Roughly twenty years ago I began creating what would become my life's work. Such was when I first began writing and forging my dreams into coherent, recurring shapes. The shapes took names, names took tales, tales became legends, and from henceforth I fixated on this one goal, this one dream.

For all my many years I have sought only a single thing: to consume myself in my dreams so that I may forget the world around me. Oft times it came to bitter gallows with overdoses and sharp objects, for building my worlds was a truly futile goal. I am, simply put, incapable.

Nonetheless I did toil. After so many years and trials I had come to one final showdown. That was Black Sun: Retribution. A CGI to portray a tiny piece of history for one of the side races and side characters of the main story. With the primary content far beyond my ability to create, I set down into Retribution with someone I had known for a decade on a simple agreement - he would attempt character models.

Well, as my previous blogs entail, he didn't.

It has been two years since Retribution died. Life has gone from bitter and miserable to horrifying and devastating. The only reason I still live is because of my cat. No other. I believe this may well be the year it all comes to a close. Two long, sleepless, painful years of fighting for her survival, for food, delving into the uttermost darkest depths of my own mind. I can safely say the last half-year has been more terrible than all the months after 2006 combined. A truly formidable statement given the sheer amount of bullshit I have been forced to swallow over all this time. From death to betrayal to more death to more betrayal to financial ruin to starvation and back again, life really is quite true to its promise in making you its bitch.

Even so I sit here today with a simple hope. A hope that I can bring closure to my life of creation before the last drops of my strength are spent.

Retribution. This arm of the project was one and a half years of virtually non-stop labor. Every hour I had strength and mind I devoted to it. I have posted models and videos, sure. But I likely never mentioned of the tech document I was writing alongside it. Comparatively miniscule, but the most coherent and complete of any such documentation I was able to write for the world. I had intended to create a video for it detailing all the completed assets and the stories behind them when the project was completed. Those dreams died with it. Today, however, I have found myself once more lingering on old battlefields.

Much changed within me when I faced the barrel of August last year. To be so deep within the darkest forest of despair I found myself losing attachment to many things that had held me back. Like giving a shit about what I did with the last hours of my life. I had always hoped I could strike down one single, crowning achievement to overshadow all the countless years of failure. I dispelled those delusions and focused exclusively on one single-minded pursuit - knowledge. Yet no sooner did the dust of that battle clear did I realize I had nothing to learn. So, I set myself against simple goals. Kitbashing. UV mapping components. Simple things. Things to try to break down blockades in my abilities that existed since I began 3d work in 2001.

Times never stay stable, however, and the rest of the year and the beginning of this one would test my resolve. Moreso, they would instill the desire further. I found amidst my darkest moments a strength I had never found before. The ability to transfer stressful energy into motion of thought. To break the chain of debilitation. Never before had I been able to do this, and yet there I was, no less than three times in just as many months.

And last week I said to myself I would do one thing if I could do no other.

I would bring closure to all the lost years.

Only upon starting the groundwork of building the tech document's content did I really get an idea of the sheer scale of the work I had been forced to throw away with Retribution's death.



I will begin simple. Process the models into Unreal using the existing exports from the Sins conversion directories. I would quickly discover my sense of organization was still lacking. Several Anahn ships were missing from the directory. 6 Xy`Kranasha ships were missing. All but two Undead ships were missing. Good job, mate.



I would ignore any thought of scaling the ships to their canon specifications. That wasn't our goal. The 20km corvettes would render the fighters incomprehensible and I had no way to properly depict the stellar-sized Fear, Spirestorm, or other major constructs. I would remain content to leave the models as they were for the Sins version, and fix issues that occurred as I discovered them, such as smoothing issues.



Two issues are present in Unreal 4 I don't know how to deal with yet. The first is there is no anti-aliasing. Temporal AA is a blur filter, and on top of ghosting the images and destroying particle effects destroys the overall image quality. FXAA is a joke very few people will laugh at as it makes games virtually unplayable. Yet these are the only two "solutions" the engine has. For now. I can try to supersample rendered frames to conquer this limitation. The second issue is more problematic, however. There is no way to attain large-scale proper reflections. Screenspace reflections are extremely slow and very disgusting looking. Luckily most of my scenes do not require reflections that would really bring out the limitations of screenspace, but those that do will have to be considered very carefully.



I decided I would create some particle effects in Unreal as an exercise but I would not attempt to animate anything besides a camera. I'm not an artist, so animation is something I'll likely never live to see myself attempting. Again, I'm not trying to create Retribution, only a tech document visualized. I may try to record sins footage, if the game still runs, however.



The models are ugly and show the heavy hand of my optimizations given Sin' poly restrictions. I probably won't try to update any of them. I forget how I even made any of these. All I know is that I used Extrude exclusively. I had to use a fair number of base meshes from external sources, and one or two models were even reverse engineered from Homeworld 2 to then reconstruct and mangle to my specifications simply because I found making shapes so difficult.



