WC Art comes out of Nowhere

Origin of Plunkett

For the origin of Plunkett Class, I was hired on to do WC Online which I thought would be the coolest thing ever until it was cancelled. While I was waiting for WC Online to start up I was put on Secret Ops and asked to a do a cruiser. It was my first WC ship and I was really intimidated. The ship designs for WC are fantastic.

So I concepted a ship based on WWII Destroyers and after a couple of revisions with Mark Vearrier came up with this final design. I have always been a big Battle of the Planets fan and so I though a Space Cruiser needed big triple gun turrets with lots of little "AA" Turrets, to give it the WWII Yamato feel. (I think the Plunkett has more turrets than any other ship in the game)

Anyway I went way way over budget on the polygons putting those turrets on. Originally the Plunkett had more Point defense Turrets on it, but I had to trim them off to get it down to only way over budget. But when the Designers saw the ship they wouldn't let me take any more turrets off, so it shipped considerably over budget.

The designers loved it so much that they named it the Plunkett, and then put two or three of them in almost every mission that they could, which at the time was really pushing the hardware.

-------------------------------
The story behind the renders is sadder

When Origin/EA cancelled the Wing Commander series there was a period of about two months where I had no work, so I worked on my Demo Reel and made the screenshots and AVI's that you found on my website. When the layoffs came I was the only person left out of the entire team and was sitting in my office in a dark hallway working on the screenshots that you see. Later that week I was moved upstairs to work on A-10 with Andy Hollis which was another failed title that offered a lot of promise.

I may or may not have the source art for the ship since it was done in a period of transition from Unix on SGI's to Windows on PC's. But I think they are all in Power Animator and so are essentially lost.
 
Hey, thanks a lot! Really interesting to hear. If you hadn't heard at the time, the ship ended up being a real fan favorite -- everybody loved the huge guns!
 
Space battleships with triple big guns are awesome. And actually there is a anime literally about Yamato in space named War Blazers, featuring a wide array of ships with big WWII guns on them. I think this kind of design for space ships is truly great. Thanks for sharing the story.
 
That's really fantastic. It's unfortunately that you never got a chance to go on and make a bunch of neat designs for WC Online and other games.
 
I wonder who the artist responsible for the other Secret Ops ships was -- the Cerberus and the luxury liner...
 
IIRC, the Cerberus is not an SO ship - the mesh is present in WCP, although never used. It's called something else there, though.

As for who designed it, the answer is actually in the CIC Grand Opening log:
taser (Sean Murphy?) said:
No, Damon Waldrip designed the Cerberus. Can anyone guess what it was designed after (i.e., what the influence was)?
Click to expand...
 
For those of us inept to not exactly know what you mean by the CIC Grand Opening Log, would someone be so kind to give us a link?

Thanks.
 
Ah, nevermind really. I just made the connection that the "www" link in Taser8's profile leads to the page linked earlier belonging to Sean Murphy's art. Thats really all the connection I was ever curious about. Cool none the less. I already feel like I've looked into this farther than I should have. Always very neat to have the full stories behind it though-- my thanks for that.
 
I really love the Plunkett Cruiser. It is one of my favorite Cap Ships in all WC. Congrats on the great job.
 
Quarto said:
IIRC, the Cerberus is not an SO ship - the mesh is present in WCP, although never used. It's called something else there, though.

As for who designed it, the answer is actually in the CIC Grand Opening log:
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure the Cerberus was designed and built exclusively for SO; we wanted something pretty different from the standard WC design motif. Mark Vearrier and I discussed some ideas and I suggested we look at some real-world things that would be the basis for the design, and I threw out the idea of using a Formula 1 racing car as the basis - something that wouldn't necessarily be real overt, but would maybe subconsciously make you think of the real-world inspiration. Mark took that suggestion to Damon W. who came up with the awesome design for the Cerberus.

Oh, and we lost track of the number of time we had to tell people that it wasn't the "Cerebus"...
 
Bandit LOAF said:
Wait, what's a Cerebus?
Click to expand...

"Cerebus the Aardvark" was an indie comic book by Dave Sim which recently concluded its 300-issue run, all written and drawn (I think) by Sim. Originally meant as a parody of Barry Windsor-Smith's Conan comics, the series followed the exploits of a barbarian aardvark across primitive lands, ecountering such characters as an Elric-duplicate who spoke like Foghorn Leghorn and an amazonian fighter named Red Sophia who had sworn never to lie with a man unless he defeated her in combat - but she liked to give in and lose really easily in combat.

Over the course of the series the stories began dealing with more complex topics and by the final third had devolved almost completely into Sim's screeds against his favorite enemies, foremost of which was "the destructive energy of the female".

Anyway, he's confessed that he had meant to name the character after Cerberus, the 3-headed guardian of hell from Greek myth, but misspelled it Cerebus. As far as I know the word "Cerebus" refers to nothing else...
 
Taser8 said:
"Cerebus the Aardvark" was an indie comic book by Dave Sim which recently concluded its 300-issue run, all written and drawn (I think) by Sim. Originally meant as a parody of [strike]Barry Windsor-Smith's[/strike] John Buschema's Conan comics
Click to expand...

(Corrected For Facts)

Also, "Red Sophia" is a play on "Red Sonja", another of Robert E Howard's swashbuckling characters.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
Wait, what's a Cerebus?
Click to expand...
One of those pervasive mis-spellings so common that the folks who use it are not the slightest bit aware that there is, in fact, another (and correct) spelling at all.

We have INTERNET to thank.
 
Also, at the risk of getting anyone too excited, Dave's assertion that the original models are "lost" because they're in Power Animator is not completely correct - Alias has written a plugin that will convert old PowerAnimator files into current Maya files, which is how I've converted some of my ship models into Maya and can use them now (that's how I did the recent render of the Shrikes and Midway). So if he's got the original files laying around they can still be translated into a current, usable form...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top