This is an idea for a T-shirt design that was inspired from another T-shirt I saw on Tee Fury recently. I always loved the red bull T-shirt I picked up in Thailand many years ago that had the familiar logo but all the writing was in Thai script.

I made a stab at trying to translate all the writing into Japanese, but even getting it wrong is actually part of the appeal.

Age of Warp was a TV show that got as far as making an unaired pilot back in the early 90s.

It featured the crew of the Starship Cassiopeia as it explored the new frontier.

Here is a replication of the promo T-shirts that was released for the Japanese market.

We're still a full year out from Episode VII, The Last Jedi, however some photos are beginning to percolate out.

As I have said before I spent many summers in Kerry as a kid (That is in Ireland folks!). I was amazed to find out they were going to be shooting Star Wars there. I was very impressed with the depiction of Skelligs in The Force Awakens, which is used for the planet of Ahch-to. However it was not exactly the Kerry I remember. It is a beautiful part of the world, but it rains. A lot!

So it tickles me to see these two pictures of Daisy Ridley character, Rey, on location ... in the rain. Now this is the Kerry I remember, standing inside the door of a caravan, listening to the rain beating down on the metal roof, waiting and waiting for it to stop.

From what I have heard tourism is blowing up in that part of the world. Best of luck lads, enjoy it!

This was my first attempt at imagining what filming Star Wars off the Kerry Coast would look like

There is a great writeup over on starwars.com about some of the design decision to recreate the look of the empire and partially envisioned back in the 70s, check it out here

I love the concept art for the shield gate, above, I don't know how it would have worked in the final story, but it looks cool to see the Star Destroyers so teeny tiny.

We're very conscious of not breaking the rules of Star Wars architecture. In particular, the shield gate and some of the early ideas for it, we wanted to start grand. Because we knew that if we don't start with a grand vision, set the aspirational bar really high, we may never create something that's very striking. The original idea was, let's just go for it. What can we create that will inspire us' One of the ideas was that we were going to ring Scarif with this giant ring, that was going to be part a construction ring for Star Destroyers, but it was also going to be a refueling, resurfacing facility for the Empire. The reason we thought a ring might be interesting is, in my mind, the Death Star is the ultimate in Imperial manufacturing. That's the big statement. Since this was going to take place before that, we were thinking, what could be something structurally impressive but wouldn't supersede the Death Star' We thought, okay, maybe an orbital ring of some kind. That's where we came up with this. It seemed like it was in line with the technology the Empire had, but yet as a visual statement, it wasn't going to supersede the Death Star.

Many years ago I was fortunate enough to get my hands on the lightwave models of the Gryphon class fighter that was coming out of ST: Endeavour. As with most things on the web it is long gone, along with all the great work. Recently I was able to import the models into blender and retexture. This image doesn't show off how good that model is, but this angle was a fun one I saw along the way I decided I wanted to see a small squadron of them on approach to a planet.

Gryphon - Design by Galen/Kaden

I am really pleased with how this turned out. I have been playing around in blender and its freestyle options. I was looking to see if I could achieve some type of animated look for some Star Trek models. The Constellation class model probably needs some work to remove too many of the lines, but on the whole a good first attempt.

I took the existing models. Upgraded them to blender cycles, and changed all the surfaces to emission which gives that nice flat color look from the 80s. I need to experiment more with this.

Constellation class - Raul Mamoru, Blender conversion TCB5000 Drydock - David Metlesits

Finally I have some free time to play with some 3D models again. I have been trying to learn blender for years now. I got a bit distracted with some content being available in blender internal and some been available in cycles and all the "scripts" to help transition over from one to the other usually glitch. So after downloading and perusing the fantastic model of the EnterpriseB by ChrisKuhn over on BlendSwap I finally resolved to learn and understand how texturing works in cycles and try and convert some models over myself to help me learn a bit better.

I have been export/importing some models I liked from lightwave and am fairly happy with some of the work so far and hope to post some of the retexturing work here, if for no other reason my own records.

Ironically in my real job, I have completed the move from python2 to python3, something that was very painful to do, but is now complete and I can get on with real work there. This has the same ... feeling to it.

Freakonomics have a great podcast on the death of the visual-effect industry, the title is a bit misleading as it relates more to the industry in the United States. You can catch the podcast here

I have been toying around with Inkscape and Gimp to see if I could recreate one of my favourite T-Shirts designs, this is based on the "Biffs" T-Shirt, which I got off RedBubble a few years back. I am off two minds to also upload the faked stressed version as well.

This is a lightwave render of a space scene that I did back in 2006.

USS Legacy and Gryphon - Kaden

Drydock - Nico Weigand LWO Conversion MattC

Spacedock - LilPigBoy

Blue Marble- Fabio Passaro

Many years ago I did my one and only CG mode that I eventually released to the unsuspecting world, The Interceptor Class, which was designed by Stuart Narsil. He used to have a website, but that seems to be long gone, and even the wayback machine is unable to find it. Here are the referecne images I used, I am hosting it here for prosperity sake. If any one sees the original creators work online please contact me.