Nah. My biggest failure of all was letting Throne of Armageddon itself die back in early 2010. That was let go at 600k words/1300 pages, about halfway done. It had taken me ten years to get that far, and everything I had written by then needed to be re-written because it was garbage. I never intended to publish it even if it was finished, though. I'm not big on the whole making work public thing.

However, I have strings of projects based on the world that were attempted throughout time. Depending how deep you want to go in the subject, I have a huge multi-hour video I made for my LP audience a time ago that talks about my personal history and parts of the history of my modding and writing. It's a pretty heavy subject, however.

DyiithJhinn and Undead existed as concepts as far as back as 2002/2003 and evolved from there. However, despite making dozens of Starcraft total conversions, only a few tried to tackle the world that Black Sun is a part of. Those were the ones that failed the hardest because it is such a demanding world. Black Sun is just the backstory to one of the side races and some side characters in Throne of Armageddon, and even it is beyond the scope of any game to possibly capture.

Salvation before it became Salvation was a Homeworld 2 conversion attempt. However, that community is very tight lipped, small, and aggressive towards newcomers. Getting the information I needed - things like particle editing, AI editing, etc. just didn't happen. Maybe it simply didn't exist. Plus, hardpointing stuff in Homeworld 2's third party tools was horrific. And the performance was horrific, especially on ATI cards because lol bad development ethics.

Homeworld 2 was never going to work, though. The engine is just way too limited to make a real mod in. I would learn the same thing with sins, and with Salvation, I dropped the idea of modding again. When Retribution is done I intend to retire from custom content as a whole and just let life run its inevitable course.

October... meh... boring month as usual.

Great looking space station, barely noticed the ship at the bottom of the screen, nice scale...

This forum is always unbelievably slow. I guess outsourcing to India isn't working out quite as planned.

Anyways, it's time that our roads part ways for now. I have decide to hold off the final stretch of the sins portion of this sans particles and other such polish. My efforts will now focus on learning UDK, modeling scenes, and investing into the most major part of this production.

Indeed, sins serves merely as a gate between my incompetence and (hopefully) coherency. Since I have no hope of managing huge fleets in the UDK when it comes to fights, the sins portion of this merely exists for fleet combat.

That's right. Everything in Salvation that was otherwise a flyby, black screen, or nothing in particular, is destined to be re-imagined through actual cinematography using the UDK. Of course, it won't be animated except for cameras and lights and such, since I can't animate. However, the plan is to have some high detail character models for all the major notables. This is still as big a gamble as ever, but I don't gain anything by waiting to begin with the UDK.

All this stuff will be entirely under wraps, there won't be a peep about its production to the outside world until the fate of the project is decided. There are too many uncertain variables to know for sure what will be possible, what won't be possible, or if the project as a whole is simply fucked.

Even if everything goes well, I have no way to know if it will make sense or even be worth watching. It is quite likely that as time passes, if I produce internal viewing material, I may contact some of you in private to gather your thoughts about such material.

But, for now, the forge must burn bright and I must work the hardest I ever have to change a certain future.

Updates may not come to this thread for quite some time. But, if any major event happens, I will post an update. Do not presume silence for inactivity.

Pneumonia is really fun! I enjoy spending an entire month puking mucus out of every orifice and being hardly able to breathe.

Retribution was updated to 1.80. While I can't notice any difference with the shaders, and all of the existing shadow bugs still remain, the performance does seem to have noticeably improved. This will certainly assist in production recordings. A 16th test video was produced and the 13th developer video was processed during this last while. Being sick stalled my UDK work but my next scene is indeed making progress model-wise. I produced my first test demo of cameras and was able to figure out how to get full-resolution frames out of the tool. The next step is to figure out particles and more advanced materials, but as I cannot make textures, I have my hands tied for materials for a time.

I am considering buying a tablet in an effort to learn drawing so I can build some concepts and help flesh out some more complex ideas. I haven't used a pencil or pen in over 15 years and I certainly was never an artist in anything I ever did. But, desperate times call for desperate measures, and I must be prepared to attempt any route when it comes to bringing my work to life.

