Unit Requests: Steampunk

[Blue Monkey]

Some possible inspiration for the island's zeppelin tower.

 

[tom2050]

I must have been off in dreamland thinking it was a map... I almost know enough now to make something like that in 3ds from scratch myself. Since I learned how to apply maps and so forth, and can make my animations. The final thing to get over is making nice objects myself from scratch since I have no real experience in doing so; and have only manipulated existing objects to change their form.

There is no shortage of tuturials online so perhaps I can give it a go sometime as a learning endeavour. Also, there probably would be free objects I could grab offline to assist in more complex structures that are beyond my creation abilities.

--- So to clarify further, the island carrier is a 'Floating City'? Since I know absolutely nothing about Steampunk (and never even knew it existed until I saw this thread some time back ) I would need to go around and look and dig up as many possible pictures as possible to try to get something Steampunk-y in mind so I could create the right way.

I saw a music video on youtube the other day (some rock band) and the whole theme of it was Steampunk Animation - kind of cool.

 

[Balthasar]

Steampunk is simple. Make a modern device or motif with 19th century style and/or parts and you have steampunk. You've seen it all your life, on the Wild, Wild West, Dr. Who, and any movies that feature anything written by Jules Verne or HG Wells or is based on them. There was some fine Verne-inspired steampunk in Back to the Future III. The movie Van Helsing had some neat SP inspired technology and great costumes*. Lately there've been alot of Steampunk-y movies, including Sherlock Holmes and The Golden Compass

(*We'd still like to see a unit made based on the Van Helsing of that movie)

So far the daddy of Steampunk movies is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in which creator Alan Moore teamed up characters from 19th century fiction against equally fictional villains of that time period. It was based on a graphic novel of the same name. This mod uses that particular work as a take-off point, but has added many, many characters from 19th century fiction that Moore didn't use, such as John Devil, Carmilla, and Dr. Mabuse as well as some colorful real people of the time, such as Buffalo Bill.

In addition to all that, we're also using quite detailed maps of Pellucidar and Barsoom, both created by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Mind you, we decided to do this before Disney/Pixar announced that they would be recreating Barsoom themselves for "John Carter of Mars".

So to answer your question: Verne's original Propeller Island was a floating resort for the very rich; our vision would combine this with the island fortress described in another Verne novel, Mathias Sandorf[. So it's safe to say that you have, shall we say, creative license, to make this unit your own.
On a more nuts and bolts level, we will use it as an aircraft carrier in the game, so an airstrip and Zeppelin mooring mast would be practical.

 

[Blue Monkey]

I must have been off in dreamland thinking it was a map... I almost know enough now to make something like that in 3ds from scratch myself. Since I learned how to apply maps and so forth, and can make my animations. The final thing to get over is making nice objects myself from scratch since I have no real experience in doing so; and have only manipulated existing objects to change their form.
... Also, there probably would be free objects I could grab offline to assist in more complex structures that are beyond my creation abilities.

Content Paradise, Renderosity, Daz3D, etc. all have free stuff. Go to any of them and search with "steampunk" as the key word & you'll find plenty to show you the basic aesthetic approach. I can make objects; struggling to learn how to properly animate. I know of another member I could probably talk into making some static objects for your parts.

--- So to clarify further, the island carrier is a 'Floating City'? Since I know absolutely nothing about Steampunk (and never even knew it existed until I saw this thread some time back ) I would need to go around and look and dig up as many possible pictures as possible to try to get something Steampunk-y in mind so I could create the right way.

The Unit Request Thread is full of images (direct link to the large version of the floating city gallery), the Fun Stuff thread and the Spurious Contraptions thread have links to other sites as well as many pictures.

I saw a music video on youtube the other day (some rock band) and the whole theme of it was Steampunk Animation - kind of cool.[/QUOTE]Was it the Smashing Pumpkins' "Tonight"? Méliès films such as A Trip To The Moon are certainly as much a steampunk inspiration as Wells & Verne. Check out any visuals you can find by Robida as well.

 

[tom2050]

Deja Thoris as you mentioned something like this?

I have to re-build the legs of the model, since they were not there because of the dress. I have removed the most of the bottom part of the dress, since it doesn't fully go with how Deja seemed to dress I might be able to rework the middle waist dress portion to go along with above pics, as well as the necklass (would have to rebuild the shoulders/neck of the model. The rest is pretty close. And the skin can be tanned.

Some of the hair ornaments can be altered to reflect Deja ornaments. Or perhaps a small queen crown as in the bottom pic.