Even with the comparatively laughable Sins scaling, the capital classes of the Anahn dwarf the smaller ones. Many of these behemoths are scaled in at the 500km range. Their projectiles release apocalyptic amounts of energy, and their battles would have been all the more pleasant to depict in motion. However, the only depiction of anything that will happen will be in my head. And, try as I may, I cannot help but feel extremely bitter about it all.



DyiithJhinn go in next. I split their meshes face-by-face to assign different textures to them. This was an insanely tedious and time-consuming process but one I could accomplish, unlike UVW mapping. As a result the DyiithJhinn are by far the most impressive looking race even though their ship roster is very incomplete.



I am not only able to replicate the Sins materials, I am able to improve them. PBR, animated plate glow, and a superior circuit texture I previously rendered out of Filterforge for the Apex project. My heart swells with emotion upon seeing the DyiithJhinn take shape in Unreal 4. I am so close to being able to do what I want, and yet I am, even if I were a normal person capable of doing normal person things, a lifetime away.



The DyiithJhinn's sins scales start to allude to the kind of forces the Anahn had to overcome in their final battle of the audiobook, although the fourth-gen Anahn fleet is grossly incomplete and none of those ships are yet imported.



Next are the Xy`Kranasha. While I experimented with the various shaders for their material, I didn't really find a good setup I was happy with. I am content to leave them like this for now. Their material readily reacts with bloom and dulls the months of manhours invested into detailing their geometry.



Ships like the Glecterror couldn't even be remotely portrayed properly in a game because of their scale. I wasn't even sure how to translate the visualization of my thoughts to CGI. I only wish I was in the position where I could try. With a non-turreted ship it is quite possible I could try. Matinee's UI, however, is not as graceful for animation as I would have liked. Vegas has spoiled me. I won't be trying anything out of my league for this.



I regret not knowing how to make the textures a bit more random for the Xy`Kranasha. The Anahn will suffer a lot worse once I figure out what I'll tile on them. Oh well.



I had concluded very quickly the Wayward Daughter and other megaships wouldn't be put into Sins. Their scale made any kind of recording in that limited environment very unrealistic. I had planned to fully animate those scenes in the UDK. It's possible I could have done so with the momentum of an otherwise successful project behind me. Today I have no idea how I could have ever hoped to have accomplished it.



Next are the Undead. I saved the hardest (girthiest, veiniest, sweatiest etc) for last. The difficult here is not the models or conversion, of course, but the super complicated material I had since their first models in 2004 never conceived of a manner how to create. I set out today to change my anal destiny.

Undead are supposed to look like the Beast in Shadow Raiders, to an extent. A more phantasmal glow about them. But the most difficult part is the sort of distorted, reflective-like "skin" that appears like glass. I thought refraction would be my ticket to the homo demon theatre party, but I was quickly and soundly handed an American Express Card instead. Drats. Give or take 3 hours of flailing and I have this.



I handed the Diffuse a simple AO map rendered from a rock texture. The UV node for that diffuse has both a small negative Bump Offset and a minor Fresnel, and all of these are stuck to Camera Coordinates. A second Fresnel network makes for the red rim glow. The only time I would ever consider using a fake lighting effect, and only because the Undead are made out of satanic death energy metal of doom.



Adding the phantasmal edgeglow seems like too tall a task, however. I don't think a glowing silhouette can be done through materials. It would probably need some kind of post processing pass. Here I have to consider decisive defeat.



The Fear's woefully incomplete model from 2007 finally has the last piece of the puzzle to give it life.



And the Undead Fleet, complete with a very downscaled Pride and Spirestorm, takes the stage. This is roughly 90% of the ships made for the project. I think it's something like ~130 ships. Ofc, the Kerr`Ussan and the 4th gen stuff is missing, but that's not a lot.

I still need to figure out some things, like if I can make a material that transitions between Wireframe and not, and the Anahn plating material. But I'm ready to move on to finishing the imports and bringing in the two scenes I had in the UDK and then modernizing those a bit.

Nothing amazing is going to come of all of this, of course. Nor should I expect to really find closure in completing it. But I think I spent enough time on this rubbish to allow myself a momentary distraction in fiddling around with it.

The reality is, I am hoping I learn just a little bit more to edge me an inch forward. If I eek out another year, I have moved an inch. Another year, another inch. By the time I am 80 I might be able to make a motion picture production with more than just still objects sliding around. You know. Assuming I'm not a toaster or something by then.

Ultimately this project's road will eventually cross with one Retribution failed to manage. Porting character models to try to find something that could be used as a placeholder for what I wanted to be created. I can do Mal`Ash easily enough by converting Valakas from Lineage 2, and the Fear's beholder-like avatar should be simple enough, but not a single other character will be an easy task. Adjak, Annashim, Haktish, all of them will probably be substituted with darkness or some really cheesy shit. But that's the price I pay for my incompetence.

Until the next time.