I had a chat with mister Krdax a little while ago and have a new direction to experiment with in the last and most challenging aspects of the particle work for this project. Polish and production continue in the background as I recover from a difficult month, and though I am behind schedule, I do believe I can continue to make headway in these few months of bearable heat.

It is nigh time to start practicing my voice acting and getting ready to attempt final takes on the script. Though it will be a very long time before composition begins, I would like to have a few production-worthy takes of the main lines. These are around an hour to an hour and a half each with minimal retakes. The last I did takes on the script was in February or march or something before it started getting absurdly hot and I had to turn on all of my fans.

I'm still looking for would-be female VA's, though I have a few potential candidates on my roster. I won't be requesting takes from them until I am in the composition phase.

I'm still deciding if I want to attempt post-process effects on sins footage or not. I think a lot could be achieved with the appropriate skills in After Effects, but I have enough tools and things to learn, and such extra weight will be difficult to bear so long into this journey.

My goal for the end of December is to have my second major scene in the UDK with some example particles, and possibly to have the Fourth-Gen Anahn functional in sins. One of their most difficult models is nearing completion despite the tough days, and my anxiety is decreasing. I feel in my heart it is nigh time for a big productivity push. If I am able to manage the same level of productivity I had at this time last year, I very well could finish the sins portion of this project minus polish by the end of January.

Ah, but such things are worries best left unworried about. I shall take things as they come. Fast or slow, whatever way the wind wills so strides my heart.

Glad you are feeling better. I'm too suffering but, not as serious Bronchial infection that has me out of work till X-rays come back on Monday. The tease you posted looks great and can't wait to your finished product...

Even though I had pneumonia I was still gearing up for hopefully making some big swings on the project's script. Here are some test recordings just for the internal demo videos I hand out to internal viewers.

https://soundcloud.com/iskatumesk/ret-record-practice-1

Damn, you need an agent...

I do have an agent. A 00 agent, to be exact.

I prefer Agent Smith myself.

Also, if Moddb's mod of the year had a write in feature, I would totally hack a botnet somewhere and ensure Retribution won. 

You'd have to make a profile for it first, since none exist. 

That's why "if it had a write in feature". For mods not on the site.

If I wanted to troll you instead of moddb I'd make Retribution a profile. 

It takes quite a lot more than that to troll me, unfortunately.

I own a tablet now. While far from being able to produce the furry porn that all self-entitled artists eventually find themselves sucked into, I find a tablet way easier than a pen to use and I can do better than what I did 15 years ago.

A little attempt at a concept of a counterweighted first-gen Royal crew pistol. An idea of the kind of props I might attempt to model, and may even attempt to texture, during the UDK aspect of this product. An aspect that, unfortunately, has been held back completely by my being sick and attempts at recovery. I'm actually getting worse again, but luckily I was able to finish off an LP project. I have some other minor projects I'd like to get done before focusing so intently on Retribution again, including a super politically correct Harry Potter musical about America.

I've also finally sorted out the harddrive mess that got my panties in a twist like, what, a year ago or more now? That effectively gives me a 3tb drive to use specifically for Retribution source frames. I'll need another 3tb by the end of the project to use as a destination for the full uncompressed frame encode. Chances are by then I'll have bought an entire new computer, though the recent expenditures of around a thousand dollars and another enormous expenditure to come from vet bills (I'm guessing close to 500-700 on its own) is going to drain me of my last 3 years of savings. Money comes very slowly for me, so I don't know what the future holds.

I am still recording a bit of material for the Retribution dev series but I know for a fact it won't be a full public release. I am not sure what kind of release model I'll use for that yet, though the tech video will most certainly be a private release limited to internal audience and some people who had a hand in the project's creation.

Retribution's source assets and resource pool exceed 150gb now, but I am finding it harder than ever to push the project forward as the one challenging aspect of project creation - the models - is holding me back now more than ever. If I wasn't so incompetent, I could have been building production-worthy source by now. What a shame. The trouble with meshes for ships has had my jimmies so rustled I started looking elsewhere for base shapes to build off of. I sent requests to Sol Command ages ago but doubt I will ever hear anything about it. Instead, I went back to homeworld 2 and did a lot of digging. A few meshes I got permission for, and a few meshes I had in my possession from another source turned out to be publicly usable. Fantastic. Butchering these into my own designs ranges in difficulty, but much less difficulty than building base shapes, apparently.

