The cargo hold & drone bay

While looking at the ships in EVE Online, I always wondered if the numbers they give regarding cargo hold and drone bay actually makes sense. Hence I decided to make models of the hold and bay.
In the left image, you have the pod, Bob, in the lower left corner a 5*1 cube meter box and the 3 other cubes for the cargo hold. The 5*1 box represent the drone bay space, equivalent to 1 small drone, of 5 cube meters.

The cargo hold of the Tristan is of 140 cube meter. To get the accurate size, I made one 5*5*5 cube, one 2*2*2 cube and another 2*2*2 cube minus a 1 cube meter. This totals, 125 + 8 + 7, 140 cube meter.
In the right image, you have the same layout as the image above, but with the hull of the ship in comparison.

My conclusion is that the cargo hold and drone bay of the Tristan is of acceptable in size.

;)

The engines part 2: A finish product

The engines... As stated in the previous blog, the engine contains a lot of different parts and details. Most details needed to be homemade as I wanted to put a lot of depth into the making of the ship.
To the left you have a picture of the engine shell that will be containing the fuel apparatus, the cooling system and the 3 engines. The 2 big engines will be mounted on the exterior of the lower half of the engine shell.

I used to have picture of the process of the 2 main engines, but last weekend, I decided to upgrade the OS of my Iphone to version 5 and I lost all my pictures, contact list and every thing else because the backup did not want to install itself correctly. But here is a description of what was done and in later images, you'll be able to see what I am talking about. When you look at the skin of the main engines, you seem to see something that could look like the rotating fins of an big plane engine. I tried to recreate those fins by cutting a lot of long small pieces of card-stock and coloring them. I then added a piece above it all to cover the fins from the top. I've also added a few pieces to the front of the engine to add dimension.

To the left you have a image of the finish engines along with the one of the two main engines. I've also added my human size mannequin called "Bob". Bob is also present in the right image containing a finger pointing at the 3 fuel tubes to show there size. As mentioned in a previous blog, when using LEDs to light up the ship, if I do not paint the interior black, you get light that bleed true the material. Bellow is an image of the painted interior. I'll probably wont paint the whole interior because I'll stop the light from spreading putting aluminium foil.

To finish this blog, you have 2 pictures of the finish engine in their full 3D beauty if you are able to do cross eyes to look at it. If you want to see more images of the finished engines, you can go to my deviant art page or go to the Tristan section on the page.

The engines part 1: Details details details

The engines.... The engines are full of details and composed of multiple components. They're composed of the 3 small engines, the fuel apparatus and the cooling section behind the 3 engines and the 2 main engines on the side of the engine shell. To the left, a modified screenshot of the engines from the pepakura software to show it's grandeur..
In this blog, I'll focus only on the 3 small engines, the fuel apparatus and the cooling apparatus. In a following blog, I'll be putting all the parts together to have the full engine.

In the upper right side, you have the 3 small engines. The top right image contains the flat printed on paper engine graphics and the 3D version of the engine. The right image contains the 3D engine inside its engine case. I made them by cutting round pieces of card stock of different sizes and by embossing them by rubbing them with the rounded end of a knitting needle in the palm of my hand.

The fuel apparatus, that I've named, brings with its 3 fuel tubes fuel to the 3 engines above. As for all the other parts, your imagination is as good as mine to figure out what they do. The tubes are "ugly", but they are very small. I should have taken a picture with a finger beside it or my human paper equivalent to show their size. the left image is from pepakura and shows the details I tried to replicate. The left one contains the start of the scaffolding. The picture bellow is an attempt to show the 3Dness of the the finish product by using cross eye vision.

The engine cooling apparatus is behind the 3 small engines. Because it's much hidden behind the 3 engines, my guess is that it was some kind of remnant of the artistic design before the engines got added. Or it was made that way to add some depth to the engines...  I think it's some kind of cooling apparatus because it looks like cooling vents on big building.

Anyway, the 5 images around represent the evolution of the cooling

apparatus from the 2d version to it's 3D version. I had a lot of fun putting in some depth to the things on each side. Take care all.

The main body

I've had a few busy weekends, but I can now post some of the work done.

Since I wanted to get a feel for the size of the ship, I've decided to start building it's main body.
The full ship height is roughly equivalent to a 15 floors building or ~58 meter.

I've started doing the middle part containing the inverted "Y" light as it will be used to join the 2 sides of the body. Since I'll be putting some lights in the ship, I've cut out the part of the middle section containing the lighted area (the inverted "Y"). Then I've proceeded on doing the two sides and joining everything together.

I guess one of the trick when using pepakura is to understand how you'll be folding/ gluing all the parts. It's important if you want to figure out how to make more rounded area and make your life easier. Pepakura is a very awesome tool, but when it comes to the automatic decomposition of a complicated 3D object, it lacks in sophistication. You need to do the decomposition by yourself by doing small, maleable, logical structures that you'll understand.
If you want to add some effects, or some additional pieces, you'll need to know how you'll be doing them before starting gluing parts together.

