From the (on hold) space opera graphic novel project.

OK, one more shot of this and then I will move on to something else. Just experimenting with overlaying different renderings - a hidden line render from SketchUp multiplied over a GI render from Podium, and then a paper texture layer on top. Oh and also a copy of the hidden line render with a bit of Gaussian blur.

I’ve been playing around with a SketchUp rendering plug-in called Podium. This is a design for a simple space craft, with a few renders taken from Podium and tweaked in Photoshop.

Still a work in progress at this point…

Hi there -

I put together a book of paintings and sketches, a mix of personal work and freelance illustration work (a fair amount of Wizards of the Coast stuff). It’s full color interiors, 159 pages, and is available in hardcover ($48) and paperback ($35). You can order through my storefront page at lulu.com; here is a link:

http://stores.lulu.com/francistsai

The order page at lulu.com has a low resolution preview of several of the pages.

Hm OK I’m not sure I’m calling this done. My judgment is not 100% this time of night, but here it is for now…

Well, if you could see them fly, you’d know which end was the front. Dammit.

Here are a couple of quick render/illustrations of some small fighter space craft based on the sketches in the previous post.

Hello again, sorry for the absence - had quite a bit on my plate there for a few weeks. Still do really, but I wanted to put at least a few minutes into this space opera project. I’ve been working with a writer named Stephen Phillips, who is doing a great job with helping me establish the world and the main characters. I think his ideas and script writing ability will help this thing out a lot!

Anyway this is just a set of really really quick and dirty sketches, starting to create the characters of the ships in this story. What I’d like to do is give the ship designs a bit of that old school, “practical model” feel. There is a certain aesthetic that comes from having to build actual models for the science fiction movies of the 70s and 80s that you don’t always see in the cg models in movies nowadays. The way I interpret that is that the ships start off with some very simple geometric shapes, which create an easily identifiable silhouette - you can immediately recognize a TIE fighter, for instance, regardless of the angle at which you are looking at it. All the “greeblies” are applied as a secondary layer, rather than acting as the main idea of the design.

So for this guy, I was thinking about a rotating cockpit, so that the orientation of the ship could change on the fly. So to speak… it would land and take off in a horizontal orientation, kind of like the old Cylon raiders from the original Battlestar Galactica TV series. Once in the air, or in space, the cockpit could rotate around 90 degrees and the ship would then take on a vertical orientation. No practical reason, just kind of a cool look. And so I wouldn’t be dinged for doing a Cylon raider ripoff. Which it still sort of is I guess…

Yadda yadda.

Meanwhile, at the Planetary Federation Shipyards in a hidden quadrant of space, the Federation Frigate “Marian’s Path of Righteousness” returns for refueling and repairs. Marian’s Path was involved in a covert operation to aid the famous roboticist Adam Fentonov in his defection from the Galactic Imperium, and suffered some minor battle damage.