A Filtered Lens

Playing with CameraBag.

Scene 4 (WIP)

A work in progress. Need to add some people and vehicles to the shot.

Old Tigress Draft

Found an early design concept for the Tigress.

Azun 20

Rendered in Vue Infinite.

Fly Over

This is a scene I used for a Scout ship before. Thought I'd import my Free Trader, just to see.

Fly By

I thought I'd try using a human figure for this shot.

Rendered in Vue Infinite.

Vue is Becoming My Go-To Traveller Illustrator

Trying out some of Vue Infinite's small spherical planetoids. Took me awhile to re-learn how such objects get generated, because technically they are still ground planes.

More Azun

Someone might know what the floating ball is all about. Having not read the magazine in 30 years, I'd guess it is a... I have no idea what it is. Will have to read up on Azun again.

Rendered World Images for Subsectors

I made world images last night for displaying in subsectors. They were rendered in Vue Infinite at 48x48 before MapGen scaled them to their various world sizes. Lunar Cell helped with the generic hydrographics images. My plan is to customize some of them for certain types of worlds still.

Here is the region near Earth. Now known as Terra.

Coding MapGen for Traveller's Known Space

Spent the day roughing out some of Traveller's known space in Classic Python 2.5 using PyGame 1.9.1 (aka SDL 1.2.13). The big dots are high population worlds. The yellow dot is Reference. Just need to make labels for the sectors, and work on the scroll/zoom bit.

ADDED:

Got my labels going now.

I haven't loaded any Zhodani sectors yet. You can see a blue world or two in the corner so far. I was curious if anyone else thought it was weird how the Zhodani use the same mapping scheme as the Imperium?

AHL Near World 2

An AHL, back in the day. Modeled in Hexagon 1.21. Rendered in Vue 9.5 Infinite. The Ramparts were modeled in Amapi 7.51 Pro. Postwork in CameraBag 2.8.01.

Trillions of Lives

I got a fax today. The '70s wants its starship terminal displays back.

This is exactly how the Far Future looked to me as a kid. With people telling me about the math required in order to play the game. Math I have yet to run into. Because, Far Future.



Here is an up-to-date color chart. The red-named worlds have populations over a trillion.



Some Amara Ships

Some Amara cruisers I decided to do some tweaking with. Modeled in Hexagon. Rendered in modo.

The Starjumper

The Starjumper. The experimental generation starship that a scout crew would discover and investigate. Long thought to have been lost over time.

Rendered in Vue.

From Marc Miller:

Generation Ships carried crew operating the ship over lifetimes: creating and educating new generations who will ultimately explore and colonize new world. For redundancy, the crew is several thousand and devoted tonnage includes renewable and recyclable support (totaling about a third of the total ship tonnage). Payload for the destination is about a third of ship tonnage.

A Generation Ship probably induces centrifugal pseudo-gravity with a spin of 3 RPM (=.7 G). The outer hull, one deck-height high, about two-thirds of the ship length, and for full circumference (600 meters circumference, 200 meters length, 3 meters high) is 360,000 cubic meters or (divide by 13.5) = 26,000 tons. Two such decks have 52,000 tons and can easily support a population of 2,000 to 4,000.

The Number of Gas Giants in a System for T5

The chances for 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4 Gas Giants in a T5 system.

A quick and dirty chart.

Trying Out an Illustration Style

I dragged out my old Carrara 5.1 Pro with WireFrame Pro installed, and imported my Free Trader model to get this illustration look. It's one of the reasons I still have Carrara.

A Re-Mastered Broadsword Vue Scene

Last night, I was looking all over for my Broadsword scenes. Then I realized they were all done virtually instead of locally. I was able to reverse-engineer one of the scenes I did in the past and create imports from it for use in a Vue scene that I had thought I made for this ship in the past.

I guess what I'm saying is, this is my first render in Vue, of this ship, in over a year. A one-pass render with no layered processing, that I normally used Paint Shop Pro for in the past with my Broadsword and Cutter models.

So this Vue scene file here will be my new master to make renders of other scenes from.

More Images

Been adding more images to my Traveller RPG Pinterest.

No Landings Allowed

Looks like I'll be using the start of an old space elevator model as a base for my highport. It will give the Free Trader something to tether onto, or park inside of.

For reasons unknown so far, ships may not be allowed to land on the planet surface. So all trading is done from orbit.

"Cold As Ice" is Her Name

The blue stripe came first. Then the name. Then the dice, rendered in modo.

ADDED:
Orbit shot.

Space Furniture

I been modeling the chairs for the Free Trader I'm working on. Nothing fancy yet. Just need two for the cockpit area.

ADDED:
Got the desk and foot rest installed.

Painting Starships

I'm sitting here thinking what color to paint my Free Trader? The original artwork was B&W, and mostly white. The Traveller far-future looked bright, etc.

I may end up making various paint jobs for this modeled ship. Setting comes first. What is the setting that this ship will be in? How are ships painted in that setting? Were all such ships sold in yellow? What decals do settings glue onto their ships?

For now, I'm just trying out different burn/scratch/pit marks, seeing what jumps out at me for a paint job.

ADDED:
Ok. Found some white paint that wasn't too bright.

MORE ADDED:
Some drafts.

Modeling a Free Trader

I spent a few hours, playing with different apps I have, doing various draft models of the Free Trader. It will be a lo-res model when completed. Something that I don't want to spend more than a couple days on. Which meant Hexagon would be used. Ha!

Amapi Pro is great at NURBS. But it is a terrible box-modeler, which I was finding worked better for this kind of object. I had forgotten that Hexagon does boolean cutting, which speeds up the modeling process as well. I'm hoping I don't have to do too much clean-up work on the mesh, once I'm done cutting chunks out of it.

Because I'm old-school, when it comes to modeling Traveller ships, I tend to use only the first drawing made of a ship for reference. I have no idea what the back or bottom of the Free Trader looks like, because there is only the one image of it in The Traveller Book hardcover on page 64. Maybe I have some notes that I took about that back in the day still. Otherwise, creative license as usual.

Like all models I make, this one will also be done by eyeballing things. No tracing.

ADDED:
An update of the model.

Can't Roll Less Than Five Using 2D6

Ok. So what happens when your 2D6 rolls are less than 5, and you change them to 5? This happens. 28% of the time, you'll get a 5.

Broadsword Candy

Thought I'd try different mixed medium for this pic. Lots of postwork that was done in just one click. I might try a water color filter on the scene next.

Something That Bland Might Have on His Desk

Something that Bland might have on his desk, while he plans his next move.

1970s Storytelling

Playing with Inform 7 and Windows Frotz.

A Traveller Book I Wanted as a Kid

In the late '70s, I had Traveller. And I had a SINCLAIR ZX81. The two went hand-in-hand. And both had very cool books they used. So my dream book, at that time of course, was to have this one.

Mint Condition Traveller LBBs

I'm so tired of seeing images of old beat-up Traveller books on the Internet. So I thought I'd post new-looking ones.

I'll add the last book later. Gotta go get some pizza first.