Mutter away. dear heart I know Al wondered whether he should keep writing his post or stop and give you guys a chance to react, so if you don't have anything coming to mind, it shouldn't really matter. I'll be posting something...right after i send my resume out and attend to other mundane matters

I want to build the second post with Vanadia so we can have a suspensful build up to the doctor coming out of the OR - he's dead Jim scene. I also have a silver screen to add about the alliance patrol ship.

So post if you got something to say. Asher might be checking out the cooler for some milk. Wyatt might really need a drink right now. Wolf might find a copy of Busty Browncoat Babes 3 in the holo-file. He's given you free reign in his house.

WWJD - What would Jayne do?

I dunno what the heck just happened but I was finishing up a post (in Word), clicked 'Save' and Winblows decided, all the sudden, that it couldn't find my thumb drive... Gave me some kind of nonsensical message "saved and closed" my document and now... it's nowhere to be found... on top of that, not a single word doc is left on my dingdang thumbdrive, now!!! WTF?!?!

*sigh*

Okay... gripe session over... if I'm lucky, I'll find a .tmp somewhere that I can restore, otherwise, it's re-copy, re-paste, re-write... blahblahblah!

Loverly silverscreen, btw, Al! (And, of course, Willow's post was sparkling as always...) Figgers that we've been killin' an Alliance Commander's boys, though, don't it?

Anyhoo... once I get it written again I'll have Sam's 'dream/nightmare' posted and mebbe a bit of a wake up.


*huge sigh of relief* Wheee! I found it! Lost a good part of the post I was working on but I'm all good up thru Tann's last. Got everything saved off on the laptop (twice - one as a 'redundant copy' in a completely different directory) and am rescribbling the post, now, as I get a minute here and there.

I enjoyed the post immensely, so bravo!

I'm glad I recovered it, too, even as "random" as it was (which, I can attest to some smaller degree, is the way one's mind gets when the body gets pummeled to that extent... endorphins+fatigue+painkillers = wooohooowhatthehellwasthat?)...

Anyhoo... looking forward to the next step forward.

...so it's time to share.

I don't know if Alacrity remembers or not but, shortly after he tossed up the opening post of this little adventure, I mentioned that after reading it (and visualizing it, of course) I felt compelled to somehow animate the whole 'opening credits' bit...

No, no... don't get that excited, I haven't gotten quite that far yet... sorry.

The 'stumper' of that whole project, of course, was going to be the characters and Rocinante herself... they'd either have to be drawn and animated frame by frame or I'd need to come up with some passable 3D models and go that route. So, since animating that entire sequence by had would have surely resulted in my fingers falling off, my eyes popping out, and my brain exploding, I decided to try and model all of our cast... starting with Rocinante (ships bein' easier than folk ta model an' sech, y'see?). Well, here we are practically two years later and I've finally managed to cludge together a farily decent model of our beloved Firefly. I can't take 100% credit for whipping this up 'from scratch' because I followed a tutorial for modelling Serenity that I found out on a Lightwave Forum, I think... Learned aLOT about modelling thanks to that thing... but I did do all the modelling myself (almost as bad as drawing when it comes to making the fingers ache) and came up with this as an almost end result. Still have a way to go (duplicate the one shuttle, create/add texture maps, etc) before it's complete and done. Also, since I'm just a po' boy, I didn't use Lightwave, had to translate the tutorial into Blender... took some time to figure out what compared to what tool wise... anyway, enough yakkin'... take a peek at this.
The other characters are gonna be way tough, me thinks... *trembles*


Oh yeah... you may notice that my biggest major modelling mistake is that I started out in the wrong view and ended up orienting the gorram ship the wrong way... was too far along when I realized my boo-boo and decided I'd fix that later... Guess it's getting close to later...

Sounds like a big project but I like what you have done so far.

Great posts so far in the game. Waiting on Tann, Blammm, and Vanadia to post so I can move forward - hopefully by this weekend.