EDIT:

I am re-building the legs now. Am about to throw her in a tanning bed, and removed the bottom portion of the dress. The crown thingy looks like it needs to be altered (too egyptian; I might change it to look like bottom pic above) and some of the neck ornaments can be changed.

EDIT:
Skin tone something like this (Blue eyeshadow already removed ):

 

[Balthasar]

That's a great Dejah, Tom. You're on the right track, exactly.

 

[tom2050]

I'm having trouble with the legs... I rebuilt them and have them fit with the unit fine and they work perfect with the animations, but rendering fails and CTD. My inexperience with this makes it tough to know why this happens; the only other solution is to have her wearing a dress. Don't know what is wrong. I figured out how to do a few things I didn't know before though.

I may try another model that I found that will work for her better actually. I'll post a pic it in a bit. I hate to take up this thread and transform it into a Dejah Thoris creation thread... but w/e. I could perhaps post all of it in the unit creation thread or something.

 

[Blue Monkey]

I hate to take up this thread and transform it into a Dejah Thoris creation thread... but w/e. I could perhaps post all of it in the unit creation thread or something.

WIPs are exactly the point of this thread. OTOH your outstanding work also deserves its own thread. Our Deja Thoris gallery is in this post.

If the current version works with the dress it can be used for She (HR Haggard's African lost tribe), Duare (princess of Amtor - ERB's Venus), or other heroines of exotic civs.

Speaking of which I badly need to update the OP requests list to give credit & links for the outstanding work already done. Balthasar / KingArthur, could you pm me a short list so I make sure not to miss anyone who has created things for us.

 

[timerover51]

You gentlemen should also take a look at Verne's Robur the Conqueror, and also Michael Moorcock's Warlord of the Air series.

 

[Balthasar]

We do have Robur's airship The Albatross in the mod; it becomes available with Stratospheric Flight. Just by coincidence, it's in the unit list just below a bi-plane which is also called an Albatross.....

But Robur himself doesn't actually do that much, so we went for the ship rather than the character.

When we picked the special characters for this mod we tried to pick characters that had some special power or particular quality that would make a good (lets face it) action figure. And we didn't want to stuff the mod with civilian characters hanging around waiting to upgrade to heroes. We have enough of that already. I've been putting some of them in (Vuldacon's) boxes to keep them from getting underfoot.

Unfortunately, that left out some of the cream of the crop; not only Robur, but also Raffles, Rocambole, Professor Challenger, Sir Frances Varney, Auguste Dupin and Dr. John Doolittle, among others. Raffles, Racombole, and for that matter, Dupin are just clever - not much to build a fighting unit from, and we already have Sherlock Holmes; and since we're using Quartermaine, Challenger would be redundant. Same with Sir Varney, since we already have Dracula. Doolittle would have been paired with Dr. Moreau (we tried to pair them - i.e., bad guys build Dracula, good guys build Van Helsing, and so on) but because of the number of creature-units that would have required we had to drop the idea. For similar reasons, and because there weren't really good pairs for them, the villains Fantômas, Kâramanèh, Scarpanthe, Zenith the Albino, Monsieur Maillard, and Count Orlock also didn't make it, to our dismay.

I would note here as I have elsewhere that there are currently 512 units in the mod. Practically every civ has it's own unit lines. The heroes and villains are just the icing on a very big cake.

But then again, Pirate Jenny just got in, so there are apparently a few speaking parts left in this production.... stay tuned, I guess (and thanks for asking).

 

[tom2050]

Here is the latest of where it is at right now.

It is somewhat a compilation of pics I have gotten off internet. The top texture (around the neck) has yet to be altered to something more appropriate. And perhaps she should be a bit more tan.

 

[tom2050]

Okay, what I think might be mostly good... might add a hairpiece of sorts. skin need to be a little darker? Perhaps a bit red-tanner since she is princess on Mars? You said Dejah should have Knife (or sword) and Pistol? I still need to add civ color somewhere, perhaps the cloth on the sides what was I was going to use. Let me know if it fits well enough.
I can remove the white cloths on the side and civ color the shoulder ornaments. I can also remove the shoulder ornaments and texture skin there instead.

Her butt didn't have any detail or even the correct shape on it because it used to be covered, and I'm not adding any either besides coloring it can't be seen from civ scale.

I colored her hair a brownish red from the original black, but can make it more reddish if need be.

EDIT: Update: Skin reddened slightly

EDIT: Early Preview; no weapons added yet... BTW, does Dejah do any magic? or just guns and swords? (My kind of girl!)

PS: Looks like she is not dark skinned enough still!

If the current version works with the dress it can be used for She (HR Haggard's African lost tribe), Duare (princess of Amtor - ERB's Venus), or other heroines of exotic civs.

