This is Mercy's Flame WIP, I wanted to show her what CCR meant. This is NOT my work (except for some extra work on highlights and flame).

I'm gonna label this a "work in progress" because it surely is. :-D

What follows is a list of things that are known, currently broken with the new theme. I believe I've fixed most majorly broken issues with the site, but if you know of something that's not already mentioned here, feel free to post a comment detailing the issue. I am also including a list of fixed bugs and improvements that are coming down the pipe.

• Private Message System Links Missing -- Resolved, you can find these on the profile pages now.
• Image Search -- Pending
• WIP Gallery Improvements -- OK, this should be finished.
• Navigational Improvements -- Most navigation has been updated, I don't know of anything I've missed. I do intend on replacing all the text links with image links at some point
• Forum Improvements -- The forum MIGHT benefit from some manual breadcrumb work, I will have to take a look at this before making a decision though.

This is the list of improvements/bugs I have yet to do, please feel free to mention anything else, and I'll add it to the list.

*Update #1*
Now that I've got the WIP gallery improvements working the way I want, if anyone wants to see what this is really intended to look like, just take a gander at mercy's blog and you'll see exactly where I'm going with this. It's going to make browsing artwork REALLY nice and REALLY easy.

http://swagonline.net/user/2246/blog

*Update #2*
I've made some more updates to the blog image capabilities of the site. This second set of changes should make it easier for users to navigate through the blog images. They now provide next and previous links in the lightbox area. Again you can see great examples of this with Mercy's blog link above.

Eclipse

I might disappear for a little bit come friday. Now I know what you're thinking... "It's thanksgiving, we might all disappear." but yeah, not for that reason. Come friday they're taking me into surgery and cutting teeth out of my skull. I'm so excited! (not really...)

I'm one of those folks who, believe it or not, have a big enough mouth that I could actually keep all my wisdom teeth, but unfortunately, the last of them decided to come in cock-eyed. :-( 3 came in just fine, the 4th is wedged against my back teeth. So I have the honor of being put under, and then cut upon. I've never had surgery of any sort before, so I'm a little... anxious.

Anyway, all of that to say that if images don't get put up for a few days come this weekend, don't worry, I'll be back. :-) I'll probably designate a guild member to handle it for the next week or so. I've got a couple people in mind who might fit the bill.

With that in mind, I'm going to take this time to wish all of you who will be celebrating Thanksgiving this coming week a happy Thanksgiving.

Ciao!

Eclipse

So, quite a bit of an update, no I've not put weapons on the ship yet, I wanted to get an idea for how this was settling. I've tried to make it very painterly. I'm hoping I've succeeded in a good way. This is definitely WAY outside my comfort zone, but I'm trying hard. Feedback/criticism is VERY welcome.

Pretty much everything has been manually built.

Eclipse

So, if you read my blogs you know I spend a troubling amount of time working on creating the perfect Chiss Clawcraft. Jeff Carlisle (our very own Lupis the Bold) has helped me out a ton on that particular project. Anyway, I was showing off what I had to JawaStu the other day, and he mentioned to me that he'd love to see a hangar scene with Chiss and the Clawcraft. Of course I'm not sure I feel comfortable doing that level of work today, however... I'd love to work up to it. And with that in mind, I started thinking. Some Chiss technology (and don't get me started about the difference between the Empire of the Hand and the CEDF) is very Imperial in design (i.e. Empire of the Hand "EotH"), and if the subject is clawcraft, then I'd expect to see more of this Imperial influenced technology. So, in the Chiss-like way of taking Imperial designs and making them better, I present my concept work for an EotH Clawcraft Fighter Helmet.

Please comment, I'd REALLY love feedback on this.

Eclipse

So, I've added my newest clawcraft work. You can see that Jeff completely reworked the tail, and I've done a lot of work to reflect what he wanted it to look like. The wings now sweep into the tail. There are a few small areas that still need a little detailing, but I chose to hold off on the textures again for a little longer until all the basic mesh can be agreed upon. At this point I think we're done with that sort of work for the most part. Engines got a total overhaul as well, and I am VERY pleased with how that came out.

So, I'm going to give myself some time off from this for a little bit, another week or two probably, and then back to texturing it. Since the wings and tail are all one part now, texturing that is going to be... well... interesting to say the least. The UV map for it should be quite interesting.