I find this challenge extends to drawing, too. I don't really know how, or where, to try to start on my path to building characters. The very concept of building a basic shape is entirely inconceivable to me. If I could conquer this, maybe I could actually learn something about graphics instead of just puking all over myself like I currently do.

Well. Until the next time, comrades.

Recently, in Coffee Hour 14, I demonstrated what will likely be the last major public showing of the project until it's finished, predicted to be 2015. I explained to my audience the revision process more thoroughly than what has been shown in previous demos, and also shows a ton of new stuff that hasn't been shown at all, yet. Compared to the previous major videos, including that particle demo, the elements shown here are significantly more refined.

If you're interested, here is a link to the only youtube video. http://youtu.be/6lXbzxI0w3g?t=22m32s As always, if you get butthurt easily, steer clear.

Ending the year, I am beginning what will likely become one of the last major revisions to the Anahn. Some of the ships shown in that video, including the Razzador revision, are still not considered finished and will be significantly updated before the end.

I'm also nearly finished my second major scene for the UDK.

Throughout the coming year I will be focusing on the UDK, but the remaining sins work should also be finished since it is comparatively extremely trivial. It's possible by the end of 2014 you will see one last prototype trailer or, if the project gets along faster than it did this year, the one and only production trailer.

Finally, I've discussed with my Mexican cohorts, and we believe the FTP should be able to handle a full public release of the developer series when the project is finished. Currently I have about 17x3-4 hours of material fully processed, not including the 17 (and counting) or so ingame demos that will be released as their own small series cataloging the project's demonstrable progress throughout the years. I still have about 200-300 hours of video to crunch down.

Time for another post. This isn't an update per se, but rather research related. I hope it can be of assistance to anyone who encounters the same issues I have.

When convertxsi.exe spews this garbage into your lap, your balls run cold as ice. The jenkem stops huffing and the spinners stop spinning. If you're lucky, your lowrider only takes a leap off the bridge and you are offered a relatively quick end. If not, you spend days/weeks/months trying to figure out what rubbed convertxsi.exe the wrong way.

In Salvation I lost months of time to it. Ships that just refused to convert properly. Sure, you could put them into sins, but they'd have strange vertexes stretching in odd places. Strange.

The thing that makes this error so infuriating is that it actually doesn't mean anything. It's simply a result of convertxsi.exe not liking something, and whoever spent the 30 minutes it took to code it didn't bother adding any kind of actual debug information. Given how simple the sins models are, in all likelihood they wouldn't notice any possible issues if they did occur. Black Sun's models are, of course, significantly higher poly. More ground to cover means more chance for internery to root its ugly bucktooth head.

One of the first things I had to do in Retribution was bughunt a problematic portion of the Anahn Leviathan during its 5th dated revision. This has always been a troublesome mesh as far as conversion issues are recorded. I have dated 5 revisions, but in fact the mesh has seen more like 7 major revisions. It was the first mesh I discovered the poly limit with, and had to spend a great deal of time rebuilding many times after to isolate and fix areas that had initially been built with a greeble plugin that causes a lot of fucked up geometry. Throw in another 2-3 major detail revisions, and we had what we had before I hit Retribution. Strange that I am so bad at this despite being at it for over a decade. Strange.

Retribution, of course, seeks to update everything because everything I make is trash. I only hope to make it slightly less trash. Like clockwork, convertxsi.exe was ready to down all of my grape drank and dunk my ADC. I spent no less than 15 hours nonstop trying to isolate FAILED VERTEX CHECKSUM errors. Now, the Leviathan's mesh is one of the worst in the project technically speaking, but those "bad" bits had always made it into the game previously. Technically, I've put 60-sided ngons into sins before. Auto triangulation seems to be what most Homeworld 2 modders exclusively rely on, as I've encountered only 1 mesh from that game that had any semblance of human-designed edgeflow. While disgusting to look at, and terribly inefficient, it seems to work. Who can argue with results?

