I have to declare my current system is not capable of rendering the scene prepared for the calendar. Due to memory allocation problems Blender crashes when processing a file with more than 1.4 GB on Win32. That is a limitation of the OS, not Blender.

So to ease my pain the last days have been busy to get a donated HP Proliant DL145 G2 Server up and running. The AMD64 Opteron 285 based machine runs on Debian 7 Wheezy 64 Bit with a MATE desktop environment, 8 GB of RAM and a number of services necessary for remote dealing with the beast. Another 8 GB of Ram went into the machine three days later (the latter being only borrowed form the donator of the machine) and so far she rocks…

Due to it’s age, performance comes at a certain cost: noise. Seven 5cm tubular ventilators sound like one hairdryer each and make an infernalistic noise that just prevents a human being to share the same room with the system at max performance. However it does successfully render the entire scene and is twice as fast as my aging workstation. So that makes the monster a necessity to live with. And never judge a gift horse by it’s teeth…

The inaugural run of the new RenderMachine went interestingly smooth with very nice speed and comfortable remote usage (it’s located in the next room and the noise is bearable with the connecting door closed).

The image below has a memory footprint of 6200+ MB and was rendered in 18 minutes and 30 seconds. My old machine usually made it through half the render process in 20 Minutes and then Blender crashed.

Final Image: “Meet the Lone Lady“

The image above shows the finished scene. Personally I like the dawn lighting and the washed out colors, als well as the contrast the Aero’s car paint provides. The first scene had Logos of most of the Traveller Megacorps. It looked really great. But I managed to delete all the SVG’s in one go and had to start over. Less is often more, so the Akerut logo boldly overlooks the starport. A tiny Bazar-Sign at the end of the landing field hints toward the existence of a startown. Well the cup of hot brewerage now has a smoke/steam effect too.

That’s about it, I’d say. Cheers.

Il’l keep ya posted!

Edit November 23rd, 2013: It’s done. I’ve submitted my donation to Ian and hope to get through the final descision making process. Thanks for taking a look.

Edit April 2nd, 2014: No calendar published this year. I must admit I’m a bit disappointed. However Ian – the editor and publisher – stated he was short a few images to fill the cal, so I guess we’ll have another chance next year.

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Community – The official Traveller Calendar 2014
Category: Community,Traveller — admin @ 14:21
Sep
13 2013

So now that I have finally made the descision to include the Far Trader in my Traveller Calendar 2014 submission, I have to get going with the texturing of the vessel. Rob Caswell published a drawing of the Far Trader challenging the DA Community to come up with a paint scheme (or – well – colorizing the ship).

I used his Drawing to create the following paint scheme which is also my current favorite for this ship. I tried to touch a bit on classic 70ies car racing colours (GULF Racing used a light blue and orange coloring).

And now the textured model. I think with a dusty weathering and some more decals I will be good. The bump map, specular map and an admittedly generic hull plating have alteady been added. This works fine for now.

And here comes the drawing…

The tail number states homeworld, ship type, registration number and sector abbreviation and says “Gerim, A2-58738 RD” (RD for Reaver’s Deep).

Next image shows the ship grounded with an open Airlock…

Set in a starport scene I’m currently developing…

Stay tuned for future updates.

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Starships – Meet the Lone Lady (200dt Far Trader)
Category: Far Trader,Starship,Traveller,WIP — admin @ 20:40
Sep
05 2013