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THE ART OF PAUL HEGEL

A self-teaching blog and living 3d art portfolio
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Complete Projects September 2021


SUMMER UPDATE: FRIGATE AND BOMBER

 * Post author By talhydras
 * Post date September 6, 2021

09/06/2021 – Well that was quite a break, wasn’t it. Sorry for the delay there!
When I last left off, I had finished up the Freespace fan fighter Achilles,
busted my back, drew a Homeworld fan frigate, and gotten off to a good start on
it.

The problem there was with the belly module – I never could get it looking quite
the way I wanted on its intersection with the main hull. Click the screenshot
below to be taken to a p3d of the frigate as it stands currently. Sharp-eyed
viewers will note a teeny tiny radar dish hovering in space right under the
nose, that’s a detail that will make its way onto the bridge at some point.



I fully intend to finish the ship up the ship at some point. The belly module
issue started from that row of four hatches but as I tried to square away my
concept with my model, I quickly realized there were a number of flaws with the
concept itself. Take a look at the comparison below:

The frigate is by no means unsalvageable, but a lot of decisions have to be made
about what component goes where before it can be resumed. But, that’s only part
of the story.

A variety of projects filled the intervening time – the biggest of which was
another Freespace fan fighter. This time it was a bomber, as opposed to a heavy
interceptor like the Achilles. This bomber is called the Marathon – like the
Achilles, it’s a mix of modern inspirations and classic canonical Freespace
ships. Leading with the goods, click the image below to view it, completed, on
p3d! Or here for an alternate dark environment, showing the lit interior.



Unlike the Tron and anime inspirations for the Achilles, the Marathon draws the
most from the SSV Normandy from the first Mass Effect game. Click the image
below to view it on the source site.



The Normandy SR-1 is a personal favorite of mine for its sleek dynamic profile
that efficiently conveys speed. I never was a fan of how they lengthened the
main hull without increasing any of the other proportions for Mass Effect 2 and
3. The biggest influence on the Marathon is the four limb structure and general
arrowhead shape.

The other big influence on the Marathon was the canonical Freespace stealth
fighter, the Pegasus. Click the image for higher res.



This is where the Marathon gets all its glowy blue pipes, pink lines, and dark
red striping. The Marathon is meant to be less of a transformative breakthrough
of new technologies like the Achilles, and more of a maturation of Freespace 2
era technology. The four large bays are meant to be shielded bomb containers –
in the animated p3d preview of the Marathon, you can see the custom built bombs
it carries.

The Marathon allowed me to really apply a lot of lessons I learned from the
Achilles when it comes to the UV mapping, but it also let me stretch my legs and
try several ambitious things. One of which was a much more detailed interior
compared to the Achilles! Here you can see the modeled pilot’s station, interior
status displays, fire extinguishers, and just barely visible is the hatch that
leads to the living area inside.

One of the key lessons from the Achilles was that if I want to use decals and
labels, I need to ensure that some parts of the UV map aren’t mirrored. So to
accomplish this, I ended up unwrapping the Marathon’s wings and interior first,
doing them as a single substance project. This was critical because Substance
actually makes it very difficult to texture interior surfaces, so several
different projects were required anyways.

The front half of the ship including the fuselage was unwrapped without
mirroring. This enabled me to paint on various blowout panel and access panel
decals, which was quite fun. It was also quite fun to paint in the details for
the main airlock behind the chin turret. The remaining rear half of the ship is
mirrored, like the Achilles – which is why it has a lot less warning text.

The biggest breakthrough came from changing up how I was doing edge weathering
and dust on the main surfaces. I used a lot of techniques in this excellent
video, and those were easily reapplied back to the Achilles. To end on a high
note, one of the earlier projects this summer was taking advantage of p3d’s GLTF
file format to upload animated previews. I’m sure you’ve noticed that the
Marathon has animations showing its various missile bays opening and the wings
animating – in addition to updating the Achilles textures over the course of
about an hour, I was also able to produce a fully animated preview of the ship
on p3d – click the image below!



