New textures for cover models
Here’s a quick photo bit of my work in progress. I’ve learned that I have much to learn when it comes to 3D artwork and rendering. My favorite hangout is scifi-meshes.com, and I realized I can do a lot better than I have been.
My cover art has never needed to be incredibly detailed; there just isn’t enough room on a cover for all the little tidbits and greebles to show on the ship’s I’ve made, but I try anyway.
Here is my latest; I’m retexturing the hull of Avenger to make it look more real. When you get up close to something, you will notice that everything has a texture to it, and it’s rarely uniform and even. So, the silver hulled ship is my original, and the one with the paneled looking hull (aztec pattern to you 3D artists) is my work in progress. Still have a ways to go, but I’ve done enough to show it off.
Any thoughts? Too dark, too square, etc?
Hello, my name is Ryan and I’ve been slacking
Hey all.
I was looking at the blog today and saw that I haven’t posted anything in a month. Wow. Now, I’d rather not post anything at all than repeated annoying updates about doing the laundry or cleaning cat puke out of the carpet, but I just want to make sure I have some good excuses lined up for everyone!
I’m 40,000 words into the fourth Birthright novel at this time and am working on a Priman fighter 3D model to use on the cover. Those pesky bosses have been keeping me busy at work, Spring projects abound, the micro SD card in my cell phone got corrupted today and it’s almost camping season so I spend a lot of time daydreaming about the travel trailer of my dreams.
One thing I was going to share is the latest Indie author I’ve been reading. Now, he’s far better off than I am as far as industry presence goes, so it’s not like he needs help from he, but he’s getting it anyway!
His name is Michael R. Hicks and he has en ever-expanding series called In Her Name, about a race of technologically advanced, bloodthirsty warrior women who have put Humans on the top of their “We should fight and kill these guys” list. Not a good prospect. The first novel in the series is free on his website, and I’ve read four out of six novels so far. Good stuff!
Anyway, I’ll keep writing if you keep on reading, and I hope Spring finds everyone getting happier and warmer as the icebergs in the Great Lakes up here by me finally start to melt!
Our future will be printed in our basements (in 3D!)
Hey all-
I am a techno nerd. No, I’m not an early adopter of every blinky-light-adorned object out there, but I love knowing about them. I’ve as a result followed the 3D printing movement, founded on affordable machines like the Makerbot that allow people to print objects out of plastics and other composite materials from printers in their own home. It costs around $2000 and prints objects in various types of plastic. There are other machines you can build yourself which are cheaper. Point is, it’s out there and one day will probably be ready for prime time.
Most people in this field can foresee the day when this tech is ordinary enough to have in your own home. It will cost little enough that an average household could afford one if so inclined. Imagine going to the computer, firing up your CAD software, Blender, etc, and designing your own dinnerware, then printing out a set for your cupboard. Cool? Yes! But what else could we do with this technology?
One guy has already gone there, seeking to push the boundaries. He’s founded a company called DefCAD and is printing out gun parts on his machine. Yes, that’s right. First, let me say this: this is not a Second Amendment gun-rights post. The gun rights issue has no bearing on the point I’m trying to make, so don’t read on in trepidation wondering what I’m going to tell you to do about it. I’m not going to tell you what to think about it, so don’t worry! My opinion is no more valid than yours, so I’ll never push my own beliefs on you, I promise! In any case, this guy was featured on the video here, where he’s printed out the lower receiver for the most popular style of military-looking rifle, the AR-15. The lower receiver contains the grip, trigger, and the magazine well where the ammo goes. He’s also producing high capacity magazines from CAD drawings as well.
Here’s the point he’s trying to make: if it’s illegal to buy these items, is it illegal for him to make them himself for personal use? He designed and printed these objects himself, with collaboration from others on the website he hosts. He’s looking for attention, obviously, but he’s also opened up a vision of the world we will see soon.
My point is this: it looks to me like the future will be crowdsourced. Imagine a world where you want new rims for your car. You go to a website that hosts designs. You look at the designs people have made and uploaded for sale or free download. You grab the file, toss it into your 3D printer (that can’t do advanced materials or metal yet, but it’s only a matter of time), and the next morning you have a new set of rims for your car.
What about cars? There is a strong kit-car market today, but take that to the next level. Imagine a company that would furnish a rolling chassis, with attachment points for structures, optional arrangements for seats, doors and a safety cage, etc. You then go to the car-building website. You can design your own front end, bumper, hood, etc. It’s all being done today, just by high end specialty shops. Someday it will be affordable enough that anyone could buy a rolling chassis and then print out the parts in whatever style and color they want and build a completely custom, self-designed car. Would that not be the coolest thing since Henry Ford’s Model T?
There are entire industries that might go out of business, because while things will need to be designed and tested, the manufacturing and sale is where companies make the cash. I could see a sales structure in which companies like Ford, Kitchenaid, Hoover, Lego, etc, will sell the rights to a certain product, enabling you to print them on your own machine at home. It’s like pay-per-view movies. Plenty of people never go to a video store; they just pay for the right to watch the movie at home.
