep on working like this, probably adding some lights in the spaceship window etc and post the finished image at its concept-art page on my website. (When it’s done.)

spaceship with deep shadow

more detailed spaceship

It’s difficult to get the lines I draw on the UV texture to look precise. They seem to end up being very pixelated and blurry.

That’s OK I guess in an image that I might just use as the basis for a digital painting that I work into with GIMP but they are a bit too indistinct to stand on their own when they are just rendered or used in a game. I’m going to have to go googling about for an answer to that little problem.

spaceship from more dramatic angle

Here’s the spaceship from a more dramatic angle. Here the lines on the spaceship are still looking blurry, perhaps I’ll have to use a texture jpeg with bigger dimensions, but the only problem with that is that it tends to slow down and crash my computer to work on anything over 3000 pixels to a side. Or perhaps I can increase the resolution. I’ll keep experimenting and see if I can work out a fix.

I’ve also been reading about some other stages that might be required, like baking rust and weathering into the texture. I’m going to have to discover some shortcuts to UV unwrapping and painting textures.

I’m getting a little frustrated with this simpler model and I’m looking forward to getting back to the more complex spaceship model. I’ve started a work in progress thread at the Blender Artists forums for the more complex model to try and get some advice from the Blender experts that hang out there.

a backdrop of stars

The textures I’m creating in GIMP are starting to look good. The more detail I build up in the colours and bump map the more this abstract torpedo shape is starting to look like an honest-to-goodness spaceship. I’ve changed the background of my renders from white to a nice starscape so I can better judge the spaceship colours against the sort of background it will have in any finished illustrations.

I’m particularly pleased with the bumpmap. A very simple image of a few black lines painted in GIMP can have quite a big effect on the surface of the 3D spaceship model. It’s a real easy way to add greebles. I can’t add anything really complex this way, such as antennas or dishes bit I can add access panels and hull plates, lots and lots of hull plates. I think I’m even going to be able to suggest features like airlocks. I’m sure going to have a go. I’m using my Bamboo graphics tablet, and it’s a lot of fun sketching stuff free-hand that will be added by the magic of Blender to the surface of the model in the finished image.

At the back of my mind is also the thought that even though this is a very simple model it might end up looking good enough to be offered to the Vega Strike community to be used in their game, or to be put up on my 3D portfolio website, in the 3D spaceship models section. I certainly hope so, but it’s not for sure as it really is quite a basic underlying model.

The whole thing has been produced using only GIMP and Blender, oh and of course lots of Googling every time I came to a problem. About every time I’ve been working on this image there has been something I couldn’t work out how to do.

Next step, more greebles, more colours and more lights in the scene. It’s getting a bit dark with that starscape background now.

the UV unwrap of the spaceship

OK! I finally got to the end of a UV Unwrap. This is where you take a 3D model and peel it like an orange, so you can paint on the peel (the UV unwrap) and wind it back on. Because my model is a spaceship my UV unwrap doesn’t look much like an orange peel, it looks more like a paper pattern that you could glue together to make a model. In fact if I added tabs to the cut-out sections you could probably do just that, but it’d be a bit fiddly.

So when I open this image in GIMP (GIMP turns it from SVG to JPEG but that seems to be expected) I can paint pretty colours on it and then wrap it back round the model in Blender. This gives the 3D model colours much more controllably than is possible in Blender itself. [I might be wrong about that part, I just found out that Blender has an integrated paint program too - integrated paint program, integrated video editor and of course all the 3D tools, is there anything this amazing open-source application can't do?]

OK so after fooling around in GIMP for a couple of minutes I had a very basic coloured image, just as a test.

Looks like modern art!

I’ve left the lines indicating the shape of the cut-out areas of the spaceship as ghostly shadows so it’s a little more obvious what’s going on in this image. I just turned down the layer they are on in GIMP to achieve this, normally I would turn this layer off entirely before getting GIMP to make a JPEG of course.

And here’s what it looks like if I wrap these simple colours round the spaceship.

The spaceship gets a new paint job

And this technique isn’t just useful for colours, I can add shadows, bumps and grooves and lots of other stuff this way. So the next task is to see how good I can get this relatively simple model to look using these techniques, before transferring them to my much more complex 3D spaceship model.

I had never heard of Zeropunctuation, but someone from the Vega Strike community noticed it and tipped me off in the forums. Of course I immediately dropped everything and went looking for it.

It turns out that Zeropunctuation is a part of the Escapist website where they do a sort of video blogcast that reviews games. It’s funny in a video games magazine sort of way (I’m talking about the humour, anyone who has ever read a video mag will immediately recognise the nerdy, childish humour) but it has a strange format, they don’t seem to have any visuals from the games they review, just these yellow background animations.

When I read in the forum that a picture of my spaceship had been used I assumed they were reviewing Vega Strike (the game the spaceship is intended for), but it’s actually a review of another game entirely. And the reviewer hates the game, which I think always makes for the most entertaining reviews.

He really lays into the game and finds fault with the plot, the game play, the concepts and all kinds of other stuff. It’s really quite entertaining, and for me there’s the added pleasure of seeing my spaceship suddenly turn up and disappear again about half way through.

I still haven’t finished this spaceship though. I’ve reached the uv unwrap stage, but it is turning out to be quite a difficult task, so I’m practising a uv unwrap on a much simpler spaceship first, like a doctor practices giving injections with an orange.