Crits & Comments always welcome! Let me know what you think.

Update 6-22-08:

So, I've been... neglectful of my art lately, both volunteer and otherwise. Wolverine has been very good about pushing me gently to finish his work, and so that blog will get updated shortly as well. However, I had some updates to add to this, so I thought I'd put them up here.

At this point the modeling should be 98% complete. The interior behind the cockpit glass will get some more work yet, but with that one exception, I know of nothing else to be done on it. The last bit that needed work were some minor trench work in the wing, and that's basically finished now. These renders show that off mostly.

With this basically complete, I found some great details of the front paneling in the cockpit just... 2 days ago, best reference material I've found. I hadn't even intended on updating it, but since I have the material, might as well. The details were on a great studio quality TIE ln, so since I have some really great references now, I may finish model off to the quality I'd like to see. We'll see though, I'm growing tired of TIE shape ships, and I know I have one more request here for a TIE like vessel. I'm going to branch out and go for something completely different with the next one I think. :-)

Again C&C always welcome, desired. I have lots of texture work still ahead of me, and I'm hoping, as always, to get things taken care of before Gencon. We'll see.

Eclipse

Soo, it's SLOW going, but this will at least convey some idea of where I'm going with this. No real lighting setup, lots of time spent on the UV maps thus far. I've only UV'd the actual cockpit hull proper and the obviously textured portion of the hatch. I'm still working on a lot of the other components that are visible here.

I am NOT looking forward to the wings! They are going to be pure pain. I'm hoping the the rest of the hull of the ship will be fairly straight forward since nothing else is spherical or anything. Still I'll probably be stuck on just the cockpit for the rest of this week. I'm not even going to attempt any textures for the internals of the ship, nothing beyond just basic materials.

I'm spending a lot of time setting up ambient occlusion maps to make the details that I worked so hard on stand out. I'm not sure if a really good light setup would fix that problem or not, but seeing as how I'm a total newb to lightning rigs (and texturing but at least I have some moderate clue there) I'm just going to fake it.

Love feedback as always.

Eclipse

Soo... After more talks with Jeff, and lots more modeling, I've got the Cockpit essentially finished, I finally updated the wing supports, rebuilt the spine of the ship, and after all this, rebuild (from scratch) the entire tail to and bottoms, and integrated them into the wings to make it one piece (you can see this in the back view). I think this image is looking really amazing for where I'm trying to get to. More details are needed on the surface, but I'm still hashing that all out. For the most part, it is what it is at this point. A little more work will go into the engine housing to give it some radiators, but aside from the detail work I want to do on the tail/wing integration piece, this is REALLY close to the texturing zone.

*sighs* Texturing, oh man am I ever NOT looking forward to that! At least there are plenty of places to hide my UV seams, but it's going to be difficult. Of that I'm sure.

So my macbook bit the dust this past week. 2 whole days of me w/ no computer to model on. :-( Apparently my motherboard just died. Yay apple-care, they just replaced it no questions asked, but still, kind of a pain. Just goes to show how much more often I need to back up my stuff. I've got pretty recent backups, but it'd be nice if I had instant backups like the next OS X will get me. I'm very much looking forward to that.

Well tell me what you think of the images, I'm working really hard on them, I hope that's obvious at this size.

Eclipse

OK, so when I was reading Wolverine's description on this he said it looked like old technology even though it wasn't which made me thing it should be really monolithic. Before I took it too far I wanted to get something on the page so that I could see if that was even moderately close. The planet is total stand in as is the lens flare, so let's not comment on them shall we? :-)

Comments on the design? Also, how's my lighting and shadows?

I've been working my TAIL OFF on the front view port. Gosh that thing was an absolute pain. As you can see I've cut the slots into it for the "transparasteel" inserts most of the details on the exterior are now done, I'm just going to do the hatch now. I want to detail the interior more but as there's a time limit to what I can do here, it's last on my laundry list of improvements to get finished.

Hopefully I'll get to start the hatch sunday. If that happens I anticipate it finished early next week, maybe this weekend, depends on my time frames. Then I just have to clean up the spine of the ship some and the wing struts. Then it's texture time... I'm looking forward to that and scared out of my mind at the same time. hehe

Anyway, here it is, enjoy and give me some feed back!

Eclipse