Maybe that’s what will happen. You want a new car, and don’t want to go through the trouble or uncertainty of building your own, so you go to Ford’s website. You select your model, pay the licensing fee, and download a one-time-use file that allows you to print out your own brand new Mustang GT500. People will establish self-design websites where crowdsourced designs would be downloaded and printed for everything from cellphones to new computers. Everyone with an eye for design and talent would have the chance to show off their stuff, not just a few players in each market segment. Manufacturing wouldn’t all be done overseas, and an entirely new industry would emerge to supply these printers with all the raw materials they’d need. Yes, it’s a stretch, but as I said, the tech is here; we’re on the very leading edge of a technology that will take years and years to reach maturity.
Just imagine what you would print if you could. And, as food for thought, think about what rules the government should have regarding things you make in your own home, and what rights you’d want guaranteed if they started writing new laws.
How the mighty (well, just me) have fallen
I have to laugh sometimes when I realize how my priorities, goals, etc have changed over the years as I’ve gotten married, had kids, become domesticated, that sort of thing.
Used to be in years past, I’d spend my idle time daydreaming about all the really awesome stuff I’d collect someday: a house that looked like a castle, Vipers, Lamborghinis, jet boats, a pet velociraptor, a keggerator, my own time traveling Delorean; you know, cool stuff.
As you age and life goes on, your ideals shift. Instead of a 2 seat sports car, I found a badass 4 door with a big V8 to claim as my ‘fun’ car, a 1996 Impala SS. Instead of a missile silo for a home, we have a nice house outside of town. And instead of a raptor, we have 2 cats. Though I admit the cats are potentially just as shifty as those man-eating velociraptors.
Just a few minutes ago, I was watching TV while straightening up and saw a commercial for the Hoover MaxExtract something-or-other, one of those neat steam-vacuums that cleans everything from cat puke to kid vomit out of your poor tormented living room carpet. I watched it and thought, “that is a sweet vacuum, I need that.”
Oh damn, how the once-mighty have fallen to Earth! I’m old…
Shadow of Doubt now available!
Well, it’s finally done. The Out of Nowhere sequel is online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Whew!
If there’s one thing that I do miss with going the Indie route it’s all the behind-the-scenes work that I don’t get to pawn off on somebody else. There’s editing, beta reading, cover design, updating links on all my other books and getting the new story uploaded correctly. Dang!
Still, it’s rewarding once it’s all finished. So today I’m going to go surf through Amazon and find an Indie author’s book to buy, and then I’m just going to be a customer for a few days before resuming work on the next novel.
I’d thought about launching into a tirade about the self-checkout epidemic as stores lately, but it’s probably been done and everybody hates it anyway, so there’s not much new to say on the matter in any case.
So, I’ll settle for wishing everyone a great day!
Shadow of Doubt 3d model
Hey all-
Well, the fun/distressing/mind-bending part of being an indie author is that I get to do everything, including making my own book covers. I use Sketchup, Twilight Render and Photoshop to do my work. I really wish I had the time to learn Blender or 3d Studio Max, but in the tiny amount of free time I have I’d rather be writing. In fact while I’m finishing up the editing of Shadow of Doubt, I’m already 6000 words into the fourth novel in the Birthright series.
I put up a new page on my blog; it’s under the Images tab and features my ongoing quest to generate 3D models of the ship that I plan to use on the Shadow of Doubt book cover. I only need a relatively low-resolution picture for the cover, but I spent way too much time analyzing and constructing the model. The result is all the pictures on the models page!
Out of Nowhere sequel in the bag!
Whew. I just finished the sequel to my YA book; it’s called Shadow of Doubt, and follows the continuing adventures of Matt Falken and friends as they battle aliens, their own fears, and some adults with ulterior motives who don’t want them to succeed at their task of defending their homes.
Editing and beta-reading is going on now, and I’ll spend the next week or two working on the cover. Sketchup and Twilight Render are my friends…
It was such a great feeling when I finished it, the accomplishment of writing the last of 86,000 words over the course of 5 months. I typed the last sentence and just stopped, big stupid grin on my face. It was just right; no feeling like I needed to drag it out or add just one more thing. I was perfectly happy, and hope readers are too when it’s published! More to follow soon!
So… are we alone?
Our family went to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago recently. (Hold your applause for our academic achievements until the end, please 
There was an exhibit there called Evolving Planet, which tracked everything that’s lived on the planet since the place cooled down enough for amino acids to start forming. Now, disclaimer; we consider ourselves minimally practicing Christians, and this isn’t meant to be a theological debate. I will say that I figure if God created us in His own image, He would have given us the capacity to ask questions like these and try to figure out the world around us. Where those questions take you is a matter of your own faith, which should be a private matter. I figure since I’m mentioning Evolution, I need to say something…
Anyway, the exhibit mentioned that there were four mass extinctions in our planet’s history, each time wiping out 70% or more of life on the planet. It wasn’t just that meteor that killed off the dinosaurs and gave us oil- it happened four times! It really made me think; how did that affect the life that eventually developed? It seems like every time there was a great cataclysm, the most adaptable life lived on and flourished, as you’d expect. What if the planet’s massive changes had managed to kill off everything and life had to completely start over? What if there had never been any of these events, and life never had to evolve past slimy fish-like creatures that figured dry land was for weirdos? What if life evolved, but they blew each other up, like we seem to always be on the verge of doing?
