guyxxed

This might belong more in the Short Questions thread, and if so I apologize and will move it. Was rewatching Frontier and the line in the recap episode where the Galaxy cabal note that Frontier was perfect for their plans in part because of their ban on implant technology caught my attention. While "implant" can mean a lot of things, it made me wonder if the rest of the galaxy is more like Grace and Brera and super cyborgs are the norm on Earth and Eden these days? Certainly Zentradi have a long history of cybernetics and it seems fighter technology has advanced to the point where you almost need to be enhanced to properly control one, so it would stand to reason. Just wondering if the setting materials give any hint to the state of "everyone else" in the current story years. Delta probably isn't a reliable gauge since it's out in the poor hinterlands of the galaxy, though the second movie seems to lean pretty heavily into cyber/AI bad guys so maybe that reinforces the idea. Is Macross headed towards a transhuman future, or has it already gotten there and all we're seeing are the lonely, left-behind luddites?

I'm in Baltimore (well, just south of it, in Laurel, but I consider myself a Baltimorean).

It's still mostly kitbashing from existing models, so not as bad as it seems, but definitely takes time. I keep telling myself the end result will be worth it. We'll see, got to get there first! 😁

Another minor update. Have been working on making the cafe Makina sits in during Episode 1 when she's spying on the marine base in Al Shahal. It proved a bit difficult, because the shot as shown is mostly impossible given what we're shown of the geography of the area, so I had to improvise somewhat. Instead of a neighborhood cafe on a hill as shown (there are no hills on the Al Shahal map), I instead biult a tiered promanade onto one of the arcology towers in the rough vicinity of the marine base (which also can't be where it's shown in the anime, but that's a whole other diatribe). Anyway, sharing some shots and hopeful to get back to something more fun soon, though I did actually enjoy figuring out how a player could move through this space and reach every level. More to come.

No paladin pack, sorry, just this oeange color version and another that matches Klan's purple valk. Interesting that both go heavier on the color than the "standard" packs (they all have white caps with colored edges, whereas both of these have colored caps with white edges), but no other hidden toys that I've found so far. And, yeah, that experimental human pose folder....it has been deleted. 😁 Once I get to putting people in the scenes I'll start over fresh with what I've learned and hopefully not duplicate any of the triple jointed, broken armed things my first tries got me.

Don't know if this is update worthy, but I feel bad when I don't keep posting things to keep this thread going. Hopefully others can jump in with things they're working on as well, but in the meanwhile I thought I'd share some of the rabbit holes I keep finding myself in lately. As an example, I have no interest in messing with the Macross characters, but in learning animation to make the planes move, and then also thinking it would be cool to have background characters so that the game settings I've been building don't feel abandoned, I've somehow now ended up tinkering with the Uta Macross idol models. Like the M30 models, these are very well detailed and a great example to learn from, both in how to model efficient topology and also in how to build an effective armature, which helps me with what I'm doing with the planes. The end result, though, is that I now have a folder full of weirdly posed models of the Macross singers that is somehow way more embarassing to be seen with than the folders full of imaginary planes I've been working on so far. 😉 I thought it might be funny if, somewhere in my game environment, you could come across Sheryl or Kaname on a random park bench, and when you approached a bunch of bodyguards would come out of nowhere and throw you off the nearest balcony. So now I'm learning event triggers and other fun things in Unity. 😄 I've also come back to my beloved VF-25s and made a VF-1D colored trainer version (one of my favorite schemes) and started messing with Super and Armor packs to work out ways to easily equip the planes in-game. Didn't realize there was a custom version of the packs for the YF-25 (my favorite plane), so that was another nice discovery in the files. Also putting these models in scenes together highlights once again the crazy scale of Macross. A valkyrie is super cool, but it's also ridiculously big, the shot of Sheryl sitting on the foot shows it better than anything. Oh well, maybe one of these days, I'll actually have a working environment where stuff will happen, but in the meanwhile, here are a couple of screenshots to pass the time.

