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.