I’m in the midst of a move, so updating will be sporadic going forwards. But it
will not be as dead as this summer was. Next time, I’ll be discussing the next
project!



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Categories
Uncategorized


KUSHAN FRIGATE – BLOCKED OUT

 * Post author By talhydras
 * Post date May 29, 2021
 * 2 Comments on Kushan Frigate – Blocked Out

05/28/2021 – All right, finished up with a blockout of the Kushan frigate. If
the biggest lesson of the Achilles was texture early and often, the lesson of
this frigate is shaping up to be ‘don’t start any project without orthographic
views’. That said, click the image below to go to a p3d view of the frigate as
it stands right now.



It’s wildly different quality as you go across the hull, with the finished
airlock and turning jets, the nicely detailed bridge section, and the still
ultra-rough rear.

The next steps will be finishing up the belly module block-in so that the
hatches I’ve modeled but not actually positioned yet can be textured. The p3d
has one, and only one, awkwardly placed on the left side of the belly module
right now. I doubt they’ll be part of any kinds of animations in a Homeworld
game, but part of the joy of starship design is adding in functional details.
After that, those hatches and the dorsal antenna will get unwrapped and textured
next week.



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Categories
Complete Projects May 2021


FRIGATE AND ACHILLES UPDATES

 * Post author By talhydras
 * Post date May 18, 2021

05/18/2021 – Between another member of the Freespace community’s comments about
the Achilles’ big belly weapons bay and my collaborator on the Warmachine
project wishing he could have more small missiles, I took a brief detour to make
another weapons system for it. Freespace Open can only support four different
secondary weapons equipped to a craft, so that meant that with two different
sets of stanchions for the heavy missiles, and the big belly gunpod, there was
only one ‘bank’ available for lighter missiles. My collaborator would rather
have preferred an option for more of the lighter swarm missiles at times, so we
got to talking – what about a giant missile pod? A few days later and I’ve
whipped it up successfully. Below is a render with the weapon equipped in its
belly hardpoint (click for full resolution).

Click here to be view this model on p3d, and click here to see the missile bay
amongst all the other weapons created for this fighter.

There’s also been some progress on the project I’d like to be focused on
currently, the Kushan Ion Frigate (click for full resolution).

A number of issues with perspective on the initial sketch have dragged things to
a slowdown, but there will be more progress and details to show off soon! You
can see on the belly module there’s faintly visible an intricately modeled hatch
I’m looking forward to getting textured, and the bridge module is feeling quite
close to how I imagined it. The firing assembly at the nose still needs work of
course, but for now it’s making progress.



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Categories
May 2021


ION FRIGATE – FIRST STEPS

 * Post author By talhydras
 * Post date May 11, 2021

05/11/2021 – I’ve gotten started on the Homeworld frigate I concepted out over
the last two days. It’s a concept that’s been kicking around my head for an
embarassingly long time, so I’d taken stabs at it in the past. Here’s the
current progress:

The firing assembly at the nose is a holdover from one of the more recent
attempts before starting to teach myself Maya. As is obvious, the turning
thruster and airlock hatch details once completed got textured – they’re only
256×256 textures so they’re tiny. The engine in particular is probably really
only about 128×256 so they’re going to be exceedingly easy to pack into whatever
larger composite I need to make but for now are each their own independent
texture. I’m not quite sure how to get the feel of Homeworld style textures in
substance just yet, so they’re a bit experimental, and I would not be shocked if
I had to update them later on when I narrow some things down. The remaining
untextured hull has the ambient occlusion on it to help it be a bit less of a
formless blob. I used a multiplier to make it gray instead of white.

The terracing along the side of the main hull here was accomplished largely
through boolean operations instead of by inserting edges or verts and moving
things around, too, which has yielded nice even results. I’m hoping to finish up
the big armored clamshell tomorrow and then keep moving backwards on the hull to
try and rough out all the shapes before getting too deep on any REALLY
complicated component. No matter what shape the final frigate is, these turning
thrusters and airlocks can easily be reused.



