Attached Link: MERZBAU

Can anyone give tips or point to resources (web or Amazon) that would give advise on designing spaces and tools/weapons for Science Fiction images. Advise on giving things a futuristic look without over doing the non-functional detailing? So things don't look contemporary to us but don't end up looking like the [Merzbau](http://www.merzbau.org/Schwitters.html)? Advise on how things like a door control or navigation consol might look. I just saw the "Making of" Alien and there was a lot on the Alien craft that was made out of cow bones and such but not on the design of the human's ship aside from some good shots of "international symbol" style labeling on the airlocks and a cookie dispencer in the kitchen that had a cookie glued to it. Even just shots of the airlock controls would have been cool. But is putting a lot of non functional pipes and wiring around really the only way to make things science-fictiony? Just detail phots from movies so as to learn from would be helpful, but I would apreciate any comments about the conceptual aspects... displays, sybols versus menue navigation interface etc... say things were voice or thought controlled what would give them surface detail that was rational... if the control is manual what direction do you think that design would go to? Is there a ergonomic reason keypads would look as they do now? I need to find an image of an iPod, I understand you access many files using a few navigation buttons. Thank you.

P.S. This is not for commercial products! I am not an aspiring vendor. I can't afford commercial Poser sci-fi stuff but I want to try to make my own using Poser primitives and prop construction pieces in Poser anyway. I made some cyborg legs but they kept accumulating faux functional detail and all the while I was thinking how much un-housed guts would be hanging off something like this, how much mechanical systems would a prop or ship have hanging off it given they would probably fly by wire... even wires would probably be replaced by infred conection etc even on cheap items in the future... so what would give them visual interest... I just could not imagine so much tubbing and pistons for the function of a robot leg for instance. So how does one approach such non-functional detail. How can make a starship consol without having a hundred toggles and a mess of tubing coming off the back or making it look like a Comador 64 and still have it look "other".

well i think thats its your own imagination thats makes the difference.

A simple "thats how you do it" does not work.

The dude's and dudet's who make this stuff for movie's think hard and long..and still its a long shot if the props work.

When you see a making of any starwars film you will see George lucas checking on sometimes 30 props of the same thing just to pick out one ..and usely its for one scene anyway.

Me im just starting to make stuf and all i use for reference is my imagination.

When i think it looks good i make it, SF stuff is always about imagination so yours can be way off from mine.

Sometimes somebody makes a "blob" and i think euh well yeah ...what the funk is it, while other people see whole SF themes in it.

I think that a good SF prop looks like you seen it before and you know what it is but still you need to look a second time to see WHAT it is ..."does this make sence" :}

A control unit can be just one Blob hangin in mid air ..when the alien using it is Mind to control the ship.

When the alien has 6 arms, the control unit can have 6 "keyboards" hangin around a seat.

I just wanna say there is NO LIMIT to what it should look like.

But i do think you should make up your own mind on what and who is gonna us the props.

and then start to work to what your mind made up for it

And the amount of detail to use ..well with displacement maps and bump maps you can get a long way without modeling in real 3D.

And the more Real 3D detail you actualy make the bigger the thing will be in MB's so use more CPU power and memory.  

On the part of texturing and SF you should ask Stonemason for some advice  "i do " :}

 

Im not being a smart 'S' by repleying to this .. i know that other more senior modelers can answer this a lot better .

But  Wertu asked me this in a other thread. so i repley

Maybe Other modelers will jump in and correct me where im wrong.

Chris

  

 

The tutorial  pointed to in  the thread is helpful. That kind of stuff... though this model bashing tutorial features the kind of arbitrary nurnie stuff that I want to avoid if I can. Really it is interface design I want help on... for instance these floating projected panels would probably need a backing to be readable, if you had a control panel would it basically only have a track ball or would buttons and switches be safer? Wouls an airlock have more than open, close, safty check, and reset? How would sensor data be represented? How would quantifiable data be represented...bar graphs? I guess my question is ergonomics and functionality... right now a lot of the appliences we have a empty housings, that is something to think about. All the mecahnical sytems in an airconditioner are gone now but the compressor and the coils. More and more often I open applieces to find the housing empty except for a printed Circuit Board screwed in one corner... so the housing are non-functional design I guess.

