Hey look, I'm making a new post instead of editing obsessively.
Warning! Stream of consciousness ahead:
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I suppose if I had to formulate a complaint for the sake of a cathartic rant, it's that I haven't been able to work on anything else since the contest "ended." I was in the middle of a maintenance bay scene with a starfighter I'd just finished, and I'd started making a series of spare fighter parts to fill a giant pit, with a spotlit central anti-gravity platform and tractor beam for levitating parts into the work area.
I'm a PC tech by trade, and I swap parts out all day long (as well as wasting time in forums and polishing my artwork in Photoshop on my inferior quality screen when things get slow*) so when I picture working on a starship I picture working on a PC, which means the parts are light and easy to work with, and the only tool you need is a screwdriver.
Additionally, my daughter (who entered the contest herself under my older than 21 year old** wife's name) came up with the idea of a bracelet that has all the force field, anti-gravity, and tractor beam controls on it, and also transforms into a little flying helper robot that zips around the damaged starfighter running diagnostics and opening panels.
It will give that character a cool side kick
Kind-of a tiny R2-D2 alternative.
So now I'm sketching out this pit full of spare parts (my daughter is still sketching out the bracelet robot, which I'm going to help her model.) I've got a plan of action, I'm experimenting with modeling directly onto a planar map, the same way I made my weapons collections, and I'm getting decent results, I've finished maybe 20 parts, and I've covered eight or nine sticky notes in doodles and 'to do' lists... and then I hear about the Enterprise contest.
Now it's 6 months later and I can't go back to working on the parts pit. I don't have closure, so I can't move on. I can polish my F
all day long, tweak every imperfection... but I can't focus on anything else.
What's more irritating is that I got this
great idea while playing the Star Trek Online demo. As long as I'm making all these parts, why don't I make them interchangeable? Why don't I make a giant, giant kitbash collection, with different texture sets for different factions?
It will require a bit more work, as I now want to model with poly extrusion, the same way I did the Enterprise, but if for nothing other than background ships I could save myself a
massive amount of time and effort later by doing this now.
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...but I can't, and that's my rant.
*ever make a post you hope your boss never reads?
**Contest rule.
(there we go) GAGA spending 27 or more years relying on royalties for a percentage of your income. There ain't nothin' that'll make you want to perform plastic self-surgery like finding nothin' in your mailbox (and I don't mean your Outlook inbox) when you're expecting your hard-earned income from 2003 to fall from the sky any moment now.