I'll spare you the full story, but ultimately, what convertxsi was bitching about was one of the side columns. You know, the 50 polygon cylinder structures of which there are 6. Only the one was responsible for the errors. Only. The one. It was identical to every other one. Removing it, copy pasting another, problem suddenly resolves.

Many ships gave me problems afterwards, of course. 1 in 2 models gives me convertxsi problems. I had ultimately developed a clever technique to fixing the error. I simply detached portions of the mesh inside the scene. Usually turrets and body. This had a stunning ratio of success. However, some models gave me much more trouble.

The DyiithJhinn Meltype was more complex of an issue. This was a 3 component mesh, no single component producing errors. Only certain combinations of meshes produced errors when exported as a whole. Strange? Yes. Absurd? Certainly. Another day was dumped into this. How did I fix it? I bridged two wings. Yup. That was it. Took me ~10 nonstop hours of fucking around to figure that one out.

The Prelate. Simply splitting the meshes didn't fix this one. Certain meshes had to be part of certain collections of meshes as an object. Specifically, the side Fast Action turrets. If these were part of the body, checksum errors. If they were part of the other mesh, no errors. Other objects irrelevant. Another 3-4 hours.

Clearly, a pattern began to form. I hypothesized that convertxsi was actually failing its optimization process when it concerns Tangent maps. In fact, previous problems with tangent maps and UV's (the Chimera Mark II, as you might recall from Salvation, had seriously fucked up textures in some portions and we never knew why until Retribution. Well, I lied. We fixed it, but we still don't know why it happens) alluded to underlying interaction between 3ds max and the abomination known as XSI and Satan's thorny asshole, aka convertxsi.exe. This problem is not entirely laid to blame on XSI and its devil children, but it's a problem that, in all my years of modding, I have only ever had with sins. Things like this become monumentally more irritating when literally every program you work with was not developed properly and nobody tried to think ahead because they were only concerned about their paycheck. 3ds max, XSI, and convertxsi are all equally blamable.

But I, a man who built his living on enduring extreme nonsense in custom content, wasn't willing to let this mystery die at "It's XSI and tangents breaking". After all, I still regularly dumped days worth of manhours into splitting and unsplitting meshes trying to find that sweet spot where all the cute black ladies danced to my congo beats. Alas, this was all I had for the last year to go by. I have literally spent just as much time trying to fix Failed Vertex Checksum errors as I have modelled and rigged models. Think about that. Time that could have gone into less stressful ventures, like haxing sex with a walrus or base jumping from the ISS.

There's a few things you should know about Max and XSI. First off, XSI Transforms seem to inherit Xform data. Xform data in 3ds max is retarded and messy and busted and Autodick should feel ashamed for allowing moronic things to happen like importing an fbx causing same named objects to inherit Xform data without asking. In a market where Autodick has zero competition, however, there's little cause for actually making meaningful updates to their programs. So, that's what we're stuck with. Luckily, freeze transforms kind of trivializes any potential problems - except when it comes to helpers (aka Nulls). You must manually reset the xform transform data for any helpers you mirror'd in max, regardless of what the pivot says they are pointing to. Both XSI and Max will claim they are oriented correctly, but sins will lol and point them in the opposite direction just for the hell of it. Took a year to figure that one out. But, worse yet, there's a layer beneath this, the so-called Ghetto Layer. In this urban jungle, information is stored regarding meshes that we don't have any access to (at least nowhere I can find or learn about).

When it came to those fighters, absolutely nothing in XSI or 3ds max could fix those busted parts of the mesh. Resetting channels, UV's, materials, whatever. It did not matter. To fix it, I exported to obj and imported them again.

Yeah.

Apparently, this process strips the mesh of some hidden information.

And, as I looked upon going through another day of dealing with the Leviathan's 6th dated revision and related conversion issues, I was really quite ready to drop the entire project. Alas, a Lithuanian transvestite reminded me about that fighter and the "solution". I attempted it with the Leviathan and, mysteriously, the 10+ vertex errors I had simply vanished. No issues ingame, nothing.

What?

While this is hardly conclusive evidence, I now have good reason to believe this annoying error stems largely from a single major source.