... it's definitely been a much bigger project than I had originally anticipated, I'll say that much. I lost track of exactly how many hours, over all, I've put into that thing - or, more to the point, I stopped counting when it took me close to eight hours just to get the 'firefly tail' modelled. Like a lot of other 'projects' this one was a chip away at it as the urge or inspiration struck. If i had to guess, though, I'd imagine there's well over 160 hours there, so far... and I'm still hoping to maybe do some interiors, etc, on top of the texture maps, etc. Lots and lots of work, as I said, but has definitely been a learning experience.

Unt alsho... Hooray for updates!!!

BTW - If Wyatt, Willow and Asher are aiming to misbehave - best let me in on it so I know what to expect.

Eol, what program do you use to make that? Maya? As for easy animation, try Vue. Cool work, man.

I used an Open Source modelling program called Blender (available as a free download from blender.org). It's very much like Maya, Lightwave, 3DS Max, etc, with the one major bonus of being exceedingly cheap in comparison (read: Blender is free whereas the others can easily run your from $300 - $800+ (American $$$).

As I mentioned above, that firefly was done by following a very detailed tutorial that was written using Lightwave as the modelling suite and it took some 'extra time' trying to adapt those instructions to Blender's toolset (example: One of the very first steps in the tut mentioned a "point creation tool"; Blender doesn't seem to have such an animal so I experimented with a few other methods (create a plane, delete all but one vertex, then extrude that vertex, etc) before I ended up simply creating a circle with 59 vertices, deleting one of them, and then draging the rest into the proper positions in order to lathe (or spin as it's called in Blender) the firefly tail.

A little aggrivating at times, of course, but well worth the effort and learning curve, I think... It still needs some work here and there but I am pretty proud of it, myself.

Thanks for the kind words.

Nice work, Eol!

Here's another idea I thought would be cool (yep... I'm being the demandin' type): How 'bout a cool action shot, like a scene from some part of our story so far.

I have a picture in my mind from our recent escapade. In the bank, close up of Asher and Brigit kneeling beside Sam. The angle of the shot is taken in such way that you can see the rest of the crew too (save Ma): to the right, over Asher and Bridgit's shoulder, through the blown out bank window, you can see Wolf resting in the mule. Ludlow can be seen dead in the street. A crowd of town folks are beginning to gather behind the mule. Maybe in the far off distance, you can see the Roc over top of the town's buildings. To the left of Asher and Brigit, the Captain, Willow, and JW stand talking to each other amongst the dead bodies of the dumb brothers. The body of the banker with the Doc and banker's wife huddled over him can be seen in behind the Captain.

Anyway... cool action shots from the story! That would rock! Personally, I think our story is completely filmable.

...put together a few "scenes from the story" here and there. Good thinkin' Blammm-O! There's been plenty of Hallmark moments so far, haven't there?

Cap, Willow, an' Dash meeting with Dodger

Asher and his gun-check girl on their date

Rocinante and Maria Celestia racing for the angelhair comet

The possibilities're ruttin' endless! I'll see what I can do as I find a pocket of freetime here and there.

The gunfight was a classic scene for me. Every moment was so well played.

Asher chasing after the people and the brass band, with weapons in hand and trying to convince the crowd to keep the party going.

Wolf running over the band. That would have been such a funny scene of film.

Wyatt nailing Ernest Ludlow between the eyes.

Good Times...Good Times....

BTW - Great Post Blammm.

Yup, yup... the mule and the band was classic...

Wolf hanging off the speeding mule to fix the brakes (Wyatt shown in the passenger's seat all frosty and calm like even though Wolfy's feet're scraping dirt and the Kid's white-knuckling the controls)

The Kid opening up on the souped-up mule and blowing it sky-high

Willow actually looking 'nervous' when the explosion happens

And hey... can't forget Dash gettin' beat down

Dash getting shot

Dash getting shot... again

Dash gettin' persploded and shot... again (that boy's gonna have to learn to stay on the boat, I swear!)

So many great scenes... Graphic novel anyone?