I am just not finding info on design. I have studied painting and photography to advantage. I have studied web UI design to advantage. I want to ground my imagination in a understanding of speculative interface design. Pure imagination seems to lead me to senseless elaboration of surface detail but I want to be more "realistic". I wish even I could just find images of control pads from movies. I am actually new to the whole sci-fi thing and I have been trying to freeze frame DVDs to see the airlock controls etc. in what movies I can get.

The whole thing in SF is IMHO .. the fantasy of one maker.. and if it does look realistic to another person thats great.

Lots of people say SF cant be realistic untill we actualy find aliens and the ships.

There is no reverence to Realistic SF because its all made up by people

if you want realistic go to the nasa site see what the make for REAL ships and take that to the SF level.

Thats what the makers of startrek do ..thet make stuff with a lot of realistic background.

So check the site's of startrek and see how and why etc etc ..

For me if it looks good its OK..thats SF to me.... anything goes untill aliens proof me wrong..

Chris

As Riddley Scott said in an interview, if you have one big fantasy ellement then you need to ground it in realism. It is like a joke, a joke does not work unless it is grounded in a consistant unverse, if anything can happen then anything that happens is reasonable and the ellement of surprise or disjunction is lost. An alien with raspberry syrup for blood just doesn't work... laws of physics and ergonomic realities are need to ground a story even if it has empaths, aliens, FTL travel and artificial gravity. Otherwise you end up with Magical Realism... the star treck crew ridding an elevator to Apha Centuri. I will look at NASA but it is not "realistic" to think that the technology and design there would be any more relevent to science-fiction design then would be the technology of Cortez. I still think I paint better for understanding technique and cdesign in painting... I just can't belive no one has treated speculative product design and interfaces... okay, I suspend disbelif for star travel but when I make a consol should it have dozens of vacume cleaner hoses coming out the back and a million un labaled flickering lights.? Seriously, I don't now... maybe yes and maybe know. I would like to read what real sci-fi film set designers say about it.

I would make the stuff to look good first, then worry about the realism later, they seem to do that in films also, the terminator robot doesnt seem to have any motors to make its arms and legs etc move but it does look good.

Quote: "when I make a consol should it have dozens of vacume cleaner hoses coming out the back and a million un labaled flickering lights?"

I'll save myself a thousand words here and just say:

If you look at the original image at this link or its counterpart at this link which shows the engineering station for the same aircraft, you will see what looks like needless complexity and overwhelming detail. Yet these were not designed to "look" complex - they simply are complex because they support a complex workflow. I trust that the designers made everything as simple as they could, given the economic constraints of space and weight, and a solid knowledge of human factors. It simply takes a complex interface to do a complex job.

So look at the NASA stuff, if only for context. Also, look at high-tech military gear, commercial aviation, merchant marine, industrial electronics and robotics.Today's technology will presage tomorrow's, if only because people perfer the familiar to the efficient, and military specifications have more lives than a cat. (Ever hear the one about the width of US railroad tracks?)

And BTW, it's not like nobody has ever speculated about the future of UI design. The movie Minority Report spent some substantial time and resources on creating what they saw as a "next generation" computer interface. Much of the technology in that movie was based on serious "futurology" although of course they had to give it some splash for the Hollywood effect. Did they get it right? It's too early to tell.

There really is no "one best way". Imagine if you went back to 1965, described the Internet to some smart people, then asked them to design a "Web Site". Do you think any of them would come up with Amazon? Or Google? Or Renderosity? Is it even a valid question? Which website would you choose to represent ALL websites?

UI design, industrial design, etc. - these are not self-contained fields like fine art. Interfaces exist to DO something, and WHAT they do determines how they operate. What does an airlock door look like? Well, how is it used? Passengers only, cargo, or both? Is it operated by the person passing through it, or by an operator in a booth on the other side of the room? Will the operators be wearing bulky gloves, skintight gloves, or riding in a mechancial device with claws? Does it provide access to a science lab, a reactor, or the 23rd-century version of the local auto shop? Does it have to be able to hold up against 50 tons of cargo slamming into it in freefall if there's an accident? You need to answer all of these kinds of questions before you can decide what the "right" look for your airlock would be.

And even if you stick to the dictates of "form follows function" you can get it wrong, because there is the element of design, which is inherently creative and unpredictable. The radio has been around for nearly a century now, and look at all the different designs there are for radios. Some of these are technology driven -- the little plastic one-speaker unit I had in the 70s would not have replaced the oak-cabineted behemoth of my grandparent's day if transistors had not arisen to replace vaccuum tubes -- but some are not. Square radios, round radios, cathedral radios, tiny transistor radios, massive boom boxes... You'd never be able to predict all these variations just by looking at the technological underpinnings, even if you could have predicted the transistor in 1930.

