This week focused on some pretty basic stuff.
5 February: Spotlight Assembly
Our aliens, like us, sometimes want to use fancy lighting to display something. This spotlight assembly is designed to sit in the corner of one of their rooms and cast a light beam on whatever it is they want to show off. It will specifically be used in a room to illuminate a pedestal.
6 February: Passage Tube
This is the baseline alien corridor. It has a 4m ceiling and floor just over 2m wide. If they need a wider tunnel, they dig sideways, not just increase the passage diameter, as seen in the wider section.
Because their ruins are largely underground, I didn’t put windows in them. The aliens know what rock is, so they don’t need a hole in the wall of their tunnel to see what the rock looks like. It would be like one of us knocking a hole in the basement wall and glazing it so we could see the dirt next to the house. That said, if I decide to have some of these tubes in an open space, either on the planet surface or acting as a bridge across a large cave or chasm, there may be a reason to add window sections.
7 February: Control Column
I decided to make a random piece of tech to use as scatter terrain. Then I decided to make it useful (and more interesting visually) by adding a keyboard and monitor. So it suddenly became a control device of some sort. No idea what I’ll use it for, but at least it looks cool.
8 February: Hex Room Walls
Baseline walls for the alien sections. At LOD A, these are simple panels in the right configuration for a 5m ceiling. From here they’re infinitely customizable.
9 February: Tube Nexus
This is just a little hexagonal room to join multiple passage tubes. If it was just a corner, it would simply be a bend in a tube. The nexus allows up to six to be plugged together.
10 February: Pedestals
Pedestals are useful for making things stand out for the player. They also make dandy stand-in items for scenes to show the focal point. So I put together a couple of them that fit the general theme.
Pedestal #1 is a simple hexagonal metal pipe or post with some very basic contouring to fit the aliens’ hexagon architectural theme. It’s a meter and a half tall.
The other pedestal is something I’m calling The Eyeball Pedestal. For reasons which should be obvious. I’ll probably set it up in Unity so the eyeball has independent rotation (and maybe a pogo-stick hover script) so it can act as a spotlight, turret, etc. hovering over the top of the pedestal proper. In my defense, I spent the better part of a week stoned out of my mind on oxy before I made this thing. Relax, I was in the hostibule with a life-threatening infection.
11 February: Alien Antipersonnel Turret
I needed an alien antipersonnel turret for internal security. So I made one. This one uses standard alien design principles – sharp-edged hexagonal cross-sections, hexagonal tori as beam guides, etc. It also uses mag-lev or something similar in place of a physical gimbal. I did that for two reasons: it will look cool once I add the hover code to make it float just above the pedestal (as I’m considering with the eyeball pedestal), and it will (in-universe) allow for faster, smoother target-tracking. So once it’s fully coded, it will be able to rapidly engage multiple targets.
This turret is one of the things I don’t particularly like doing in Blender for something like this. Despite it matching my mental concept art with the sharp-edged hexagonal cross-sections, those same sharp edges make it look like I was just lazy. But as a great author once said, “so it goes.”
