Modelling Advances

I have finally braved into starting the Tron Warp game properly. Last weekend I went back to my hometown, which meant a four and a half hour long trip by train. Apart from reading Dune compulsively (with more ideas triggering in my head for videogames that I probably will never make, mainly because I’d be using IP that’s not mine hehe) I also clocked some work into modelling with Blender.

Now, I am an aerospace engineer. That means that I have had proper CAD training and I should be able to figure out Blender by myself with some tutorials and be able to make some decent models. Truth is, I have either never had the patience or the wits necessary to do so, plus I am doing this project on the Macbook Air I bought and on the go which usually means no mouse. The logical conclusion is that rather than modelling by drawing on the screen, I am going to do things through code.

The first ship I have designed is above: the hull is different ellipsoids combined together, the “wings” (or pushers actually) at the side are made out of parabollas over straight lines and the connectors are a truncated cone. The pushers are actually to push other ships towards oblivion!

What I have not decided on yet is how to render these models. I am going to give Godot a try, because I have used it for 2D and everything was super simple to set up and a pleasure to code in actually, and I can’t be bothered to write all the code to do the 3D rendering in C or C++ (not if I actually want to finish the game that is). I was thinking about going for a low resolution toon rendering, to give it a very old school feel, but this morning while I was still in bed I thought that a look similar to Antichamber might work better. I guess I’ll A/B test it on myself and friends in order to choose.