So, my tentative plans to work on Star Citizen ships (as described in my previous post) got completely derailed by something else that I had already been meaning to tinker with:

Unreal Engine 4

Now, I’ve been tinkering with video game engines for a long, long time now (almost as long as I’ve been doing 3D modeling).  I first got a taste of this sort of content creation with id software’s Quake (using Yahn Bernier’s BSP editor) and I’ve looked at video games as tool kits ever since (a mindset that fed upon and back into my other longtime hobby, tabletop roleplaying).  Many of my friends and family know that I buy 3d games at least as much to tinker with their engines as to actually play the packaged content.

This is a long post, but bear with me; it’s all background to explain something that I’m pondering.  It is probably also of general interest to anyone else that is curious about the process involved in this sort of 3D work.  Feel free to skip to the bottom if you are just wondering what I’m actually up to.

For the last few months I’ve been sparing more attention for the newest game project from Chris Roberts’ company, Cloud Imperium Games: Star Citizen.  As you may recall, Star Citizen is an extremely ambitious sci-fi singleplayer campaign/private server/multiplayer persistent universe in the space sim genre, was crowdfunded to the tune of $2 million on Kickstarter back in 2012, and to date has earned over $43 million entirely from the community.