100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 2

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CDCR-002a_Terror_off

I had the idea for this image a while ago, not long after I finished my Puddle Jumper model. As I recall, I got the idea looking at the cover of The Terror, a historical novel by Dan Simmons describing the horrible fate of the Franklin Expedition as the crew succumbs to the harsh environment and also some sort of bear-monster. I think that part was a metaphor for how we’ll never know entirely what happened to those people.

Anyway, I more-or-less saw it in my minds eye as you see it above. Crashed Puddle Jumper buried in the snow, askew Stargate in the background, a set of lonely, filled tracks marching back. My premise for the image is that the ship tried flying through an older gate, unaware that it had fallen prey to the elements in the years since it was last used. The Jumper emerged at an odd angle, the left wing clipped the ground and sheared off as it was extending, and the rest of it plowed into the snow a short distance away. Continue reading →

100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 1

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CDRD-001_White_Stars_Over_Planet_Credits

There’s an idea I’ve heard about, the Mind Palace. It’s a sort of memory exercise, where you imagine a building—library, museum, palace, whatever—and sort stuff you know into different rooms. You take advantage of your brain’s natural tendency to form associations by tricking it into joining certain information to these imaginary rooms, so visualizing the room also calls up everything you’ve “stored” in there. I’ve never had the patience to try it out myself, but I thought of it earlier yesterday, when I decided to embark on this project, and I found myself able to begin conjuring up shots in my minds eye, just like I used to years ago, as if the ability was behind a door in my mind I just hadn’t opened up in a while. Maybe I didn’t “lose” my mojo so much as was driven away from it. Continue reading →

100 Days, 100 Renders— Day 0

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For the next 100 days, August 8 to November 16, I am going to produce one 3D rendered scene every day.

There are too many reasons to do this.

That’s the only conclusion I can come to after many false starts to this introduction. Do I talk about the university drawing course that drained my mojo years ago? Maybe the rabbit hole I’ve kept falling into where I build models only to become bored with them once I’ve finished? The embarrassing experiments of the past week that prompted me to decide to re-focus on my fundamentals? The fact that lately all I seem to want to do is massive, ambitious projects I won’t complete without a grant and a support team? Or the time- and commitment-based projects that inspired me on this one?

They’re all important, and they’re all interesting, and maybe I’ll go into all of them as time goes on. The one reason that fits into all of them is that I got into this line of work because I wanted to make cool pictures of spaceships, and it’s been ages since I produced enough images to count on one hand within a year. I want to tap back into why I started doing this, without worrying about any of the incidentals about what makes a good reel or sounds impressive in a job interview. The CG industry has not been kind to me, and I think it’s time I stopped worrying about what the industry thinks. As Douglas Adams wrote, “I’d rather be happy than right any day.”

So, what are the rules? Simple— The picture has to depict a scene of some sort. No area-lit models on soft gray backgrounds. Anything else goes. My hot-rodded Macbook Pro dates back to the last U.S. Presidential Administration, and based on Apple’s current pace of Mac upgrades, may end up outlasting the current one, so in the interests of actually being able to render a picture within 24 hours, I’m not placing a size minimum on this. I could end up with some crazy grainy postage-stamp picture if I aim for something with a lot of expensive effects, with layout screenshots so I can explain what it’s supposed to look like. I’ll try to keep my post-processing either non-destructive or well-documented re-renders at larger sizes are practical later on.

So. Here goes nothing.

Battlestar Pegasus DRADIS Screens

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PDRAD_2D_WIP_20160726

A while ago, I made a set of icons for the DRADIS displays from the new Battlestar Galactica. Another artist contributed a recreation of the actual monitors, and I built on both to make computer screens for some cutscenes in the fan-made BSG video game, Diaspora. I figure sooner or later, I’ll probably need some more BSG computer screens using the design language from the Pegasus, rather than the Galactica. I’ve had some spare time recently, so I decided to recreate the DRADIS screens from the Pegasus.
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There Are a Lot of Command Ships

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A few days ago, the first teaser for the first Star Wars anthology movie, Rogue One, dropped.

 

 

There’s one shot in particular I’d like to talk about. You can probably guess what the shot is from my specialty, given how little space-stuff was in the trailer. First, some background.