And people need design. It's not optional and it's not going away. It'll be a part of whatever future we end up with, just like music, religion and table manners.

Your primary action in deciding that sort of thing is deciding what the background world is like.

Their general level of technology isn't enough: you have to get into their heads.

The new version of Battlestar Galactica is a case in point.  The background for the series is that for military reasons the technology in use is retro, even more so for the Galactica and its older Vipers.  They came out of a period when humanity was facing a high-tech adversary that could get into computers (after all, the Cylons basically are computers) and networked systems, so the ships are intentionally "lower tech" than the humans are capable of.  And if you're going low tech there are things that work perfectly well that there's no reason to change.  If you are going to use a wired communication system to reduce the risk of interception, then a telepone headset that gives the user some privacy in the conversation is entirely reasonable, even on a spaceship with faster-than-light drive.  It works, there's no reason to change it for something that looks higher-tech just because.

On the other hand if your civilization is like the Federation in Star Trek where high-tech isn't something you're trying to avoid and you can get away with aesthetics then you could have something clean and smooth without a lot of nurnies and pointy bits.  I personally like the Enterprise shown in the Star Trek films from 2 to 6: clean, not too hotel-like, but with little touches like compartments along the corridors that hint at storage spaces and equipment access and other practical things.  It's a practical ship coming from a society that can afford to put in the little extras to make it look nice.

Or you might have a civilization that's reached Clarke's Law level (advanced technology indistinguishable from magic, more or less) where they can afford to go really retro with the technology hidden.  In that case you can get either the super-high tech look (smooth featureless surfaces everywhere) or the super-retro (the control room of a starship that looks like a wood cabin or a Roman villa.

Basically, once you pick your background, your form follows from there.

Quote -
If you look at the original image at this link or its counterpart at this link which shows the engineering station for the same aircraft, you will see what looks like needless complexity and overwhelming detail. Yet these were not designed to "look" complex - they simply are complex because they support a complex workflow. I trust that the designers made everything as simple as they could, given the economic constraints of space and weight, and a solid knowledge of human factors. It simply takes a complex interface to do a complex job.

On the other hand if you look at a more modern cockpit like in the Airbus you see a lot fewer of those dials and gauges replaced by a few multifunction computer displays.  The plane cockpits shown are 1950s and 1960s vintage where you needed a separate controls and displays for every system, even systems that a flight engineer or pilot might only look at 1% of the time.  Nowdays the vast majority of those readouts would be on one screen out of several that the pilot could choose (or the computer would throw up as a warning).

That's another thing to take into account: how old is the technology.  What you'll see in vehicles is that typically what goes into production is a generation or two behind what's cutting edge.  The space shuttle is run on systems designed in the early 1970s, 747s (like the flight engineer's station shown) were designed in the mid 1960s, so tech from that era.  The various Airbus models started coming out in the mid 1980s so they were able to use things like fly-by-wire and multifunction computer displays.  A new transfer vehicle meant to ferry people to a permanent lunar base that's designed now will have things like LCD or OLED screens and graphic user interfaces and a computer system that would be ancient compared to consumer computer systems and interfaces in widespread use by the time the vehicle was actually being used, that sort of thing.

So in your setting, the older the technology is the more likely you'll see it in your spacecraft.

You might want to check out our friends out in the Far East...

Japanese sites have a lot of mech/robotic treasures!

To start you off on your quest, here are a couple of sites, follow their links to other sites and you will find all kinds of great ideas...

A personal favorite, he creates plastic models, but they are awesome!!!
http://aswars.tripod.com/index.html

More of what I glean for my own Space Warship artwork:
http://yamatomechanics.org/

Run around the Japanese sites with your Broswer set to translate (IE right-click in the browser window and "translate page to english" option)

 

Just a thought..what's the word that comes after Science? it's Fiction!..;) I think you're overthinking this some. It's your imagination that will make it work or not. What do you think it should look like?

The wonderful thing about Sci-Fi is that no one knows what it's supposed to look like..;) After decades of Star Trek, the follwing exchange took place..

How do the Engines on the Enterprise work?

Very well, thank you!..;)

You can include (or not), all the detail you want. For example, you can get Blender, (a program I suspect has unnecessary detail..;) and use the discombobulator on simple primitives to get some very detailed objects. Blender's free, and out there.

