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.

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)

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“.

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.

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.

I’m certainly open to suggestions for future posters. Right now, all I have is the image of a man or woman in Vitcorian space gear and gas mask, with the tag “He risks breathing poison… So you can breathe free… Support the Third Planetary Bond Drive”.