For the other projects I did in the past, I use to have flaps on the side of the pieces. These flaps would be used with glue to join two adjoining pieces. But by using the flap, since card stock is thick, it shows where you did the junction. What I decided to do for this project was to cut off all the flaps and directly glue the adjoining piece edge to edge. I use UHU super glue for this as it's cheap, does not smell toxic, dries fast and doesn't give me any funny felling if it goes on my skin. It does an amazing job if you do it correctly with a sharpened toothpick. But before doing the gluing, make sure that you've colored the edge with a marker that doesn't bleach and is chemically stable. I tend to use Faber Castell makers if they have the color I want. They're more expensive but worth it.

In my case, since I'll be putting lights in the ship by using LED, I need to paint the interior in black. The reason I need to do this, is that if I don't, light bleed through the card stock. In order, here is what I'll have to do: use regular white glue on all junction to cover all potential holes before it gets too hard to reach specific edges (it's been done on the body) and then paint the interior with black paint. Using a flash light after will show you all the regions without enough paint. Once this is done, you can move to other parts of the lighting process that I'll be presenting in another blog.

To finish this blog, I just wanted to show what my "workbench" look like.

Enjoy.

Making the right arm

Most ships, if not all, in the EVE Online universe are very detailed. But those details are not achieved by doing a very detailed 3D model as it would take too much computer juice to render all the graphics. One thing that they do is a skin where one of the channels (level of information) contains a bump map. When this bump map is processed by the computer, it gives a lot of "fake" details to an otherwise very flat surface.
Since I'm a geneticist and not a computer software engineer or a game developer, if you do not like my explanation; tough luck! Wikipedia and Google will give a way better explanation of gaming graphics mechanics.

One problem with the bump map is when printed on paper, you lose all the fancy computer graphic algorithms and it looks flat.
Behind the right arm (for those who play EVE; spin the model...) there's some kind of mechanical apparatuses. Since I thought it would be cool to give the model the most details I could, I decided to make them real parts.
Hence by randomly cutting pieces of card stock, coloring them and gluing them, I achieved what you see in the picture above.
The picture does not give it justice, but it's an evolution of the papercrafting from a 2D to a 3D model.

The finished model looks like the following 2 pictures.
I took the picture of the underside of the arm with my human figurine as I found that it gives it a lot more perspective and it looks cool as I imagine that person slowly building the ship, soldering part by part all the armor and ...

Also when I was doing the mechanical part, there was a circle in the middle that looks like a "do not X" sign.
I think, since it's the size of a human, it is an opening to the inside of the arm... but only the real ship designer will know what it is....

Since I'm up to date in all the posts, new posts will come roughly once a week when a new piece is done.

Size and Scale

Just for the fun of it I decided to start with the left side of the ship.This contains the left shield, the tubes and the cockpit.

I started with the shield as it contained my 1 man corp logo and was easy to do.
Then I proceeded with the tubes and cockpit. But in the middle of doing the cockpit, I wondered what the size of a pod and human were compared to the ship. In the left picture, you have the finished left shield, the original Pod with it's smaller brother (sized to the Tristan), a 6 feet human and a few of the cockpit parts. The right picture contains the size comparison of the tubes, a human and the Pod along with a ruler. By looking at that picture, you notice that a human, when passing from the ship main body to the cockpit (through the tubes), does not have a lot of leeway or space...

Left, right and below, you have respectfully the front window, the front part being fixed to a cockpit part and the half finished part of the cockpit. The back part of the cockpit will only be done once I figure out what I wanna do with the windows.
 I was wondering if I should only put in some mate windows or if I should do some kind of shadow play by putting figurines in it and having semi transparent windows. BTW there's going to be a few LED s lighting everything up from the inside!

What is cool about the Tristan

I always thought that the 6 "extremities" of the ship could move to give it a more aggressive stand.
Bellow is a picture of the 6 moving pieces of the ship.
I did it quickly just by deforming the moving piece so it looks a bit crappy, but it shows the essence of it.

The way I drew it, the cockpit could move in.
The 5 arms could fold back protecting the ship, reduce it's signal strength (when scanning for it) and make a more powerful overall shield.

Since I like challenge, I'll try to put a motor in it to have an offensive stand (compact) and an exploration stand (all open). I'll also be putting some light in and the beeping lights too.

Hello All,

This is the first entry to this blog about my ideals and the making of a papercraft EVE Online Tristan.
I first started doing papercrafting after I saw pupumonkey's post . He did very nice models of the Caldary Kestrel, Minmatar Firetail, Amarian Apocalypse and a Gallentean Vextor

After viewing his models, I decided to try my hand at it by doing a Pod and then a Thorax.
Now I'm doing my last model for a while and it will be a Tristan.

The ship model looks like this:

Here is a quick guide:
-Use software such as Pepakura and GIMP.
-Extract the model and skin from the EVE Online game, you need to have the game client and a software called TriExporter.
-As for the skin of the model, I use GIMP to modify it and to make it fit as the skin from the game contains multiple layers that needs to be modified for printing purpose.




Guin