There is a school of Star Trek fans that go to (probably excessive) detail in designing the control surfaces, called LCARS. Check those out

In the Wings tutorials, I have a tut on making greebles and nurnies (at least I seem to remember doing one..;) hardly the last word on it, but maybe helpful.

when they first sat down to do Star Trek (the Original Series), Roddenberry and his cohorts put some thought into making the bridge, where people would sit, etc. Sounds like what you're up to now. The Studio heads said (in effect), "what's all this? put some rocket fins on it, and let's go!"..;)

Your answer probably is between the 2.

I seem to remember someone asking something like this recently. If that thread's still up, check it out as well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is all very helpful! Thank you. Right now I am trying to do a bridge set up like a conference room with a confrence table with low profile flat screens and menu navigation interfaces based on the back of my digital camera... the "outside consultants" have glass front alcoves to the side for their occult buisness with the company. What I had found with cyborgs is I kept adding more and more detail to make them look real but ultimately that rebounded as they became more and more irrational in design. In the commenteries on the Alien DVD they keep hammering away at the issue of keeping "plausible" as opposed to being taken away by "fancy". Here are two nice captures... the self destruct "scuttle" control board and the atmosphere/gas controll board from the escape craft.

I am also trying to figure out how to design zero-G portions of a ship interior. It is funny... in the commentery on Alien the director can manage to accept intersteller travel but he says he just can't buy cryro-technology :)

You need to get into the work of Ron Cobb - he did all the functional stuff for Alien and Aliens (and I think the underwater lab in The Abyss). His designs are always based on an engineers viewpoint and he'll come up with a whole practical theory behind the creation.

There's a lot of stuff he created for Alien that you just won't notice by watching the film - if you're serious you'll need to track down magazine articles and artbooks get to get at his plans/sketches, but the DVDs have his designs in the archive galleries and there's stuff online all over the place, but look for interviews (one of the Alien box sets came with an extended doco featuring some good tech chat from him) as well as nice pictures.

Zer-G: Cobb added stuff like extra handrails up near the ceiling of the Nostromo's airlock to account for Zero-G environments - I think there were other similar things scattered throughout the ship.

Cheers

Hmm... is there a view of current spacestation applications? might be worth a search on NASA to see if there are some interior/design images.

Well, as Keith said, you have to know your characters and get inside their heads, understand the REASONS for their technology. The story is what drives the design, unless you're designing a product purely for sale to other artists (who will use it to create their own stories.)

Also, you have to think about how true to life you want to be. We accept certain sci-fi conventions because they are familiar, not because they are accurate. Just about every spaceship in every movie has gravity. But where does it come from? (Hint: it has to do with the fact that the movie is being filmed on Earth.) If you assume that they've developed some kind of gravity generator in the future, that assumption leads to certain conclusions and, frequently, inconistencies.

For example, why would a ship that could generate a gravitational field ever have conventional rocket-style engines when they could simply project a gravity well of immense strength in front of the ship and let it "fall" all the way to its destination? Why would they fight with lasers (or "phasers") when they could simply use the gravitational field generator to crush their opponents into a singularity? Control of gravity implies a paritcular level of technology and a particular set of capabilities, but these capabilities are seldom used for anyting more than creating 1 gee for the crew of the ship to walk around in while they are indoors. And don't even get me started on how you can hear the lasers (a silent weapon) as they fly through space (an airless medium.)

If you really wanted to do due diligence, Wertu, you would determine how your future society deals with gravity, and proceed accordingly. If they can control it, that creates one set of assumptions. (Would they have chairs or beds? Aren't these effectively "anti-gravity" devices? How would their ships be shaped if they could put gravity in any location, direction or strength they wanted? Would there be such things as "floor", "wall" and "ceiling"?) If they can't control it, that creates another set of assumptions. (Weightlessness at all times, with attendant problems, or the need to accommodate structures that can create fake gravity, such as a giant centrifuge.)

BTW Keith, thanks for pointing out that more modern jets have far fewer controls. I had noticed that myself while looking for images, but didn't bring it up as my posts tend to be too long anyway :-P

You know, I think Star Trek: The Next Generation had it about right, at least as far as interior design. I think a futuristic spaceship/station would be designed for comfort, and even grace. I don't think an interstellar vessel would be clunky and awkward, or even ugly. Basic human aesthetics don't change much, which is why we still find so many ancient buildings to be beautiful. And technology always aims for simplicity. Those simple touchpads they use on TNG are probably a good guess, though its likely that by the 24th century technology will be even simpler than that, simpler than we can guess. Direct neural interface, possibly. Of course, it depends on how far in the future you're going...

