GRG's Miscellany

A Warhammer 40K club at school has inspired me to get modelling again.  My ragtag scavenger army for battling my brother will now grow to include some militia in the style of the Imperial Guard. I was given some Tempestus Scions for Christmas, and they are works of art.  I'm going to love building and painting them. However, Imperial Guard rely heavily on vehicles and I resent paying huge moneys for ancient models (looking at you, Chimera).  So I started to explore making my own Chimera-like APC. I made very low-poly models of each of the main parts (tracks, hull, turret) in Blender , then marked the seams and used UV Unwrap to make the net.  Exporting that as a .png meant I could print it out. Except...it'd all be the wrong size. So I imported the UV layout .png into Inkscape  and scaled it.  I made a rectangle of a known dimension (e.g. 100mm long for the base of the hull), and scaled the imported png to match.  Then I could print it the c...

Today I have been working hard at texturing and modeling a cockpit for the dropship I made ages ago . The texture is really low-res, but it's exported from Inkscape , so I can boost that later if need be.  It's also a little bland in places, but I'm no artist - I'm proud of it. I also modeled a really basic cockpit and moved the camera inside.  Here's how it looks: Dull, huh? In the fullness of time, I'll make a texture for it, and model some instruments.  For now though, it's a huge leap forward for my meagre art abilities.

After my first failed attempt, I managed to port the polygon triangulator code into Unity! It struck me how much more difficult it was to write in C# than it had been in Python.  I've always been a bit wary of Python as it isn't widely regarded as a 'professional' language (at least amongst the people I've spoken to about it).  It really showed great strength in exploring the triangulation algorithm though.  If I do similar algorithm work in the future, I think I will turn to Python first. However, now it is ported to Unity, I have a direction choice to make: To plough on to generating terrain from large polygons, to make the code produce a DeLaunay graph, instead of just any old triangulation, or to smooth out the process of specifying the polygon in the first place. Choices, choices...

For my 3D games, I've been playing around with ideas around semi-procedural geometry, by which I mean geometry which is generated from a small amount of authored data.  For example, I could draw out the shape of an island in a dozen or so 3D points, and the actual terrain geometry could be generated from that. A big step along the way to that is splitting up a non-convex polygon into triangles.  The triangles mustn't overlap, nor must they cover any space which the polygon itself doesn't cover.  For example, this diagram . Today, I managed to get a python program* running which took a list of 2D points defining a polygon, split it into sub-triangles and displayed them in a tkinter canvas**. I am certain this has been solved by clever people in much better ways, but I still feel proud to have figured this one out (and I haven't managed to break it yet!). The basic algorithm is: Create a temporary copy of the polygon points list start with the three points fro...

I'm continuing to build scenery in 12" square blocks to allow for depth in the terrain, and I've finished two more blocks: a corner bunker and another straight trench. The Corner Bunker The idea for this block was an objective, defensive position or entry point at the corner of the battlefield. The bunker itself is just cereal card glued to the underlying corrugated-cardboard frame.  I used a scalpel to cut the groove for where the door closes.  The paint is a simple mix of cheap black and white acrylic paint. The road edges coming in are meant to be tracks worn by long-term vehicle use.  I built up areas with a mix of bird-grit , bird-sand , talc , PVA and water.  Then I used sand-talc-PVA-water to smooth it a bit more, then finally talc-PVA-water to try and make some sections look muddier. The colouring is a dark brown spray , followed by a lighter stone-coloured spray , then dry brushed with cheap brown acrylic , blending up with white. ...

An addition to my scavenger Rogue Trader army is this modded Eldar Viper Jetbike. You don't get many Games Workshop things on Freecycle, but a couple of battered jetbikes and some Dark Eldar popped up and I nabbed them. Then I had to make it fit my scavenger militia.  So I ventured into the world of Milliput for the first time. I first attempted the cockpit without a wire armature, but that was brittle and extremely frustrating, so I cut it all off and worked it again with florists wire.  I have since bought modelling wire because the Milliput really did not like sticking to the plastic coating on the florists wire. The pilot is the original Eldar one with globs of putty to make him look a little more Cadian-like. The stippled rust was inspired by this forum post , but I still need heaps of practice. As the clear perspex stands were missing, I decided to attempt to make the bike 'sit' on its own dust cloud.  I glued two pieces of bent florists wire...

I was looking at a game on Gog called Kingdoms and Castles .  It was extremely tempting. But then I remembered that I had already bought SimCity 2000 , which I have always enjoyed.  So I reinstalled it and started it up. I was feeling confident that I could still manage to build up a decent city, but I went in on easy mode anyway because I didn't want to be too challenged. It all started off well.  I survived the inevitable destruction of the power plant, and my budget was in the black.  It was all going well. Then came the earthquake. ...and eventually I realised it was time to start anew.