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I am supposed to be working on a tricky scene for Sleeper Squad #39 today, but I bought the MK204 robot for three bucks "on spec," as they say, with the knowledge that it had a deal-breaking flaw for me, but for three bucks I was willing to take a chance on being able to work past it.

The problem is that the recessed surface on the front of the robot is clearly meant to be a video screen or a window. It cries out to be a video screen or a window, or why bother to recess it? Why clearly put a rim around it and bolt it down in three places if there wasn't supposed to be something there?

This kit is a Mely3D cheapie, and Mely's cheapies are usually not especially well-constructed, though they have their uses. (This package lists as being by Absolute Studios. We will have the discussion about WTF is going on with the "Absolute Studios" label some other day. Suffice to say, this is a Mely kit, no matter how it's listed.)

I don't mind if you surface your model with fitted surfaces--the kind that don't tile and are designed for that specific form (e.g. like skins for human figures as opposed to a generic Plaid Flannel swatch), but it's nice if you make some systematic logic. At least, for example, make all the "rubber" surfaces one surface and all the "metal" surfaces one surface and so forth. That is not the case here. Body surface #2, which is outlined in yellow in the first picture, not only has several different types of surface in it, but there is utterly no logic to what surfaces and parts fall under body surface #2 and which fall under body surface #1. This is the kind of thing that makes me crazy.

Anyway, I could turn off the "window" area in opacity, but I would also be turning off the rim around it, and various other tubes and wires and antennae, which I don't want. I could fire up GESCON, a very useful tool I'll talk about some other day that does set-theory operations on surfaces (e.g. intersect a wall with a corridor-like rectangle, say "take out the intersection of the sets," and get a brand new doorway in your wall). But GESCON is not something you use casually (I won't next fire it up until I remodel Ruby Martinez' apartment, which she has begun to do in #39) and this was supposed to be, like, a ten-minute experiment. I need to get back to Sleeper Squad!

So I made a custom opacity map. This is not super hard to do if you have a separate image-editing program. I started with the appropriate metallicity map for the surface (because it was in B/W already, making color selection/fill easier), fillled in that inner window circle almost in all black (I left a few bits to be dirt spots), and made everything else in the JPEG pure white. Then I saved this opacity map as a new file (I add that b/c I don't want anyone reading this and overwriting one of an object's vital surfaces!)

Then it was just a question of putting a sphere primitive in the chamber (six feet across turned out to be pretty much exactly the right size), positioning it carefully, and surfacing it as slightly dirty glass. The enormous orange light that fills the chamber is a fairly small light that's used to provide "engine exhaust" effects on the back of the figure. It looks huge here, like the copy above says, because the sphere is distorting; it's a big lens, in effect. A wall across the back interior of the chamber to block that off would handle it. Then install a seat and maybe a console from some other kit and we're good to go!

But maybe you would prefer the video-screen approach. OK. No model changes are needed. We just copy some appropriate surface onto the sphere, which is now a screen. In this case I used an eye surface from a Vyktohria kit, which will not apply straight onto the sphere via icon, so I put it on a G8 and then copied and pasted from the G8 iris surface to the sphere. Then there was a lot of tiling and offset adjustment on the surface, plus adding some emission, just for glowiness value.

The last step was to take a blue scan-line image I made quite a while back (for "Videodrones," if you are really curious, which is part of "Fun Size Nightmares" in the TTTT folder) and have used for this purpose several times since. Putting this in a diffuse overlay gave it just that little [chef's kiss] touch.

So, anyway, if you're still reading this the day of the $2.99 sale on this kit (which you are likely not) and are deciding whether to buy it (which you are even more likely not), you will know now that this can be done.

And now I must have lunch and resume Sleeper Squad.

Description

[Zoom in, it's big]

I am supposed to be working on a tricky scene for Sleeper Squad #39 today, but I bought the MK204 robot for three bucks "on spec," as they say, with the knowledge that it had a deal-breaking flaw for me, but for three bucks I was willing to take a chance on being able to work past it.

The problem is that the recessed surface on the front of the robot is clearly meant to be a video screen or a window. It cries out to be a video screen or a window, or why bother to recess it? Why clearly put a rim around it and bolt it down in three places if there wasn't supposed to be something there?

This kit is a Mely3D cheapie, and Mely's cheapies are usually not especially well-constructed, though they have their uses. (This package lists as being by Absolute Studios. We will have the discussion about WTF is going on with the "Absolute Studios" label some other day. Suffice to say, this is a Mely kit, no matter how it's listed.)

I don't mind if you surface your model with fitted surfaces--the kind that don't tile and are designed for that specific form (e.g. like skins for human figures as opposed to a generic Plaid Flannel swatch), but it's nice if you make some systematic logic. At least, for example, make all the "rubber" surfaces one surface and all the "metal" surfaces one surface and so forth. That is not the case here. Body surface #2, which is outlined in yellow in the first picture, not only has several different types of surface in it, but there is utterly no logic to what surfaces and parts fall under body surface #2 and which fall under body surface #1. This is the kind of thing that makes me crazy.

Anyway, I could turn off the "window" area in opacity, but I would also be turning off the rim around it, and various other tubes and wires and antennae, which I don't want. I could fire up GESCON, a very useful tool I'll talk about some other day that does set-theory operations on surfaces (e.g. intersect a wall with a corridor-like rectangle, say "take out the intersection of the sets," and get a brand new doorway in your wall). But GESCON is not something you use casually (I won't next fire it up until I remodel Ruby Martinez' apartment, which she has begun to do in #39) and this was supposed to be, like, a ten-minute experiment. I need to get back to Sleeper Squad!

So I made a custom opacity map. This is not super hard to do if you have a separate image-editing program. I started with the appropriate metallicity map for the surface (because it was in B/W already, making color selection/fill easier), fillled in that inner window circle almost in all black (I left a few bits to be dirt spots), and made everything else in the JPEG pure white. Then I saved this opacity map as a new file (I add that b/c I don't want anyone reading this and overwriting one of an object's vital surfaces!)

Then it was just a question of putting a sphere primitive in the chamber (six feet across turned out to be pretty much exactly the right size), positioning it carefully, and surfacing it as slightly dirty glass. The enormous orange light that fills the chamber is a fairly small light that's used to provide "engine exhaust" effects on the back of the figure. It looks huge here, like the copy above says, because the sphere is distorting; it's a big lens, in effect. A wall across the back interior of the chamber to block that off would handle it. Then install a seat and maybe a console from some other kit and we're good to go!

But maybe you would prefer the video-screen approach. OK. No model changes are needed. We just copy some appropriate surface onto the sphere, which is now a screen. In this case I used an eye surface from a Vyktohria kit, which will not apply straight onto the sphere via icon, so I put it on a G8 and then copied and pasted from the G8 iris surface to the sphere. Then there was a lot of tiling and offset adjustment on the surface, plus adding some emission, just for glowiness value.

The last step was to take a blue scan-line image I made quite a while back (for "Videodrones," if you are really curious, which is part of "Fun Size Nightmares" in the TTTT folder) and have used for this purpose several times since. Putting this in a diffuse overlay gave it just that little [chef's kiss] touch.

So, anyway, if you're still reading this the day of the $2.99 sale on this kit (which you are likely not) and are deciding whether to buy it (which you are even more likely not), you will know now that this can be done.

And now I must have lunch and resume Sleeper Squad.