For exteriors, the same holds true. All the nurnies might look cool, but I'd bet future design will be more sleek and graceful, like the Enterprise. Again, human aesthetics should be taken into account. And whether or not a ship will be entering the atmosphere or solely confined to space is another variable.

My big gripe is the matter of materials. Somehow I don't think you're going to find interstellar spacecraft rusting away. :lol: The rusty scifi interior seems to be a favorite in the Poser world, but while admittedly it can look kind of cool, it's actually a pretty ridiculous notion. I suspect lighter, stronger, more durable materials will be in use. Of course, they may get dirty, but rusty? Not likely.

 Now, for alien ships, you have to throw out the rulebook completely. They could be ugly, bizarre, and even downright incomprehensible. But humans don't change much, and however much technology advances, you can expect that it will be designed to be as simple, comfortable, and attractive as possible.

I think a starting point is tech availability, which is a slightly different question to what tech exists. Look, for instance, at Firefly/Serenity. They have spaceships, with artificial gravity, but the tech is expensive enough that a lot of people still ride horses. Rust is possible inside a ship. Use steel, have people there for months or years, and you can get rust. Would they use steel? Starships suggest that energy isn't a limit on spaceflight, which is why we currently use so much lightweight alloy. But for some types of structure you need physical thickness, and the strength of the metal is secondary. Example: aluminium as armour plate, as on the M113, isn't any lighter than steel, for the same protection. But the extra thickness makes the aluminium plates stiffer, and greatly reduces the need for a supporting frame. You get the same effect with truck bodies.

Unless you are trying to predict the future, it doesn`t really matter how you make the stuff look.

Quote - Unless you are trying to predict the future, it doesn`t really matter how you make the stuff look.

Except that it doesn't look convincing if everything is made of perfectly honed 3D primitives. Maybe aliens will build stuff out of featureless cubes, but as far as looking good goes, more detail is better.

My point was that if you make the control panel of a spaceship, for example, to look like a computer keyboard, no one can say that it is wrong.

This conversation is helpful. Thank you.

Above are just my impressions of some air supply/backpacks I found on the net. I'm sur most will disagree with my comments. The one I like is the one at the bottom. Complex enough to be interesting but still plausible while I don't buy the styling of the one above it or the cludgyness of the one above that.
The second from the top (the vacume clearner) is probably the most rational but it doesn't seem compelling.

I am still wondering about what displays and indicators different consols etc would have. I am sure some would say I am thinking too much but for me I want a transparency... something interesting but not utterly irrational = plausible. The bottom pack has a lot going on but who know what it all does... ease in access would explain the guts out. Reasonable arangement of low teck valves/guages and mysterious wire controls. while the gray thing third up just seems kind of arbitrary in how things are tacked on.

It isn'yt that it must make sense, only that it shouldn't grosely not make sense?

Dunno.

One interesting site for ideas is The Atomic Rockets page, which is loaded with pictures and hard-edged thinking about the engineering of SF. The emphasis is more on the Solar System pulp sci fi of the Fifties, but it's a fascinating place. Similarly, Heinlein's Have Spacesuit, Will Travel is hugely dated, but he did a lot of thinking about the design. And how does anyone reach dials and controls on the back of a backpack?

I just try & make stuff that looks cool

Hehe... interesting stuff...

Well it goes along the lines of whatever kind/flavor of Sci Fi your imagination is conjuring up...

There is a ton of faked stuff in current scifi (meaning a lot of assumptions on technology and how it will work in space)

There are also steampunk scifi technology ideas floating around.... Even my own scifi I'm working on is very exaggerated (Nebulas you can breath in, ships catching on fire. sub-dimensional travel...)

I think in order to sell the ideas you have to have a plan, a set of rules, and be consistent. in your designs. Its ok to have non-digital readouts in the future (like Clockwork dials) as long as its the same throughout the design of the civilizations technology... this makes it a more believable-imagination.

Non of the above packs are "wrong" (Even scuba gear had dials on the back where you couldnt reach). The key is to design in consistant fashion.

