Welcome to Phoebe!

CORP

This week has been pretty slow for R1FTA but that's usual. I'm getting used to being a high and mighty director of R1FTA (lol) and most of my "directing" time this week has been spent trying to get the new recruits to not lose shiny things to SC blobs and blops. While I'm sure most of SC couldn't give a rats ass about R1FTA there seem to be a small minority that have a vendetta against us and they don't mind using excessive force.

https://zkillboard.com/kill/42152831/
https://zkillboard.com/kill/42209235/

These deaths lead to a nice corp mail composed by myself explaining that you should probably do some research on your target before you go in guns blazing and that maybe if you asked for help you would have lost a rifter instead of a stratios. I don't actually mind the deaths even if they are at the hands of SC. If the new recruits have enough isk to buy legion after legion more power to them. R1FTA has always been a casual corp and I'm not going to be the one to demand that they don't fly expensive ships until the SC threat cools down. However, I do hope they will use each death as a learning experience else corp mails may be coming far more frequently.  I've always believed it's better to train up to expensive ships instead of starting off flying them but then again I'm a broke bastard that never has stepped foot in a ship worth more than 100m so what do I know.

The only other thing going on in corp currently is the recruits are asking for a corp hangar of their own that is stocked with some fit rifters and other ships. I'm not opposed to the idea of them having access to a hangar like that so they can grab a ship in a hurry for a fleet but I need to find some way to prevent corp theft if someone decides to do the daring heist of 10 or so fitted rifters.

Also there have been murmurings in the back alleys of R1FTA about a black op to take down a ████████. So keep an eye out for that in the coming weeks.

FIGHTS

Honestly no good fights this week :( I've been so busy with school lately that I get home and fall asleep immediately. I'm hoping for a good roam or another chance at a carrier this weekend.

ART

Wait... what? A member of the Black Rebel Rifter Club talking about art? Yeah that's me but I'm not talking about your regular old oil painting on canvas here. I dabble in graphic design as well as 3D art and animation and since this is my blog I'm damn well going to talk about it. Don't worry all of it is EVE related.

For quite awhile I've dabbled in 3D art but I'v never seriously tried 2D. Out of the blue I was asked by some pretty weird fellows to do some art for their Communist campaign. I thought they were pretty funny and they were causing all sorts of racket in Aeschee so I helped them out and did a few pieces for them. What's the worst that could happen?

I also gave them a template for new members which spawned a whole handful of new pictures and caused great distress to members of the Aeschee area.

I've been kicking around an idea to make a cinematic EVE video for nearly as long as I've been playing EVE and this weekend I've decided to start working on it. The opening sequence is ingrained in my mind I've been thing about it for so long. 

A camera starts off blurry and slowly focuses in. Cue ominous music. As it focuses first you see a asteroid field in the distance and then when it fully focuses the closest item to you is revealed in crystal clear clarity. (Check out that alliteration) Casings, 50 polished chrome cylinders reflecting the universe like shards of glass hovering in space. Each ever so slowly rotating their own way. The camera watches these casings do their celestial dance for a moment before a black and red rifter speedily cuts through the frame. Some of the casings collide with the ship bouncing off the metal and scattering while all the others spin or are flung behind by boost of the thrusters. The camera pans following the orange glow of minmatar thrusters. Cue radio static/murmurings. Revealed is an orca fire leaking out of its vents and holes in it's hull. Around it swarm a group of rifters. 

That's as far as I've thought ahead so far. While it may sound like a fairly short scene it is far from simple. The main problems for me in the production are going to be getting the things I'm unfamiliar with done. Music may not be a problem due to EVE having a pretty wonderful public soundtrack but sound effects and after effects like the tails on ship thrusters and lasers are completely foreign to me. Eve is wonderful because CCP has allowed most of the assets in game to be exported and edited out of game to make videos, cool sigs, etc. However they don't let you take everything as far as I know. Some essential things such as the space environment are unobtainable to me so far. It seems like tools are out there that may do some of this stuff but EVE exporting has extraordinarily little documentation and what there is is often from 2006. I had to learn myself how to take assets out of EVE and it was no easy task. I really don't know if the high quality out of game video making community is so niche that it's just a handful of people or if the old wise ones are just keeping secrets to themselves.

Because I expect people to ask the environment in EVE is that background image that is always there. While you can get stills of it like this I need the full 360 image that the game uses because like in EVE the camera will be panning, moving, and rotating. Ignore that I misspelled environment in this picture. I blame paint.

One of my previous works. This took a long time to figure out how to do because the documentation on it was outdated by several years. Chicago was my nickname at the time hence the text.

That's all for this week. If you actually read through that wall of technical jargon that is above I applaud you. See you next week, Slade.

P.S. I didn't talk about Phoebe because it doesn't effect me