Mark Hennessy-Barrett

I found a toy Buck Rogers Starfighter in my local old-comics-and-toys shop a while back. This was a gimme at £15 (even if the pop-out wings don’t really anymore and the little plastic missiles were missing), so I’ve been bashing on giving the old girl a bit of a BSG-style makeover. There’s probably about six to eight hours of “kept” modelling in this so far. I haven’t really kept track of “chucked” modelling, but it’s probably only about 2 hours so far.

For those history buffs amongst us, this was actually Ralph McQuarry’s original design for the Colonial Viper in the 1970s Battlestar Galactica. So, in keeping with this more crunchy, gritty day and age, I imagine I’ll be punching reaction-control thruster exhausts into the pylons before too long. Hum. I think this thing’s Ficton Reactor must use a McQuarry Converter. Yeah, that sounds about right.

Gotta keep it real, right?

Work in Progress SF, Space

Of all things, I cannot find the comp-atop scene with the countermissiles launching from Nike’s upper rails, or the missiles that are smashed apart by same.   They’ve got to be something – aside from that, I’m *really* rather happy with this update.   Thanks to RiK for lending me lots of CPU power for brute-forcing this, rather than having to spend the time I spent setting up that CFD air-blowout on breaking the first scene apart. Video under the fold…

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Showreel Honorverse, Showreel, Space

Update #4 – Honorverse the Online Game

I should point out that these showreel updates are me going completely off-canon, by the way. The ships as represented in the original trailer are how they’re described in the books, to the best of my understanding, and that I’m wandering completely off-piste now just for my own pixelly pleasure. These ceased to be Honorverse ships the moment I did that, and are in no way, shape or form endorsed by Baen, Tor, David Weber or Nimitz the Treecat. So there, too.

Well… hum. This sequence was a pain the butt to render the first time ’round – the Impeller wedges have to be the way they are to look even remotely canonical, but that means they’ve gotta have refraction and transparency tracing enabled. I’ve turned my ray recursion down to 8, which is the minimum I can get away with without black spots occouring, and I’m not using any fancy lights – but the concussion waves and splodey hypervoxels just plain take time to render. This frame was 30 mins 40-odd seconds on my quad-core 3GHz XP64 rig. Click the pic, for some reason WordPress is messing with the aspect ratio.

Yes, half an hour for a 720×405 frame. Bums. I’ll try replacing the HVs with alphaed image sequences, ’cause I think there’s a lot of very unnecessary math happenning in there. Losing the shock-rings drops the frame time to 19 minutes. I like using HVs, as they have pleasing visual qualities (though in this frame four of ‘em are at intensities that drown all the detail), but the frame time may Cause Issues.

This frame? 1 min 58s. So that’s a ludicrous discrepancy.

Either way, it’s gotten a bit late so I’ll leave the camera work for the morning when I’m feeling a bit fresher. Hey, I did animate a particle accelerator today, too.

*update*

Six mins 30 without the HVs. Guess they’re for the chop – no idea why they’re being so *SLOW*, they’re usually Ever So Quick these days.

Showreel Add new tag, Honorverse, Showreel, Space

I’ve just had a client ring up and ask me to do some final tweaks to a particle accelerator animation, so the showreel stuff is on hold until I get that done.  Because I like getting paid – makes me feel all validated and stuff.

To keep things rolling, though, here’s a link to some physicsy stuff that I did earlier in the year. The red subatomic stuff at the end was done by fellow ‘lancer Iain Welland, an all-round good-egg. Point of note, the building did originally have much nicer surfacing and lighting, but they wanted it to look like the CAD illustration in their pamphlet. Them that pays, says…

There was quite a fun bit at the beginning of this film as well, so here’s a procedural sun that I wallopped together for this. One of the physicists on the HiPER gig asked which SOHO pass the renders were from, so I feel pretty good about that.

Update: Well, this is what so productively occupied my day. At least it’s for the good of Mankind.  Firefox users, you may not see the “play” button, it’s the black bit on the black bar in the bottom left hand corner.  Just click around there a bit, it’ll play.

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Published work Science, Space

Update #2 – Honorverse, the Online Game. Just a quickie, as I’ve taken a short break from copying, pasting, tweaking curves and repeating to armour the hammerheads at the ends of the ship.

Much better. Happy now. Back to copy-and-paste-and-retime… All things being equal, this intro sequence should be rendered by morning, which will please me greatly.

Showreel Honorverse, Showreel, Space

Update #1 – Honorverse, the Online Game. The brief for this was to create very pristine, very white starships based on David Weber Novels. Lots of fun, I got to blow holes in spaceships (which is something very dear to my heart), and was just about the most fun I had in 2007 at all. Here are two stills from the intro:

At the time, I’d argued for lots of visible hull panelling and nurnies, because let’s face it Galactica set the bar for meganurnies per cubic metre and I wanted to be like the cool kids. But no, the Honorverse ships had their outer armour laid on with nanotech, and so was to be smooth and clean. Very very clean. And white. Very white. Also, the client wanted fairly realistic missile explosions: a thermonuclear explosion driving laser beams. Bomb-pumped lasers, to use the terms. Here’s the existing trailer animation in low res (16.5Mb) and High Def (50Mb). Of course, now that it’s Showreel O’Clock I get to go back and whale on things until they make me happy, so I’ve spent some of the day adding just a soupçon of panelling and stuff

*edit*  Let’s try embedding, shall we?

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YouTube Direkt

Youtube’s got it in semi-high-def natively, which is nicer to look at.  But I really, really like being able to directly embed video in my website.

Yep. I feel OK about today’s work, given that I’d done one set of panels that just didn’t fit the rest of the design, had to toss ‘em out and start over. It’s nowhere near as nurnietastic as The Big G, but it’s all mine and that makes it special. Yesterday I was playing with explosions and got a Hypervoxel doing just about what I wanted it to do: Just the one bomb for now. (3 Mb) So that was the week so far. Now that I’m happier with the appearance of the vessels and the explosions, I can knuckle down and replace the other 58 explosions with those HVs. And set all their motion curves. All eight motions curves. 58 times. Oh, and I know Military Stuff gets painted uniform colours, but tomorrow I’m *SO* re-texturing those guns! Well, if I minded lots of repetative work, I should’ve done something not-animation, shouldn’t I?

‘Til tomorrow, Internet. Meat!

Published work, Showreel Honorverse, Showreel, Space