Lunacon 51 (2)
Some thoughts on my second con (should that be “sec-con”?), jotted down at midnight, though they’ll be posted much later.

The first panel I intended to attend was “Yesterday’s Tomorrows”, a documentary on the failed vision of futurists from the 1930s through 1960s. Due to the weird layout and unpredictable spacetime anomalies that have caused the Lunarians to christen this hotel the “Escher Hilton”, I arrived at the room far in advance of the panel. Indeed, I arrived at the start of “Not 2B Toyed With”, a 12-minute movie that the moderator assured us was absolutely hilarious. She had to assure us, because she couldn’t show us, because in the rush to pack for the con, she’d left the DVD at home. But she was appropriately contrite and, at the suggest of a snarky audience member (me), proceeded to illustrate by sock puppets, stopping only when, well, she ran out of socks and hands to put them on.

As it turned out, “Not 2B Toyed With” – even though it never actually showed – was a better presentation than “Yesterday’s Tomorrows”. The latter, it developed, was a 1999 documentary financed by Disney and shown on Showtime exactly once. The moderators liked to call it “the documentary Disney won’t let you see” (since the studio hasn’t released it at all) but there isn’t anything spectacular about it. Instead it was a bunch of self-involved baby boomers narcissisizing about their impressions of the vision of futurists. It had a lot of cuts to semi-celebrities pontificating, like you find in those “I Love the 80s” shows on VH-1. It was a true waste of my 90 minutes.

I spent some time in the game room, watching some people play “Ninja Burger”, a Munchin-esque game from Steve Jackson Games. It looked pretty fun, actually, and funny and clever as you’d expect from SJG. I also played a round of BANG!, a spaghetti Western shoot-em-up card game. It’s one of those games with hidden objectives – no one knows who the outlaws or deputies are – that had a complicated but manageable cardplay system. I was “The Apache Kid” and the renegade, and I did well for two rounds, until I was accidentally blown up by the very same dynamite I’d put into play. *Sigh* It’s from Mayfair Games, and I think I’ll try to find it online when I get home.

I dropped back to my room to get some dinner (the restaurant was closed by now – a costly mistake on my part) and then went to “Sex Done Right”, a panel on writing about, well, sex. And though it’s easy enough to dive for the gutter, it was actually a semi-serious writers’ craft panel. It had a certain self-involvement among the panel members, though, that quickly killed my interest in their thoughts on writing. I check out as soon as one said, in all seriousness, “But then the werecat morphed and I had to think, will he rip through her? She couldn’t morph, of course, since she was a vampire….” That told me I’d wandered into a particular corner of fanspace, one that holds no attraction for me (and, to be snobbish, one that seems to draw poor talent).

I was also reintroduced to that universal con character, Annoying Guy One Seat Over. There was a nebbish first-time con goer sitting next to me who was too enthusiastic, too eager, and too clueless to be tolerated. Many panels seem to develop such a guy – who has to comment on everything, who is clueless about his cluelessness, and who overrates his own intelligence/humor/relevance. The major ecological function of Annoying Guy One Seat Over is to spread humility – to remind us that we too can be annoying, overbearing, etc. Many a time in a panel I sit back and ask myself, “Is that really a valid point? Or am I devolving into Annoying Guy One Seat Over?” It’s a useful check.

Well, here I sit in the Hilton Rye Town waiting for Lunacon to get started. If you are paying more attention to this blog than you should be, you’ll recall that I attended Lunacon 50 last year as well. This year I managed to reserve early, so I am staying at the correct hotel and don’t need to shuttle back and forth. I also arranged to come up on Thursday (the night before the con opened) so that I wouldn’t feel rushed. Originally, this was intended to be my entire Spring Break trip (before committing to go to Ocala to see my mom).

It took longer to get here from NJ than I had expected — nearly four hours door-to-door. Some of that was just waiting for trains, of course; and some of it was being whisked around Rye, NY by a cab driver who, it turns out, didn’t actually know where the Hilton Rye Town is. At least this time there wasn’t a sudden blizzard.

It leaves me with the question of what to do until the con starts. Since I dragged this laptop all the way up here, some of the time will hopefully be spent writing (and more than just blog posts).