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Categories
Complete Projects May 2021


ACHILLES COMPLETE

 * Post author By talhydras
 * Post date May 6, 2021

05/06/2021 – The Achilles is the most ambitious project I’ve done as an amateur,
and any time you push the limits you learn a lot. To keep it so the good stuff
is up front, here’s links to three different p3d views of the fighter. The first
two are with the wings open, in a dark space environment and in a lighter
environment, and the third is with the wings closed. Click each thumbnail to be
linked directly to the p3d! Do note that you can see through the cockpit floor
through the bottom of the fuselage, this is a p3d bug not a feature.

The most important lesson I learned is that it is FAR easier to composite
together multiple complete texture sheets like I did for the missiles than it is
to unwrap and texture an object as complex as the Achilles in one go. When it
came time to unwrap the main fighter itself my main goal was maximum quality –
but I went about it all wrong. Let me break it down.

 1. I decided I wanted to maximize the amount of surface area on the unwrapped
    texture each component had. To do this I decided to split the fighter
    straight down the middle, unwrap one side, then mirror it across to get the
    other side. This meant giving up on any of the text decals I had so much fun
    with on the missiles. This is a bad approach because it leads to
    butterflying along the centerline. Much of that I was able to fix up but
    there’s still visible seams right down the centerline.
 2. I also wanted everything scaled properly to each other. This was an
    absolutely enormous delay, not to mention a task that sapped my desire to
    keep working on the project because it took ages to get Maya to unwrap
    without the program’s unwrap algorithm literally crashing. It would
    regularly reach some arbitrary limit for how many UV shells it could handle
    and then just dump the rest in a pile somewhere on the map.
 3. After that ordeal I decided I didn’t want to spend ages stitching together
    UV shells. I was anxious to get into Substance and start painting. From
    before I started doing anything in Substance to after I declared victory, I
    was still editing and fixing things in Maya as a consequence. Worst of all,
    Maya’s unwrap feature often splintered contiguous surfaces and scattered
    them around the map. In order to take advantage of modern textures’
    mipmapping Substance will automatically grow the contents of a UV shell out
    to the boundary of the next UV shell. This would have been fine had all my
    UV shells been fairly comparable in size, but since Maya made lots of tiny
    splinters scattered around the ship often this meant dark regions were next
    to glowing regions. Also pursuant to point 1, I wanted to maximize my usage
    of space, so I told Maya to pack things with one pixel of padding between
    them. Maya’s smart, I thought. Maya can do that. That is a thing that can be
    done, I said confidently to myself.

Putting that all together, the ship is marred by a variety of obnoxious little
flaws. If you look in the large open weapons bay you’ll see that meticulously
modeled armature bizarrely speckling. That’s because of the issue I alluded to
in point 3 above – a lot of those armature shells are next to glowing regions
and they’re so tiny compared to the size of a pixel even on the Achilles’s
gigantic 4k map, they get little bits of glowing blue on them. And this
automatic spread between the shells is not something I can hardcode or edit, so
the only way to mitigate it is erasing the blue on the neighbor that’s too
close! While researching the problem I often found advice recommending padding
distances of ten pixels between shells, as opposed to my incredibly optimistic 1
pixel boundary!

So how could I have done that better? What are the lessons to take home from
this project?