Somehow, 3ds max retains data that every other game does not care about. Not homeworld 2, not Starcraft 2, no one. But XSI cares about it, enough to take it into its nursery and breast feed it straight off the street. Nevermind the fact it bites, this data apparently causes convertxsi.exe to fail in whatever it does. I mean, convertxsi.exe commonly reports vertex counts exceeding 4x that what 3ds max sees, and even after it "optimizes" files, we still see absurd vertex counts. There's no real telling what it does, and no way to know what FAILED VERTEX CHECKSUM really means. I like to think of it as catching inhuman moans in the dead of the night while wandering the bloodsoaked cherry blossom gardens of Osaka, or the gurgling of my lungs as I go through nearly month 3 of being sick from Pneumonia.

I can't say I am fond of sins or the years of my life it has torn from me with its claws of death. But if anyone can tame this land, it's Richard Simmons.

Party hard.

Your modeling style probably uses mirror commands and lots of duplication, right?  That vertex data is most likely where it starts making "ghost" information.

Glad to know you are figuring it out, though.  I figured if anyone would, it would be Isk.  The models look good as always, and I hope you get over the bad health 

I try not to use mirroring as much as possible, but yeah, it does stand to reason that mirror/duplication might be causing more issues than just with the hardpoints. I hadn't thought about that.

As long as this solution works to resolve any future issues, it should shave a lot of time off of getting the remaining models to be made into sins. I'm nearly ready to rig the few 4th gen ships I have finished.

Keep up the amazing work IskatuMesk! It looks amazing.

I finally figured out how to make gifs again. So here's a look at a Phase 8 type fumeFX test sheet, animated. This is a rejected variant; I have better ones. They are used for creating animated sheets that are then used to create Sins and, eventually, UDK particles.

And now, for a not so shameless double post, a quick video showing what the new sheets can do with very basic changes. This whole system uses only 12 particles peak.

very nice effects

huehuehuehue

from one shitstorm to the next, it seems that fate just wants to kill this project. but, nah

Here's some stats for ya as of Feb 6 2014!

The source 3ds max Mesh data for the project Sins variant is just shy of 1gb.

The sins project itself is 1.3 gigs in size. I've culled quite a few unused things from it.

The Sins project has 137 meshes currently.

There are over 630 sounds being used. Most ships lack unique sounds currently. This is expected to exceed 2k when fully complete.

There are 386 textures in use. Most are tga. Only around two dozen are for ships, the rest are mostly for particles. At least 50% of them have been modified in some way, and probably 25% are built by hand (including the fumeFX sheets). Since I am no artist, the majority of them are shit and need to be replaced if possible.

The mod only has 264 entity files. Most of them are to gut researches of any benefits, because the game crashes when I try to remove them from player researches.

To produce a 6 minute test demo, it takes over 2 hours of Sins recordings to come up with presentable footage considered superior to Salvation in FPS and control. Of the 19 demos recorded thus far, only about 10 seconds or so is considered "production-worthy" camera and placement.

Just a few minutes of UDK footage is well over 30gb in frames @ 30fps.

For considerations of building the music layer for the movie, I have assembled just over 1,000 of the absolute best of my enormous music library. While I have a lot of really good ambient pieces, combat music is once again expected to be extremely challenging. Expect to see more European and Japanese origins in the soundtrack.

When I did several bareback takes of the narrator's lines last year, each take was well over an hour long with minimal recastings. A barebones audio composition sans finale was built with these lines and example audio, and totalled just over two hours long. A 3-4 hour final production is not outside my expectations, especially if I succeed in the UDK.

The script was considered final close to this time last year, but I have had no external attempts on takes, nor will I request any, until the composition nears its final stages - predicted to be in 2015 and only if I get my shit together and my character modeller actually starts doing something. Currently, this is the big lynchpin of the project, and threatens to destroy it and my last 4 years of work. The psychological strain is enormous.

I have not actually done any voice acting at all other than some practice in the demos since that script was finalized. My takes are ok, but considered alpha.

I have processed 19 developer videos at this point in time minus planning videos and demo-related material. Most of the videos average 2-4 hours and 1-2gb. Only a single internal viewer follows the series, and loosely at that.