As has been usual, this is another exhortation to “Work to Win”. My “study” of WWI and WWII posters indicates that almost all fell into the “Work harder” or “Buy more bonds” categories. True to form, this poster says, “Victory up here… begins down here“. Overhead are a Retro Rocketship and a DV snub fighter. On the ground, in a vaguely-factory-ish compound, is another Retro Rocketship. It’s not so easy to make clear that this one is being assembled or worked on. I put in a forklift and a repair bot, as well as a guy welding something to the periscope hatch. (He’s hard to see, on the top of the ship.) Actually, I had to go find models for almost everything, as I didn’t have a lot of industrial nick-nacks lying around.

I’ve got a new, rarer “landscape” poster ready. It shows two Zarkov rockets at a docking tower, with crew running to man the ships. A DV snub fighter is lifting in the background, and the ever-lovable jetpack guy has just launched himself. The tag is “They’re Ready to Do Their Part … Are You Ready to Do Yours?“, with the ubiquitous “Work to Win” slogan. I am particularly happy with this one because it is not based on an existing poster, at least not as far as I recall. More below the fold.

This is actually the second major version of this poster (not counting a dozen minor touch-ups). The original looked down on the platform from a much steeper angle and included a third rocket docked at the third station. The sharp angle didn’t blend well with the sunlit clouds, though; it was actually a little vertigo-inducing, since the tower seemed to be at a crazy angle to the normal of the sky. Gah. Lowering the point of view also allowed me to zoom in more and take advantage of the details available in the models I used.

That detail proved challenging in a different way, though. Poser choked, repeatedly, as I tried to render this. Indeed, it even failed with the Poser 4 render engine. (The superior Firefly engine is much more delicate and prone to run out of memory, but the Poser 4 engine has heretofore been pretty robust.) So I had to cut figures and props to reduce the memory footprint. The biggest savings came from dropping the third ship, which in this view was just blocking line-of-sight anyway. I also added some color, especially to the Aviatrices, because their olive vests were hard to see against the metal of the platform.

This is a variant of a classic saying from the Second World War: “Loose Lips Crash Ships!. Of course, in the original, it’s “Loose Lips Sink Ships” and the image is of a cargo ship going down beneath the waves. Well, cargo ship clearly becomes rocket ship… but then I was stuck. You see, my rocket ship models are all intact. I haven’t yet mastered the art of deforming, breaking, or otherwise mangling a triangle-mesh object, so I had to work around it.

My solution? Two ships, one pointing into the ground and the other, some distance away, pointing out of the ground. The intended effect was to imply a single ship broken in twain by the crash. I also sought out some fire effects and decided on — believe it or not — a Witch-Burning set by Peemot. (I can’t find the name of the creator of the terrain piece used. Sorry.) I like to think it works but you’ll have to be the judge…

It’s become clear that I’ve mis-tagged some of these, and I thought it was about time — 1/3 of the way toward a book! — to collect them in one place.

More below the fold.

• “Don’t Let That Shadow…“
• “It’s a Swell Rocket…“
• “Keep Us Flying“
• “The Tools of Victory“
• “See Action Now!“
• “Take the Fight to Them” (revised)
• “Invest in Invasion“
• “…That You May Breathe Free“
• “Take the Fight to Them” (original)

Another in the series, this one with the tag “Don’t Let That Shadow Touch Them“. This is based on one of the most effective WWII posters I know of, with the same tag but the shadow of a swastika. My job here was harder, in that I don’t have an instantly-recognizable symbol of the Martian oppressors. Instead I settled for a Martian war machine off-camera, with a low spotlight to throw a long shadow. I’m of mixed opinion on whether it gets across the shape but I like the atmosphere.

I used the Poser standard figure “Ben” plus the Poser 4 girl. For no good reason I decided on only two children instead of three. The original had the kids playing with toys, so I used a Poser-standard cartoon character “Ginger” for a discarded doll. Ben, meanwhile, holds a scale model of an Avro Lancaster bomber. Technically, this is counter-factual to my timeline, as WW II doesn’t occur in the world of IW2. But surely some further development of the airplane will occur, and the Lancaster is not a wildly unusual design.

Because most of my posters seem to exhort either “Buy War Bonds” or “Work to Win”, I decided to add something more. In this case, I mention the “Second Guardian Drive”. My nebulous assumption is that this is early in the war, when the humans are in the process of expelling the Martians from Earth. The “Guardian Drives” are bond drives to finance the outposts that will guard Earth’s orbit. This places this poster significantly earlier than, say, “Take the Fight to Them” or even “That You May Breathe Free“.