 1. Once a complicated component is more or less finished – especially in a
    project like the Achilles with lots of transforming parts – it’s critical to
    consider unwrapping it completely and texturing it right then and there.
    This leads to enjoyable incremental progress and breaks the unwrapping step
    down into manageable chunks. I should have unwrapped the upper wing and
    lower wing together so that they were scaled correctly to each other. Then I
    could have applied what symmetry I wanted to and really gone to town on just
    those two objects. Then, once I had the engine modules, even though the
    upper and lower modules have different bases I could have taken the common
    geometry and unwrapped that, texturing that to completion. The success I had
    with compositing the missiles together into one texture sheet shows that
    getting perfectly accurate scaling between missiles or in this hypothetical
    example regions of the ship isn’t necessary – I guessed well enough with my
    texture sizes that none of the missiles look particularly low res compared
    to the rest. There’s no reason I needed to unwrap the internal structure of
    those weapon bays at the same time as the rest of the fighter as those will
    be rarely seen details.
 2. I should have broken apart the main body of the fighter in thirds. I should
    have mirrored the wings and the flat chassis of the fighter around a unified
    fuselage, instead of simple left/right mirrored symmetry. This would have
    been only slightly less inefficient than what I chose, and had I spent the
    time to stitch together the regions that Maya shattered that would have led
    to better results, without the obnoxious mirroring line down the center. It
    would also have given me a region that was not left/right symmetric to put
    plenty of the “danger” signs that I so enjoy.
 3. If I hadn’t done any of that, what I could have done is use Maya’s layout
    tool to generate square regions that were comparable to each other and then
    scaled them by hand. Again using the interiors of the weapons bay as an
    example, I could have just selected all those faces in Maya and used the
    Layout command to fill an arbitrary square sheet with them, then dragged
    them away from the rest of the fighter and simplify that way.

While working on the Achilles I regularly ran into problems with the ambient
occlusion as well and that was because it will be in multiple different poses
when fully implemented in Freespace, so the amount of light reaching a surface
is not always consistent. I ended up saving out the ship with its wings closed
or its missile bays closed and then generating fresh AO maps and hand
compositing them together in a best-fit arrangement. Had I declared the wings
“done” and then textured them in Substance and then moved on, they wouldn’t have
the shadows cast by the rest of the fighter initially baked into them. This is a
double edged sword and I suspect I would have needed to spend a few hours fixing
up the same AO problems no matter what approach I had taken.

Final thoughts – I am incredibly excited to move on to something different.
Having a detailed concept for the Ion Frigate will hopefully mean I spend less
time trying to come up with interesting shapes within Maya like I did for the
Achilles. It’ll also be a great testbed for the lessons I’ve learned from the
Achilles, where I’ll want to split it in thirds and mirror the left third across
the center third for an efficient but asymmetric texture. Plus Homeworld is how
I got started with artwork so it will be an adventure – but that’s for later.
For now, I’m thankful I aimed so high with the Achilles. I never would have
really learned just how important it is to have semi regularly topology unless
I’d tried to make it shiny like a car (or more accurately like its Tron
inspirations). I never would have learned that there are serious practical
limitations to Maya’s UV layout tools had I not relied too heavily on them for
the Achilles. There’s a lot to be said for learning from others, but one of the
best ways to learn is by trying on one’s own and I’m glad I did so for this
project. Thanks for your patience!



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Categories
April 2021


ION FRIGATE – CONCEPT

 * Post author By talhydras
 * Post date April 2, 2021
 * 1 Comment on Ion Frigate – Concept

04/02/2021 – So, a week ago my back gave out again and I found myself needing to
do more standing and moving around and stretching and a lot less sitting and
modeling. That meant standing and drawing, so without further ado I present a
preview of the next project, the Ion Frigate:

I ended up drawing this over about ten sessions based on how my back felt at the
time. The upshot of that is that I got to make a fun little progress time lapse
of the intermediate stages of development. With my back largely healed it will
be time to try to finish up the Achilles geometry and progress to texturing it.



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Categories
March 2021


ACHILLES – COCKPIT

 * Post author By talhydras
 * Post date March 22, 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.



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Categories
March 2021


ACHILLES – BELLY WINGLET

 * Post author By talhydras
 * Post date March 19, 2021

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.





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Categories
March 2021


ACHILLES – WEAPONS BAY DETAIL

 * Post author By talhydras
 * Post date March 18, 2021

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!



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Categories
March 2021


ACHILLES WEAPONS BAY REFINEMENTS

 * Post author By talhydras
 * Post date March 17, 2021

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.





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