My predictions in 2012 placed me balls-deep in UDK production with sins work long behind me at this stage. I was supposed to have been doing major scenes at the end of summer 2013. At this rate, I'll lucky to have Sins complete minus polish by the end of 2014 simply because I struggle so much with doubt and stress. This summer is going to really suck.

So. Sort of a status update.

Currently, the project is considered dead/dormant. It will remain this way until my associate begins making demonstrable progress on the character models. I've waited close to a year and a half now, and I can't really justify any more major work until I know that work won't be wasted.

I did make some measurable progress in the UDK in recent times. Here are some images of some experimental level material concepts.

And for those who missed it, I put some of the 2012 Apex voices on my soundcloud. If you're into voice acting/sound editing, they might be of interest.

https://soundcloud.com/iskatumesk/apex-2012-test-reel

There is sort of a crisis going on right now regarding one of my cats. Given my mental stability, it should be of no surprise that the last month of nonstop stress has worn me thin, and the potential of the cat losing at the very least its eye, possibly its life, weighs heavily on my shoulders.

Do not expect to continue to see me around here. I will only post again if the project makes some kind of progress.

This was not ready to be shown. Of course not. It's not finished. Nothing here is finished. But, one must face facts. This project was started in the presumption I would be able to obtain character models via one of several avenues. All of those avenues are impossible. There is no Retribution without character models.

I was a fool to have started this. Now I am going to do what I never wanted to do again. I'm going to show an incomplete product because that's all I have to show. However, this is very likely to be the one and only time Retribution is viewed as a project. Like all internal testing videos, this was never to be shown to the public until project completion, and was intended to be viewed as a part of a compilation - a stepping stone to what it was to become. Now, it's all I have to show for a year and a half of being lazy and hoping something would go my way for a change.

http://www.gameproc.com/meskstuff/ret_devseries/rettest19.mkv

Of course, I only have myself to blame for all of this. You'd think over the course of 15 years I'd have learned something, something meaningful, like how to model organics. But, no. I could blame that I was born into bondage with this insufferable mental demon, or I can just accept the reality that I am never going to get anywhere in custom content of any kind. So, it's time to set it all down. Not that anyone's really surprised, of course. My track record does not speak too highly of my ability to get the job done by any stretch.

As Retribution is considered dead now, I will talk a bit about the third scene that I was working on. Third of some dozens, mind you.

The third scene was the Anahn Industrial Foundry. It was not only the largest and most complicated of the scenes I had created thus far, it would serve as a basis for building my props scene to be used to create more scenes later down the line.

The Foundry is one of the few things I have attempted to model based on concept art. I used a concept art to establish the basic camera angle and thematic I would go for. I attempted to find more concept art related to industrial scenes, but almost everything I found was too far beyond implied design to apply to my work, or was far too low resolution to be of any use. Modeling off of concept art is a nearly impossible task because I find it hard to bring ideas into fabrication. I work best by just swinging my dick around and yolo'ing without any foresight. I did have an established goal I wanted to do, though.

First, I had a foreground to make. This would be super high detail, because it would be where the camera was confined to.

Then I needed a background. This would be built out of largely modular pieces that could be recycled for filler scenes and other areas later on in the project.

Then I needed a skybox. The skybox was to be built out of three layers. The first two layers would be meshes and the third would be a series of composite mesh/texture hybrids using some experimental materials I was making.



This is as far as I got before the concept art was useless to me.



At this stage I am just flailing around. The camera bounds area is at ground level, where the first bridges and magma would be. That small tower with the three levels exposed is the control tower and would technically have 5 or so levels to it. I initially planned to model this out but then decided against it since the camera would not be inside it. However, I was never able to find a good material to mask the windows with.



Still very early in. Trying out different detail ideas. I built many extrusions with the intention of splitting them so I could apply different materials to them, since I don't know how to UV or texture.



It was suggested I tried to Loft a curve for the skyrails. This was too difficult for me to do, so I made a pipe and just extruded it. This entire scene is built out of extrusions and inset. That's all I do - make a block, extrude the shit out of it. The lower level begins to take shape - this is where the camera would originate from in the animation in my head.



Minor detailing. I originally wanted to model/animate the trains/railed devices that would use those rails, but quickly scrapped the idea because they would be far too hard to model. I added a box to scale - the box is the scale of the average Anahn (8 feet) and represents the character scale in the UDK.