 

I see your points on the backpacks but remember that while the last one may be the most interesting looking to you, the first one is most realistic for a reason. Take the covering off a NASA life support backpack and it'd be far more interesting looking too, bu the cover's there for safety. Do you really want to take the chance of your backpack catching on something and being being damaged as you try to get loose? The covering's intended to keep the components safe. It really depends on whether you want realistic, or realistic but not necessarily practical.

Since I'm a volunteer firefighter I have access to high-tech, low-tech and inbetween-tech toys.  Because of the environment we work in, controls and displays have to be simple: we don't have time to spend fooling around so the designs and interfaces are meant to provide critical information instantly and the controls are limitied to basic functions.

For instance currently the highest tech hardware we have in operation is a thermal imager.  Very sophisticated technology.  The controls for the unit consist of one big button.  Press and hold the button to turn the unit on or off, or press it quickly when the unit is on to put it in standby, press once more to come out of standby.

That's it.

We have heads-up displays for our breathing apparatus located in front of our masks.  The display is four little red lights: 4 lights is a full tank, three lights is 3/4, two is half a tank of air left, one light is a quarter, that one link blinking (accompanied by a high-pitched whine that will drive you nuts) means get out of the building now.

Sure, we could go with LCD displays in the masks and such (and some of our air packs have an LCD display showing exact pressure in the tank and estimate of time remaining located on a device you have to look down at) but it's not necessary.  We need to know roughly how much air we have left and when it is time to get out.  Nothing more complicated than that.

The reason I'm mentioning this is because it's an example of interfaces and controls that are designed to provide information or pass commands fast and efficiently, telling you what you really need to know.  For the thermal imager the onboard computer controls things like adjusting the aperture of the lens, adjusting the brightness of the display by taking light conditions into account, adjusting the temperature scale on the display and so on.  I don't need to do that when I'm using the device.  All I need to do is turn it on and off.  So that's the controls they gave me.

So if I were designing the command bridge of a starship I'd take that into account.  What controls does the helmsman actually need versus the navigator (if they are two different people).  Is two big buttons labelled "GO" and "STOP" all they really need because the computer handles the rest?

Similarly, at a life support station are they going to have extensive displays showing the percentages of gases in the air and humidity and pressure and temperature or are they simply going to have a few displays that basically say "OK", "YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT THIS", "PAY ATTENTION TO THIS NOW" and "YOU"RE ALL GONNA DIE!" and if you want more details, well, then you have to bring up the specifics on a monitor.

Quote - I just try & make stuff that looks cool

Stonemason, easy for you to say! You're a genius. Your scenes are so beautiful. I own a couple and they are wonderfull just to look at... hardly want to crud them up with my figures etc. I really want Sector 15 soooo bad but I really don't know when I will have the money. You have the perfect balance of visual interest and rational plausibility...

When I make stuff its starts acreating nurnies like barnacles... ugh! Part of that is that I have to obscure the fact that I am working entirely with primitives. I have tried a bunch of different modeling programs and I just   don't "get" any of them.

I appreciate all the help here. It really has me thinking in a productive way. I don't think I am being rigid about rationality, it is just I need that structure of rational design since I don't have the aptitude or talent to just have at it intuitively. I do want to try to do this for the creative experience but really it does come down to the economics of it I guess.

Atomic Rocket is EXCELENT!

