Clouds & Worldbuilding

- July 19, 2021

This past month, life has gotten much busier for me. My social group is all fully vaccinated at this point, so we've been busy getting together in-person again and making up for lost time. Aside from that, I’ve had a number of other things going on in my personal life – some fun, and some practical. Overall life has been good, but I’ve had less time than before for things like daily 3D work.

With that said, I have made some progress on 3D work since my last update on that, and I've also continued to design the world and scenario for Orion Skies itself.

3D Clouds

   My last update about my progress on 3D graphics was two months ago. After that post, I spent some time trying to learn how to do high-quality 3D clouds and skies.

   As before, I started by following a “cloudscape” tutorial from Blender Guru, a 3D artist who has made a number of high-quality tutorials.

   However, that cloudscape tutorial is several years old, and Blender has changed significantly since then. Some of the features it uses no longer work the same, and many of the buttons and options have been reorganized and I had to find their new locations.

   Additionally, a lot of new technology has been added to Blender since that time, which should theoretically allow for a number of improvements over the original tutorial's version. After following the tutorial once, I began to experiment with some of that new technology, working towards re-creating the same scene, but modernized.

There's much more work to be done on that front, and I'm looking forward to getting back into it in a more serious way when time allows.

The final product from the old cloudscape tutorial.

Design Work

Although I haven’t been devoting much dedicated daily work-time to Orion Skies, I have continued to think about it regularly, and have been making notes with new ideas. I’ve especially been working on worldbuilding: thinking about human society, history, aliens, technologies, spacecraft, social dynamics, etc – though I’ve also been thinking about gameplay elements like Lua features and designs for ship and weapons.

There’s a lot of progress happening on that front, but I don’t think I’m ready to share any of it at this point – I’d hate to share something that ends up getting changed or cut when I actually build Orion Skies after CFO is out, or worse yet to share something that I end up deciding to turn into a surprise in-game discovery!

As part of this design work, I’ve also been doing some reading and video-watching on topics related to Orion Skies's world. Here are some links that folks may be interested in, in no particular order:

I've spent a lot of time thinking about aircraft carriers and how one would realistically expect a space carrier to work. Here's a photo of a Dassault Rafale launching from an aircraft carrier.