New Releases Of Awesome

Okay so it’s been about, what, 6 months since I made the first episode of The Engine Room? Certainly doesn’t feel like it’s been that long; my brain’s been kind of on hiatus, focused on other things such as college courses and all that jazz. You know when they tell you school is like a full-time job? College just drives that point home.

Finished my college courses for the first year in early May. Why am I only posting this now? Well, there are a couple of reasons, but they both ultimately amount to my own laziness. Truth be told, I’ve also been looking for a summer job. I need some form of income to support my pixellated porn addiction through the summer, and until I graduate. Been making job applications up the wazoo, and waiting for a response (hint: nothing has come up yet, so I’m still waiting).

Then of course, there’s the project I’ve been working on in Second Life. I’ve been interested in designing some mesh items for some time, since Kaelis introduced me to it as a matter of fact. My training, however, is mainly with paints, drawing implements, and sculpting tools; I have very limited experience when it comes to mesh editing. I then looked at my TARDIS, which I originally modded after the Velvet Room from Persona 3 and felt it could really use a makeover. There was Blender, sitting on my desktop, practically begging for me to use it. I figured since I’m a total newbie when it comes to 3D programs like Blender, I would at the very least try to do something creative with it, if only for the experience.

I spent 2 weeks working non-stop, pulling my hair out in Blender, trying to make decent models, optimizing my models for Second Life, make clean UV maps, the works; I was going all-out on this one! Finished the raw edits in the first week, finished cleaning up by the middle of the second week, and just yesterday I finished all the scripting (and by yesterday, I mean before 12 AM in this case).

This is the result of 2 weeks worth of waking up at 4 PM and sleeping at 8 AM:

I give you, Hephaestus!

I completely redesigned the base Pod interior, and almost everything in this design is made using mesh. Most of the rust textures were acquired; I simply edited them to make them tessellate nicely. Was going for an old and tarnished aesthetic, leaning slightly towards the steampunk style, but what I really had in mind was a sort of submarine/bathysphere design. Outside the windows, you can see the orion nebula slowly moving around the pod.

The scripts for the texture effects inside the windows were fun to design; I wanted something that would keep a single texture when landed, and would randomly cycle through other various textures via UUID from a notecard when in flight. Of course, cycling through textures is a little messy, since they’re not actually saved clientside, and it only gets more awkward the more textures you need to cycle. To counter this, I created a texture preloading prim underneath the base of the console to keep all the textures loaded at all times. The rotor in the center keeps the same design as the rotor in the default Pod, ie. the sphere, but rather than shifting colours, it pulses while in flight and remains a fixed size when landed. Though personally, I like the cloister bell effect I added; the console turns red when the cloister bell is activated, and back to blue when deactivated.

So, I figured, a new TARDIS needs a new Chameleon form. Well, it just so happens, Bongmaster designed the perfect one. So I visited his store and yoinked it for L$ 500. Lovely little thing she is… the exterior, I mean. Get your mind out of the gutter!

Of course I realized when I flew outside the TARDIS, it would be awkward if someone cams outside their skybox and can look over to my TARDIS and see everything I’m doing, since I inverted the normals on the hull halves. Not to mention, seeing a plywood ball floating in the sky would look not only out of place, but incredibly boring. So what did I do to make the outside of my TARDIS more interesting…

Fucking Gallifrey…

This has been a fun little big project. While my meshes may not be the most optimal or cleanest out there, I’m still learning. Plus, I really hope to use my experience for certain upcoming SNews-related things (nudge-nudge, wink-wink).

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go back to masturbating in my TARDIS for the time being…