CRS-4 General Purpose Droid

As part of my efforts to re-design the world of Pale Black, one of the first major asset I dumped and rebuilt from scratch is the security droid. After some painful contemplation, I have decided that the previous version looked too...what's that word..."anime"-like. Sure it looked aggresive, but considering that it's purpose on the station was to protect the onboard population, I couldn't have it look as if it was going to rip out your spine whenever it was coming at you.

So, taking some pointers from real world robot designs, I came up with something more subdued and neutral. Something that wouldn't normally make babies cry but if looked at under the right light, could (hopefully) make your skin crawl.

I present to you, the CRS-4 General Purpose Droid.

As you can see, the station employs three variants that serves different roles. As with many major assets, I did a short writeup about the droid's characteristics to ensure continuity with the design and it's behaviour. I'll close this post with an excerpt from the writeup:

".....What the CRS-4 lacks in intelligence and durability, it makes it up with a relatively low startup cost and an even lower operating cost. The droid’s parts are designed as modules and can easily removed or re-attached in the field, even by untrained personnel. This reduces the need for dedicated technicians just for droid maintenance, as long as the operator maintain a healthy inventory of spare parts......"

Download - Chipped paint Lightwave3D preset

Yes, yes I know it's been a rather long time since my last update. While I have been hard at work revamping a lot of the assets, I have also been kept busy with paid jobs. In fact, this project is the only thing that keeps me from burning out from all those mundane, un-creative jobs that pays for my meals.

Anyway, I am working on a short teaser at the moment. The teaser will not only serve as a demo of the visual style and quality I'm aiming for, but also a means to experiment with my production pipeline. I've made some progress, albeit slowly, but I'm hopeful I'll get it done very soon. Oh, and having one of my workstations die on me the last weekend didn't help.

One of the things that I had started to develop early on was a metallic chipped surface shader that I could reuse (and easily modify as needed), since the story takes place on a space station where there will be many, what else, old, scratched metallic surfaces.

I have completed a version using only the layers system in Lightwave3D with procedural textures and gradients, the result of which you can see below:

A version of the shader was applied to my early prop models, such as the barrel:

You can download the preset here (Newtek Lightwave 3D v9.0 or higher required).

I am currently working on a node-only  version of the shader which will allow me to control the amount of chipped areas via a weight map, such as on the edges of an object.

Using a procedural shader saves me the trouble of painting chipped paint textures for every single object, and I don't have to worry about texture sizes since procedural textures are resolution independent. The downside of this approach is the increased CPU overhead when rendering since the textures have to be generated during rendertime. But considering the alternative of using high resolution image maps, which will incur memory overhead and possibly a larger impact on rendering time, I think it is a fair compromise, if not a solution.

Alright then, back to work!

Generic corridor

A typical sci-fi corridor, complete with fog and alarm lights. The big white square on the upper left corner is suppose to be a display screen. Still a WIP at the moment, though.

Storage room

New environment, a large, empty storage area. Nothing terribly interesting.

Happy Labour day and first video of the blog

Please forgive the wonky animation, didn't wanna spend too much time animating at this early stage of production.

One of the animations I made to put the rig through it's paces. I've spent the past week de-bugging the rig and getting the damn thing to render. I ran into some rendering problems that caused some hair-pulling, head-banging and face-palm moments. That alone caused some re-renders and wasted a few days of rendering. I'll elaborate in the next post.

Nonetheless, in hindsight it is a good thing that I thoroughly tested these two things before going full swing into animation, otherwise this could cause some serious damage on my sanity.

Security droid

One of the opposing robots the protagonist will encounter in the space station. Like most of the machines serving the (former) inhabitants of the station, the bi-pedal security droids have semi-independent AI that allows creative thinking, which makes them efficient enforcers and sometimes unpredictable.

Droid workshop and what the hell was I thinking

The droid workshop was the first environment I worked on. I finished the first version in one and a half day so I was pretty pleased with myself, confident that at this speed I could finish the first episode in no time. You can see the first version below:

Thankfully, I came to my senses quickly and realize that it looked like a POS. So I scrapped the whole thing and re-did it. The new workshop as it stands now looks like this:

I don't always have the luxury of sketching things out properly first, so sometimes my workflow involves haphazardly putting shapes together in my 3D modeler and hopes that it sticks. Fortunately, most of the time it works and the results look good enough. On the flipside, if it doesn't work out I would have wasted a lot of time.

So the lesson learnt here is: In the future, I will try to do more planning before before sinking my time in actual production of any assets, especially key objects and characters.

Here's to the one and a half days of my like I'm never getting back.

Guns and Grenades

The M161P Plasma Repeater Blaster and frag grenade. Putting holes and blowing up bad robots with the right amount of badass-ery and prejudice.

The great crates

What better to kickstart the production than making the ubiquitous crates and barrel that have became the hallmark of the sci-fi genre.

Yes, admittedly, progress is slow, but at least it is moving along.

To cap this post off, here's a humorous read about crates in video games.