First off, I have a feeling that anyone who says "I don't think about it, I just make stuff that looks cool" is probably following the same rules as the rest of us; they have just managed to internalize them so they don't have to follow them consciously. So unless you have that same sharp instinct, it isn't the best advice. Better to start with intellectualizing the problem, then later begin to trust your instinct as that process becomes increasingly internalized. It is the same for most art. Thinking about function, looking to real-world examples, watching your tech level are all good advice. But above that, at a higher level of abstraction, is the emotional affect and the semiotics. After all, when a prop shows up in a movie it isn't just there to fill an actor's hand. It is there to carry forward the story. So it makes a difference if the gun is sleek and cool or large and ugly. Same for the settings. Within a single movie you can have a variety of emotional affect; in Alien, for instance, contrast the homeliness of the dining room, with the womb-like (and vaguely threatening in a smothering sort of way) of the computer room. I think original Star Trek gets far too little credit for their attention to semiotics. When a character lifted -- or spoke about -- a "communicator," you understood exactly what was going on. The name, the shape, the way it was held all communicated (!) the purpose of the tech item quickly and efficiently to the audience. Whereas Space 1999 had communicators that looked uncomfortable and seemed more than anything else like interview microphones (Commander Koenig here, reporting for Channel 11..) and the guns had everyone in my shop setting staplers to "stun." I dislike the super-crowded greebly sets we get so often these days, with random buttons all over the place and parts that have to be lifted and turned and re-seated in non-intuitive directions. One is always wondering in the back of their minds how the character actually knows which button to press. None of them even have labels! (As a comparison, apparently most of the actors that played transporter techs had already decided how "their" controls work. There's a story David Gerrold tells of one of the actors telling him, the writer, the right way to beam someone up.) Specific advice? You'll see this mentioned in some books on design. Idea is, for semiotic affect you look at something your audience is familiar with and try to abstract something about it that "sells" the same purpose or emotional effect. If it's long and pointy, it looks dangerous, like a weapon. Long pointy hulls are great for fighters, not so great for bulk cargo liners (there's functionality in that as well!) It's hard to make a convincing gun without a pistol grip. You want something that sucks? (in a good way); ribbed tubing for whatever reason screams "vacuum cleaner" to most people. Oh. And thanks for mentioning Ron Cobb. He actually has several very nice sketches of airlocks in the book "The Making of Alien." Plus his symbol set inspired me to draw up one of my own (which I have yet to use outside of role-playing).

Quote - Atomic Rocket is EXCELENT!

Heh... I know Winchell from the NBOS mailing list (I do some graphics for NBOS.com and Wichell uses Astrosynthesis Starmapping program I worked on)

nomus, thanks :) what you say helps. I was thinking I had to understand ergonomics and "design" in a style sense but I think by semeotics you are saying I must also think in terms of symbolic expression and the expression of structure. Interesting. **
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Plus you can always play the "mimic" game. I've got a page or two somewhere in my sketchbook where I was developing spacecraft and air vehicles on the shapes of pre-Cambrian sea creatures and modern crustaceans. I think, when that technique works, you manage to somehow bring some of that intangible "realness" across from the real thing. When it fails, of course, people say "Hey -- that's just a trilobite with air intakes!"

cool :)

Very interesting thread. :biggrin:

I've attempted a few science fiction environments of my own, and I do have a few design principles that I try to follow. My particular style is "near-tech" sci-fi, which is almost, but not quite, way out there.

• anthropometrics and ergonomics are important to me — the environments and props should relate to the scale and range of motions of the end user (whether the end user is human or otherwise)... this should take into account even obscure factors like line of sight, ventillation, and the visible color spectrum of light to a particular species.
• functionality is another important factor — when you look at something I've made, the use becomes fairly obvious... and if it isn't obvious, then I have failed miserably
• credibility — the environments should look believable, in that they might actually be constructed or that they would possibly be used... even the manner by which they are put together, should mimic how they might be assembled in reality
• consumability and sustainability — because the stuff I make looks functional and hopefully credible, this hints at things getting used up and replenished, so I try to add in bits to help support this... which in turn helps with credibility

Designing a science fiction environment is dead-easy. Simply because no one can authoritatively say, "that's wrong". And if people can agree that something is indeed wrong with your science fiction environment, then there probably is some basis for it then technically it's moved into the realm of science fact.

Cheers! — Möe

 

Möe, I just looked at the interriors in your store and they look terrific, they combine plausible functionality and a sense of a future style/design. Just great.

Thanks, wertu.

Some of the stuff I am rambling about in terms of design can be seen in my gallery... take note that these are only attempts to get it right. It's not quite there yet, but I'm working on it. :biggrin:

• http://excalibur.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=460941 — is a science fiction bar...
• http://excalibur.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=221637 — is part of a bridge environment...
• http://excalibur.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=132249 — is one of the first freebie items I created...

There's more, but you can see that I strive for a certain thematic consistency in my junk.

Cheers! — Möe

"I'm just pleased as punch to report 2 thermonuclear missles are heading our way" - Hitchhiker's Guide
That kind of computer?..;)
why don't you try something, and show us what you come up with?

Moe, those are stunning! Re. Argo bridge: I was just thinking that pilot/helmspersons would have stick type controls even on a space ship. I like the info/desk cubical. That also seems right, also the navigation/weapons(?) station.Those helm controls are super sweet. The Antares bridge has a great scall and works for arrangements where each persons operations are to be kept privy. Also captures the loneliness of comand and/or of space travel and the center corridor captures the loneliness of space. The bar I can't analysis, it just has grat mood and credibilty. Thank you for showing!