There are a lot of stars and planets in our galaxy; scientists claim at least 100 billion stars and as many as 17 billion Earth-sized planets. Whether these planets can or do support life is going to be hard to figure out. You’d have to think that the law of averages would cough up at least a few that have life, wouldn’t you? I know people who think every third planet must have life, and others that think we might just be alone. I just hope there’s no super-intelligent race monitoring Earth right now; if they catch any reruns of Jersey Shore or that show with Honey Boo Boo, they’ll probably vaporize the planet in order to spare the rest of the galaxy from us humans.
Just think about Earth’s place in the solar system. A few million miles closer, and the sun’s benevolent forms of heat and radiation would result in an irradiated and overly hot planet. Too far out, and everything ends up much like Wisconsin in the winter; too cold to support life.
Old school sci-fi writers didn’t seem to mess much with the concept of aliens as we know them today. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, Doc Smith’s Lensman series, etc, often completely ignore the topic of alien life. Then there’s the more recent sci-fi offerings such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Farscape, Babylon 5, and more. They truly embrace the idea of abundant life.
So, where is the middle ground? Is one right over the other? As an author who writes sci-fi, I was torn between how many aliens to include in my own series. I wanted to acknowledge the concept of alien life, but frankly the story I was writing wasn’t dependent on having an ‘alien of the week’; it was a smaller scale story about the people of one little group of folks just minding their own business. My quest to balance aliens with not having to force too many of them into the story actually led to the plot of the whole series: an ancient race that had spent a hundred thousand years tweaking the genetics of primitive planets they discovered, even seeding unpopulated ones with their own chosen forms of life. This allowed me to concentrate on my story without having to think up new and weird aliens every chapter.
It also makes me think: is it possible such a thing has happened out there? Just imagine if Earth had been able to skip a few million years of stagnant evolution. There are planets and solar systems much closer to the center of our galaxy than us, which means they probably formed long before Earth and had a jump start on life anyway.
Hopefully they have better TV shows than we do…
What’s the fascination with Dystopia?
I was looking for new reading material the other day and a realization dawned on me: there are stinkloads of dystopian books out there. The YA genre is stuffed with them, with titles like The Hunger Games, Maze Runner, Enclave, Divergent, etc. It’s the new craze, now that wizards, vampires, Greed gods, goblins and Hobbits are old hat.
Adults have their own dystopia, with titles like World War Z, The Passage and the sequel The Twelve (which I am reading right now and thoroughly enjoy), and oldies like Lucifer’s Hammer and On the Beach. I read those last two in high school and they’ve stuck with me all these years. I was a child of the 80′s, so my dystopia was a war-driven post-apocalyptic one (usually nuclear) brought on the the mutual annihilation fears born of the Cold War. Mad Max, Red Dawn, Escape From New York, Terminator, etc.
What’s our fascination with the end of society or civilization as we know it? There are even TV shows about people prepping for large scale disasters, and the stigma that used to go with that has largely faded; people don’t seem shocked by the idea that others are considering the possibility that things could really head south. Hell, the state of Wyoming even commissioned a study to figure out how they’d get along in the event of a political or economic collapse that left the federal government powerless (or unwanted!). Might have to start looking into buying land out there… The recent zombie craze seems to indicate a growing cultural curiosity about the days after the world heads down the crapper. Until The Walking Dead on AMC, how socially acceptable would it have been to have a watercooler discussion about your plans to survive a zombie apocalypse? I personally have a plan in place and am totally prepared, by the way. Don’t come knockin’, that’s all I’m saying.
Do you wonder how you personally would handle the situation? It’s an insightful exercise to daydream about how you’d take control and hold everything together. We all want to be in charge of our own destinies, maybe even learn how to be a hero, but it’s probably not going to happen in most of our safe, uneventful lives. Now, though, if a plague wiped out half the population and the other half were barbaric cannibals, you could imagine with little guilt how awesome you’d look as you blew up/gunned down/beat senseless the chaotic hordes as you did your job to keep your family and friends safe. They say that adversity brings out our true character, that only under that sort of test can one find out who one really is. Wouldn’t we all like to believe we’d rise to the occasion, be honorable and badass at the same time, and that we were capable of being a worthy leader?
So, what movies/books did I miss on my list of dystopia/post-apocalypse material? Is there something really amazing out there that I should read or watch? Any suggestions appreciated, since I’m always looking for something new to consume.