Some more minor detailing and a few props I may instance later, within the UDK, for detailing. The magma takes on a cheesy complexation. I don't know how I'll make the lavafalls yet - they remain the toughest thing to figure out for the scene.

At around this stage I considered the project dead, but opted to continue work in a small bid to improve my fledgeling UDK knowledge to what extent I could. Struggles with the cat and severe depression stagnated work on the scene severely.





Around this time was maybe a day's worth of work total, since I worked off and on with the scene very sparingly, and most of the time was spent being confused and not knowing what to do.



In particular, I didn't know how to detail the scene, and opted to ignore detailing entirely for the duration of this miniproject.



I originally planned the ground level skyway to enter hangars, but didn't know how to model the hangar interiors, so I left them entirely untouched.



The scene at a glance. I wanted the slag pits to be viewable from ground level but failed to measure the heights appropriately, so they were actually out of view.



I learned a new technique to detail generic scaffolding. Inset a square, extrude, then inset again, collapse the new inset, inset the four pieces and extrude inwards. I applied this technique liberally throughout the scene from hereon, since it was the only way I could detail the surfaces.



I never could figure out how to detail this interior.



So I opted to skip interiors and focus on blocking out basic geometry for the exterior where it was within my ability to yolo my way through.



The ground level bridge confused me for a long time before I decided to extrude it "off camera" and sweep it under the rug.



Blocking out the area immediately surrounding ground level. This area absolutely must be high detail for the scene to have any chance of succeeding. I didn't know how to detail it, so I hoped I could make props later on to mass copy paste once I had the components set out.



The prime_structure_skybridge begins to take shape. This piece is largely ignored for the remainder of the production because I don't know how to detail it. In particular I didn't know how to model cables without spending extraordinary amounts of time extruding individual curves by the thousands, so I opted to ignore all detailing that required cables, which was most of the scene.



Areas that require massive detailing to succeed, as these would probably be viewable during the take.



The secondary hangar begins to take shape, and would be largely ignored from hereon.



I intended to instance the secondary hangar structure for background purposes but got lazy.



I block out low-detail components on one of the prime towers. This tower was originally intended to be used for a railed elevator, but then the design was changed to a crane. I couldn't model a crane, so then I later simplified to be a simple support for one of the upper structures.



During modeling the tower I was in an extremely dark period, so progress was extremely slow, taking many days to progress in spurts of 4-5 minutes of work an hour at most.




Once the tower was satisfactory I slapped together a quick skyway for it to connect to.



During this period work sped up considerably.



Quick and dirty pipes. I didn't care to detail them. I knew I couldn't, so I moved on ASAP. The anal-bovine mesh, aka the first hangar, got only a tiny amount of its required detailing done.



The second upper level was very hastily cobbled together in a few minutes and then ignored for the remainder of my time with the project.



I tried to model external plating for the pipes akin to a concept I had seen, but they still look like shit. They need more attennae and cabling and such to look any good.



A look downwards.



I tried to block out components for the ground level but found it impossible to detail at the level necessary. I had hoped props could fill it out; fences, lights, etc.




Since iteration is so easy in the UDK, I opted to consider the scene a prototype and move on to making props and putting the scene into the UDK. No further work was deemed necessary because the project is unlikely to ever move again.




I unified old meshes, ones used for my second scene, and some new ones, into a single scene. Only a few of these are destined for the Foundry, others were for other scenes.




Putting the scene into the UDK took over a day because I somehow fucked up the scene file and almost lost all of my work on the foundry, and many hours were spent trying to recover it. I had to manually rig the tiling rate and smoothing on all 200 of the Foundry's objects, plus the props, then get them working in the UDK. These are my very first screenshots I took of it.



At this stage I began researching materials, and quickly realized that lava materials were extremely complicated and would require considerable time to get working right. I stopped my work with the scene and concluded my time with the UDK, since any further time spent now would exponentially increase for no gain. Total real-time work spent on this would have been like a week, if you include all the fucking around in the UDK and busting the scene and such. Scenes are easy to make, and this thing is super low poly still. However, getting it looking good is no trivial matter, and not worth my time.