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.

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“.

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.

More from the First Interworld War. One is an updated version of my very first Interworld War poster. The second has the tagline “See Action Now … Join the Rocket Service.”

My reasoning, and the actual posters, below the fold.

The revised poster arose because I never liked the background. I also changed “Transplanetary Expeditionary Force” to “Federated Expeditionary Force”, for a few reasons:

1. Two words ending in “ary” in a row are dysphonic.
2. “Transplanetary” is too long a word to roll off the tongue.
3. I wanted something evoking the A.E.F., or Allied Expeditionary Force. (And yes, I know that the “Allied” bit is from World War II; in WWI, it was just “American Expeditionary Force”. But I wanted something more international.)

The second piece is inspired, again, by something from Posters of World Wars I and II. In the original, there are a bunch of men on the deck of a submarine, with a Japanese ship sinking in the distance. The tag was “See Action Now… Join the Submarine Service”. Well, the obvious analog to the sailors who served in the tiny tin cans cut off from the outside world for weeks or months at a time, would be the spacers locked in the similar tin-can rockets, cut off from both worlds for weeks or months at a time.

I went with the “Mongo” design I have, mostly because I needed windows to see out. (Inexplicably, the “retro rocketship” design does not have viewports.) For the target, it would have to be a Martian, of course. Sadly I don’t have any Martian cylinders lying around. Instead, I took the Walker that I do have and I turned off all the legs. That made it into a satisfyingly saucer-shaped object, though the center was off (since much of the “mass” was now invisible). At first, I used a “DV Fighter” just to set the scale and figure out where things had to be. But I got used to it and ended up liking it a lot, so it’s in the scene. Also, I have another Mongo coming in from the above-left because, well, I like rocketships.

Obviously having the people outside on the “deck” wasn’t an option, so I had to change tacks. Instead I came in close in the cockpit, so that the other ships were visible through the viewports. A few explosion FX help to set the tone. I used a Michael 3 figure (with the semi-hilarious Krk [sic] morphs that someone has put out on the Net) as one of the rocketeers. For the other, I was torn. I have a nice HoverDroid from DAZ Studios, and it looked OK. But I want to keep the counterfactual trend that the Space Services are gender-integrated. So instead, it’s a Victoria 4 with a generic bodysuit that looks vaguely ST:NG-ish. I don’t really have a lot of good retro sci fi things for the V4 figure (or the M3 one, for that matter) so I’m still improvising there.

I then updated the tag. I like the sound of “Rocket Service”; it’s just archaic enough.

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Researching for this(!). I came across a great book called You Back the Attack — We’ll Bomb Who We Want, billed as “remixed war propaganda”. An artist named Micah Ian Wright took World War II propaganda posters (some from the Bad Guys) and reworked them to put a Bush Jr. spin on them. It’s snarky, obnoxious, and really hilarious — though sobering in a way, too.

As a bonus, Mr. Wright included all the original, unmodified posters as an appendix. So it’s easy to see how these were used and how they could be used. I expect I’ll be pulling a lot of inspiration from this book. The first such brainchild is offered below.

It’s based on a WWII poster that read, “Invest in Invasion … Buy War Bonds”. The graphic was a rugged airborne trooper in the doorway of a plane, gritting his teeth and getting ready to jump. Many parachutes dot a darkening sky. This immediately struck me and I knew I’d have to make an analog. It’s a little tricker than it sounds, because of course I’d have to set the sci fi background explicitly. The 1940s artist could assume the viewer would know what an airplane was and why someone would be jumping out of them.

Luckily, I have in my Poser inventory the “rocketship Mongo”, which became the carrier vessel. Hiding the door and positioning a Michael 3.0 soldier there gave me the airborne ranger I needed. Of course, this being pulp science fiction, I couldn’t use anything as prosaic as a parachute; so I used a jetpack instead. I face my first issue there, as the jetpack wings were way wider than the door. The wings can be folded up (thank you, creator of this object!) but then it looks a lot like a guy about to jump to his death.

So then I began to cheat. After positing “Alex” in the door, I cloned him and placed “Bob” out in the air. Bob’s wings are extended and the jetpack lit. Then I put a duplicate of the rocketship up and to the left of the original. I had to show the entire rocketship to the viewer, of course, to establish the scene. I added some more clones of winged troopers to take the place of the earlier parachutes and to set the scale.

I kept the text virtually unchanged (“Invest in Invasion — Buy War Bonds”) but supplemented it with the tri-ship logo of the Transplanetary Expeditionary Force and the slogan “Third Transplanetary Liberty Drive”. To top it all off, I rendered with a transparent background and overlaid it all on a picture of the night sky.

All in all, considering it took only a couple of hours to make, I’m pretty happy with it. Now I need to start thinking about the next one…

from a war that was never fought. I haven’t really decided if all of Mars is noxious (in this reality) but since Well’s had “the Black Gas”, I figure the TEF had better have gas masks. And while it might seem unthinkable that women would carry arms in Victorian/Edwardian society, it’s a fact of the 20th century that major wars break down mores, and a truly interplanetary war fought with turn-of-the-century technology would conceivably accelerate that process. Plus, I needed another model.

So I haven’t stretched my creative muscles very much lately, and I’ve been looking for something to do. Playing around with Poser and some models I got from the Net, I decided I was going to make propaganda posters from the First Interworld War, loosely conceived as the follow-up to H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds. I know it’s far from unique but it struck my fancy and I’m going to try my hand. The first, very rough, effort is below. The tagline is “Take the fight to them… Sign Up For The Transplanetary Expeditionary Force”

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”.