Unscheduled off-world activation!
I was able to start focusing on some creative work again recently. I started with making crew figures for my White Star, which I found tedious and vaguely pointless considering that I've been seeing AI tools that can generate character models from photos which would be more than sufficient to be a couple pixels across and seen through a window. Granted, my little ten-polygon stick-figure guys with their hand-painted uniforms were also decent at that scale... except for the heads. Stupid human brain being ultra-sensitive to resolving faces.
So after I got frustrated with that, I decided to return to learning Unreal 5 for employability reasons (and hoping that Metahuman might also solve my tiny crewpeople problem). That didn't go great either, as my learning materials have become obsolete with Metahuman going from being a web tool to a desktop app, and also Unreal Editor seems to be the only program that's too much for my computer to handle. It's pretty much the only thing that makes it
feel like it's almost six year old and not as zippy as the day I got it. On the plus side, I now know how to import objects and apply texture maps. It's nodes. It's always nodes. They all work the same, especially now that PBR is the law of the land. And it got me to finally to write down a cheat sheet for which apps use Open GL normal maps and which ones use DirectX normal maps.
So after I got frustrated with
that, I loaded up my DHD model. I'd been working on one a few years ago, and managed to rough in the flowing multi-trunked "base." I hewed closer to the original diagrams of the DHD than to the object as-built. For instance, the back side of the base on the drawings has a smooth arc across its entire length, while the actual setpiece is pretty flat:
Anyway, once I'd accomplished that, I set it aside because of the big horseshoe-shaped dealy around the control console. It has the standard stargate pseudo-Egyptian arch motif running around it, but the design on the real one is roughly carved in by hand, only suggesting the pattern seen on the stargate itself, and I wanted to do better. I've got a very nice arch detail from my stargate model, but the shape of the horseshoe makes it a tricky modeling situation. It's not a perfect circle, so I can't simply model one and then array it in a loop like I could for the stargate. Not only that, the horseshoe also tapers at the end while maintaining more-or-less the same cross-section.
For some reason, I now felt confident I could work the problem and win. After a lot of experimentation, I eventually figured out a plan of attack with a bunch of intermediate template objects, and a series of heatshrinks, rail clones, more heatshrinks, stenciling, multi-shifting, and boolean subtracting. Even with a lot of tedious (yet surprisingly relaxing) hand clean-up, the geometry is, to use a technical 3D modeling term, whack, but it renders okay.
Then I looked at my test render and thought the arches were a little big compared to the original pattern. Oh, well, I thought, they're based on the same arch on the stargate, so that's the size they're supposed to be. Then I remember that my stargate was modeled 11% too big, and that arc was already in my DHD file before I resumed working on it, so I didn't remember whether I'd corrected that when I brought it in. I checked, and I hadn't.
So I did the whole thing again. The geometry is moderately less whack, and doesn't look quite so out-of-scale. I'll probably continue doing touch-ups as I go, cleaning it up a little at a time between working on other parts.
Those were the hard parts, the rest of the DHD will be pretty straightforward (not fast, necessarily, I've still got a lot of boolean operations and cleanup in my future). I'm going to continue to draw heavily on the photos of
Atlante Props' restored DHD, especially for the paint-job. His photos are the only ones I've seen that make it clear which engraved arcs are accented in gold and silver (while the DHD was also painted without those accents during the show at different points, I think they look nice), as well as the metallic yellow and blue patina on the keys. There are close-up production diagrams with measurements posted by producer Joseph Mallozzi that'll give me a good guide to the console, and
Rharyx on Tumblr did the hard work of figuring out what the arrangement of symbols on the Pegasus DHD console was. Naturally, it's missing one symbol from the Pegasus stargate, and has three symbols that aren't on the stargate at all. I'm thinking I'll make the DHD consoles as seen on TV, as well as "rationalized" versions that make more sense. I'll talk more about that once I do them.
Other stargate model updates!
A surprising turn of events; new reference material for the movie version of the Stargate. It looks like my supposition about the Earth stargate being modified to make the Abydos version was correct, because several glyph panels have surfaced that are still in their Abydos configurations. In an episode of the TV show "Leverage," Dean Devlin lent some stargate symbols he had from the movie to be used as set decoration in a vault of artifacts. There were six in visible in the episode; glyphs 9, 12, and 36 were all visible in the film, but glyphs 27, 29, and 31 weren't. 31 was unmodified from the Earth version, but 27 and 29 were new. Additionally, a photo of another glyph being used as decoration surfaced (well, it'd been on Facebook for years, but someone told me about it), number 24, which was also unseen in the movie and modified. So I need to dip in and update my movie Stargate model and my article on the movie version of the stargate symbols.
In fact, I should've done it much more promptly. BlueBrixx, the Lego-style building toy with the Stargate license, released a
Stargate movie Advent Calendar set.
The grand finale was the Abydos Stargate, and they used my model/blog post as reference, which I can tell because they included the symbols I had to make up since you can't see them in the movie. So, yeah, I should probably hop to before someone from the new show finds my stuff on Google and references some horrible mistake I know I've made but haven't corrected publicly yet. At least anyone with any sense on the new show needing to rebuild the SG-1 stargate will go to the EMG first. Hear that? Not me. Definitely not Eaglemoss/Master Replicas. Ask the E-M-G.
Les Enfents de MacGyver.
Another thing I want to make use of in this round of stargate focus is a production document from the SG-1 pilot of an entire all-new set of stargate symbols, intended for the Abydos map room (I guess there was a point where they considered sticking with the idea from the movie of different stargates having all-unique symbols?). That makes for 38 new origin symbols, and/or I can use the whole set together, perhaps for the Asgard galaxy's stargate network. The
Othalla gateroom would be a pretty quick model.
Finally, minor logistical note: After Vimeo started charging a lot more money for a lot less functionality, I've stopped video hosting with them and gone entirely to YouTube. Being able to replace videos and keep the URL wasn't worth the grief. If you want to see any of the videos embedded in the thread that are now dead,
here are all my Stargate videos on YouTube. I may double back and replace the links that have gone dead in the old posts later.
Honestly it would bug me if I didn't have it right either.
I could probably model things just fine (I do solid modeling for a career - not mesh modeling but actual parametric solids), but dealing with textures makes my head hurt.
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