Sure I can do her as well... any particular weapon for Duare or She?

Is this She of HR Haggard? So I can get a pic of what to mold her after.

Dr. Hugh Strickland treats a patient, Noreen Pemberton, in his psychiatric clinic. It seems that another spirit is fighting for control of Noreen's body -- Ayesha, the legendary She!

Novel by Peter Tremayne, Sphere Books, 1978. A sequel to H. Rider Haggard's She novels: Wisdom's Daughter, She and Allan, She, and Ayesha: The Return of She. Dr. Hugh Strickland was also involved in the framing sequence of The Revenge of Dracula by Peter Tremayne.

I think I've found Duare sample pics:

Spoiler :

 

[Balthasar]

She looks about the right color to me; any more and you'll loose her wonderful curves in the shadow. She is royalty, after all.

(If wishes were fishes, we'd have two Dejahs: Dejah the unarmed hostage, and Dejah the rescued warrior princess. You can guess why.)

Armed Dejah is almost always shown with a sword, at least. It's the weapon of choice and tradition in Helium, her kingdom - like it is, for instance, in Japan, even though both cultures long ago acquired conventional ballistic weapons.

So, when regularly armed she'd carry a (usually sheathed) martian sword, a pistol and a knife.

Otherwise, she looks great, Tom.

 

[tom2050]

She looks about the right color to me; any more and you'll loose her wonderful curves in the shadow. She is royalty, after all.

(If wishes were fishes, we'd have two Dejahs: Dejah the unarmed hostage, and Dejah the rescued warrior princess. You can guess why.)

Armed Dejah is almost always shown with a sword, at least. It's the weapon of choice and tradition in Helium, her kingdom - like it is, for instance, in Japan, even though both cultures long ago acquired conventional ballistic weapons.

So, when regularly armed she'd carry a (usually sheathed) martian sword, a pistol and a knife.

Otherwise, she looks great, Tom.

Okay, I'm ready to render the Thoris. (EDIT: Unarmed Thoris finished). I'll do Dejah the unarmed (with full animations) and Dejah the full blown sword, knife and gun (what type of gun? MP-40? or just a generic pistol 19th Century style? or a "radium" gun?) equipped death warrior princess of Mars. I checked the sword models I have, and none are too similar to the one shown, but I should be able to make one just like it and texture it according to the pics from the link.

Obviously sword would be primary weapon; I can have her holding both sword and knife (right and left hand).

For the gun animation; I will have to make my own animations for these (since they don't exist), so I'll get some good practice in with this. I'll leave gun 'holstered' on her hip for all animations until it comes time for her to 'pop a cap'; 'blast a radium' or whatever the gun does.

EDIT: Should sounds be a generic Warrior Princess type? This is what I will use unless there is something more specific you had in mind.

 

[Blue Monkey]

The classic illo's I've seen of the Barsoomian guns look like exotic 19th c. guns. So at civ scale a sort of Wild West or piratical pistol would make sense to me. It's Balthasar's call.

I didn't mean for you to make a She or Duare unit - they're not in this first scenario & would only be "king" or "princess" units anyway. Just wanted to say that the unit you showed, with the dress, would be useful further down the road.

 

[Balthasar]

Generic Warrior Princess sounds? I had no idea there was such a thing. Sounds fine to me.

 

[tom2050]

The classic illo's I've seen of the Barsoomian guns look like exotic 19th c. guns. So at civ scale a sort of Wild West or piratical pistol would make sense to me. It's Balthasar's call.

I didn't mean for you to make a She or Duare unit - they're not in this first scenario & would only be "king" or "princess" units anyway. Just wanted to say that the unit you showed, with the dress, would be useful further down the road.

At civ scale, it probably won't be noticable in detail anyways..
But I'll use something like this, these are fancy and exotic enough to be suitable I think for Warrior Princess:

Spoiler :

--------OR---------

Generic Warrior Princess sounds? I had no idea there was such a thing. Sounds fine to me.

I had no idea either actually.. I will have to come up with some.

 

[Ozymandias]

I had no idea either actually.. I will have to come up with some.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1j__xN-RXNM&feature=related

 

[tom2050]

I did a test run, but skin is too red in game, as well as hair IMO. I will fix and then post the 2 units.

 

[polyphemus]

Here's my WIP:

A Barsoomian Flyer

Spoiler :

Spoiler :

The colors are not at all right, i just want to get the model down first...

I don't know anything about this flyer, so any and all will help for animation purposes...


Edit: It was hard to get a good representation from that 2d image so I understand if the body needs to be altered