Monday, July 18, 2011

Stealing the computer away from my daughter's Minecraft session to make a quick post.

I did some work on learning Blender and straight-away ran into something it can't do: individual edge/vertex beveling. It has an overall bevel modifier which can accept per-edge weights but it is not something you'd use as a poly modeling tool. Searching on the forums reveals that this has been a long-standing lack. Sigh. Well, Maya has a similarly baffling omission; you can't do proper insetting in a face in stock Maya. So they're all lacking something.

Salvage and rescue is the theme I'm working with at the moment. I'm trying to imagine how a spaceship would decompose into constituent parts in a 2D world. Here is some amateurish concept art:



I'm thinking there would be a couple of layers of spaceship: some skin pieces that could be removed, and then various modules underneath that could be salvaged for money. There might be an inaccessible background layer to the spaceship that has its skeleton, too. With 2D art it's not clear to me yet how this all goes together. Maybe the skin parts should just blast off and disappear; otherwise people will expect them to tumble like metal sheets, which they can't do.

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