 

R1vRotJTwo Star Destroyers, both alike in dignity…1As it happens the angle of the Star Destroyer shot in the Rogue One trailer is almost identical to the angle of the second shot in Return of the Jedi, so there’s a great comparison between the three-footer-inspired design and the eight-and-a-half foot miniature.

 

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References
↑1 As it happens the angle of the Star Destroyer shot in the Rogue One trailer is almost identical to the angle of the second shot in Return of the Jedi, so there’s a great comparison between the three-footer-inspired design and the eight-and-a-half foot miniature.

Babylon 5 2×01 Effects Update Supplemental- Their Horses Were On Fire

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With the Audio Guide to Babylon 5 getting into the third season of the show, and RedTed’s Babylon 5 model coming along nicely, I’ve been feeling more excitement about my old B5 effects project, which has been safely tucked in the back of my mind for the past few years. I think I’d like to take care of some more of the prerequisites before I jump back into making shots, not in the least because I’d also like to finish my current Star Trek project without introducing one of my trademark delays. I also think it’d be prudent for me to act as if this isn’t going to be a one-episode wonder, and take my time in laying the groundwork for continuing this project indefinitely.

Luckily, in my last post, I promised an investigation into the three depictions of the Battle of the Line in Babylon 5. I’d like to make all the depictions of the battle as consistent as possible, so I wanted to catalogue what happened, and which redone shots corresponded with which earlier shots. Let’s start with a chart of my findings, and then there will be some further discussion. I’ve listed the shots in chronological order.

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Random Trek #86- “Time’s Arrow, Parts 1 & 2”

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Random Trek 86: “Time’s Arrow Part 1 and 2” (TNG) with David Gian-Cursio

Random Trek 86: “Time’s Arrow Part 1 and 2” (TNG) with David Gian-Cursio

Back around Thanksgiving of 2015, I was listening to an episode of the podcast Random Trek, when the host, Scott McNulty, mentioned being a fan of the Ships of the Line art calendars. I tweeted him, mentioning that I’d be in the 2016 edition, and he invited me to appear on the show to coincide with my picture coming up.

The premise of Random Trek, simply put, is that Scott discusses a random episode of Star Trek with a non-random guest. As luck would have it, the random number generator gave us the episode “Time’s Arrow,” the two-part season-finalé/première of The Next Generation’s fifth and sixth seasons. As is Random Trek’s custom, this meant we recorded a double-length episode discussing both parts. And it’s a good thing, too, because we blew past a single episode’s runtime just discussing myself, the calendar, and nerding out on Star Trek in general. And I probably could’ve kept going, but I knew people came to hear about Data meeting Mark Twain, and not my many, many opinions on Star Trek.

To Random Trek listeners who are visiting for the first time, welcome! In the spirt of restraint and being a well-mannered guest, I didn’t pimp myself out too much on the air, but you’re on my website, now! Aside from the Ships of the Line 2016 calendar, some of my other notable works include my on-hiatus project to remake the visual effects of an episode of Babylon 5 (I’ll get back to it eventually), cutscenes for the fan-made Battlestar Galactica flight sim Diaspora, and contributions to various projects with Ninjaneer Studios, including a Ming treasure-ship for the opera The Red Silk Thread and a ruined city for the exhibit Corrosion: The Silent Menace at the Orlando Science Center (featuring TNG alum LeVar Burton).

If you’d like to keep up with me, my Twitter handle is @davidcgc, and I can often be found hanging around Foundation3D, the A.V. Club, and the TrekBBS.

In the spirit of providing added value, here are some notes and links related to things I mentioned on the show.

SotL_Feb_2016_Comparing_Notes_Amazon_Preview

“Comparing Notes,” as it appears in the calendar. Image courtesy of Amazon.com

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Archer-class Starship

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Comparison of my model with Masao Okazaki’s original schematic drawing

Download Lightwave 2015 Version

Download FBX/OBJ Version

The Archer-class starship is a small TOS-era scout designed by Masao Okazaki for the Star Trek: Vanguard novels created by David Mack, Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore, and Marco Palmieri. I began the model some time ago, after getting the idea of doing an opening credits sequence animation for the then-recently-announced Star Trek: Seekers spin-off series.

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