Yet more in my one-man propaganda barrage for the Second Interworld War. This one reads, “It’s a Swell Rocket … Send Us More! with the ubiquitous exhortation, “Work to Win”. I modeled it on one from Design for Victory that had a somewhat-goofy airman pointing his thumb at an off-camera airplane and saying, “She’s a swell plane”. Normally I’d claim the moral high ground and insist that I changed to the gender-neutral “it” rather than “she” to help stamp out sexism, but the fact of the matter is, I just didn’t notice until I was done. Then I was too lazy to go back and change it. I also included the rocket, because (as I’ve said before), I labor under the added handicap that my audience doesn’t actually have day-to-day experience with the things I’m illustrating.

Another in the ongoing series. This one reads “Keep Us Flying — Buy War Bonds“. The inspiration is a WWII poster with exactly the same wording. In the original, it’s a pilot wearing a parachute harness. (I’m assuming it’s a pilot. It could be an airborne infantryman, I suppose.) Using the by-now standard substitution, I put in a jetpack trooper. Exhorting people to buy war bonds is pretty much the major focus of war posters, apparently.

I made one change. I didn’t like the blank background, so I scoured the Net for a free background I could use. (I found a site called stock.xchg, which has thousands of stock images [get it?], many of which are free to use.) I settled on a stirring sunrise sky, which I like quite a bit actually.

Yet another in the series of posters for the newly-rechristened Second Interworld War. This one is inspired by the many different posters that had streams of planes passing overhead in a not-too-subtle V formation. The purpose was to impress with the sheer excess of Allied production. And of course, the exhortation to work hard and to invest in war bonds. My poster reads “Give them the Tools of Victory: Work to Win”.

Executing this poster took quite a bit more work than the others; the gruesome details appear below the fold.

The key bit to understand is, Poser is an excellent program for, well, posing stuff. But as a full 3D rendering program, it’s simply not ready for prime time. As a user, I’m becoming aware that it simply gobbles memory and uses it not terribly efficiently. This will be important in just a little bit.

For this design, I had to replace the ubiquitous WWII bomber with my workhorse, the retro rocketship. I decided to cheat a little and have one leg of the V come from the Zharkov type and one from the Mongo type, though in the end product the distinction is hard to spot. Placing them was simplicity: I put one up in the sky, then duplicated it and translated it in the -z direction, Repeat that ten or so times, and you have a line of rocketships stretching back toward the vanishing point. Yay.

To get even more flashy, I decided to add some steam flying machines, which I envision as the gunboats of the campaign. This added some complication, because the SFM is a complex mesh itself plus it needed two or three crew to make it work. Otherwise it looks ghostly. I added Ava and Gene, specialized versions of Victoria 3 and Michael 3, and posed them carefully. Then I began the replication …

… and ran into that memory thing. Five gunboats, on top of the rest of the scene, killed my computer. I mean, the render really drove a stake through its heart — it was everything short of a Blue Screen of Death. I started removing objects from the figures far enough away to tolerate th e loss of detail. Not good enough: the renderer just wouldn’t take it.

I sat back and regrouped. I know of, but not how to use, a program called PoseRay, which I knew converted Poser objects to POV-Ray meshes. POV-Ray is a kick-butt free renderer that’s been the standard for something like a decade. I have lots of experience with POV-Ray, dating all the way back to version 2.1 (it’s at 3.7 now) and Ion Yadigariglou trying to render relativistic retarded-potential electromagnetic potentials around neutron stars. Poser is new to me, but POV-Ray — for POV-Ray, I know some real tricks.

So I grabbed a copy of PoseRay, read a quick tutorial, and converted my scene object-by-object. I lost the interactivity of Poser; POV-Ray is a scripted language, lacking direct manipulation. But in return I gained numerical precision and ease of adjustment. Most importantly, I gained the POV-Ray advantage: While meshes are not particularly efficient, the second copy of a mesh costs almost no memory. In other words, replicating the Mongo rocketship a thousand times took almost the same amount of memory as rendering it once. Suddenly, I could have entire air fleets and it would hardly impact the render time.

I didn’t go quite that crazy but I included, easily, twenty or more. Something about the textures didn’t quite take and things look a little plastic-y. But for the most part I am quite satisfied with this effort. As much as possible, I want to stay in Poser, but it’s good to know that POV-Ray is there when I need the big guns.