Okay, that works for me (the acknowledgement by Chiba), and I'll happily go back to suspending my disbelief. Like I said, I really appreciate that there has been thought given to things like this, someone took the time to figure it all out and write it down, and that it's all there for us to puzzle through and absorb. Thank you very much for pulling it together and sharing it, this is fun stuff. (And, as an engineer who can't let things go, I started doing some calculations on just how much acceleration you would need on those few milliliters of fuel to impart the kick we observe to an 18m long fighter plane, and...well, it's very big numbers. Significant fractions of c. Wild).

Fair enough. The engineer in me is still raising an eyebrow that you could get enough thrust out of that small an amount of reactant to move a multi-ton air/spacecraft at the speeds we see, but there are certainly crazier things to accept and at least there's a thought through rationale behind it. Works for me, and thank you for pulling those together. I'm always a bit impressed at the depth of world building Macross has accumulated over the years, whether it's "official" or otherwise, it's all fun to read through.

Interesting, and very helpful, thank you! I think it still raises an issue, though, in that the thermonuclear reactor is, well, reacting to produce the plasma, and that plasma still needs to be exhausted even if the turbines aren't blasting it out, correct? Maybe the transducers are so efficient that it can be radically throttled down when not actively flying and still have enough power to run the whole thing in a combat situation, but there will still be some super hot gases spewing out of the nozzles the whole time. Only other option I can think of is that they have a way to close off the expansion chamber after the reactor and run off the "bottled" plasma for awhile, but that raises the problem of being able to flip a thermonuclear reactor on and off at will (maybe not too big an issue since it is fuel injected and gravity powered instead of needing neutron dampening). I'm still having images of valkyries stomping around sandblasting everything within a dozen meters and setting things on fire wherever they go. Entertaining, but not practical. 😉

Maybe a dumb question, but something that's always tickled the back of my mind: a valkyrie generates electrical power through its turbines, and it uses the most power when in battroid form (energy conversion armor at its strongest, pinpoint barriers likely in use, weapons and motorized joints all active), so the turbines have to be going pretty good to sustain that. No problem when in the air or in space, but when standing or walking on the ground, there would be a constant blast of hot air from the feet/nozzles throwing up dust and rocks and generally making a nuisance of themselves. I know the planes have batteries, and maybe this is the hand wave tomake ground operations practical, but they can't possibly be powerful enough to give more than a few minutes of operation. Just wondering if there's something I've missed that makes this more practical, or if it's just a concession to Rule of Cool suspension of disbelief and I should stop worrying about it. 😉

My suspicion was correct, transformation on this one is pure magic. There is no "mechanism", the shoulders/arms just float up into position from fighter to battroid. The shoulder gaurd even sticks through the other parts in fighter a bit. Polygons can be very forgiving. 😉

I will have to dig into the models, but I highly suspect the transformation is mostly magic. 3D is almost as forgiving as animation is, and there are a lot of parts that float around on these models. The 25s, for example, have nothing actually connecting the legs to the groin in battroid, and I'm pretty sure the shoulders on the 22 just kind of "end up" there. I'll take a look and let you know. As for the growing fleet, I haven't even touched the VF-11s, 19s, or SV-51s available in the game yet. M30 is quite the teasure trove of high quality valkyrie models!

Small update, have added a competing trade family in the Al Shahal community with their own "royal guard" units. The VF-22 seemed a natural choice (and I've pretty well overrepresented the VF-25 at this point 😉). This livery was based off of some Iranian gaurd uniforms I found online (the VF-25s above were based on a Saudi scheme). I need to make panel lines and rig the model for posing, but am pretty happy with how it turned out. No idea where any of this is leading, but I'm having fun in the process! I can imagine a scenario where the different families come into conflict and the NUNS cannon fodder have to step in to separate them, though given rich people antics, more likely these and the 25s above would just be arm wrestling for the prime parking spaces at the spaceport. Enjoy, and have a good weekend!

Yup, that was exactly what I zeroed in on, but nothing came up on screen during playback. I've probably got a setting messed up somewhere on the player itself. Thanks for the confirmation, I'll keep fiddling.

That would not be a bad outcome! 😉 Don't know if I'll ever get there, but it's fun trying.