Art is never finished, it's only published, as one of my great teachers taught me. It's very close to final. There's some tweaks here and there. We're going to run the bug gauntlet here pretty soon. That does give me a little bit of time to add a couple extra features here and there that, if I ran out of time on certain things, I need to polish up. That's the time when I get it in.
So the ship, in initial planning, was called as going to be the most amount of work to do as a variant. The neck, nose and tail sections are essentially a reuse from the previous base version and previous variants, but the body on the Phoenix had to be, inside and out, completely redone.
So the Phoenix material itself is propagated through the entire ship, so everything on the interior and exterior is tailored towards the Phoenix palette.
So that just kind of came out after a while. I got a ship called the Phoenix, and then I learned the ship Constellation Phoenix. There actually is a constellation Phoenix. So I did a little bit of research. The little orange lights up there you see is actually the constellation Phoenix. And then I wanted to do kind of like a front car hood emblem type thing for this ship, since it's a little bit more high-dollar, polished. So I did a little concept for the logo, and then it just started finding its way into everything. So that's like a projector shooting the image onto the wall, which has some effects to it.
TL;DRJosh Coons chose a darker, richer, more expensive-looking wood for the Phoenix to avoid the common cheap light-brown flooring, based on his research into what makes wood costly.
That wood, I had a word for it. It's called apartment home rental wood. Well, if you Google wood floor, that's the first one, the most common one that's going to come up. And common is not good for a luxury ship. We want something a little different, something that would be expensive to install. And I wanted to get away from that base, light-brown color. I literally just bought flooring for my own home, and that color is the cheapest wood on the planet.
Yes. So I've been doing a lot of research actually in real life about wood and the cost of it, the finishes on it, and what adds to value. The more rustic and hand-touched it is, the way more expensive. So actually reclaimed, recycled shiplap wood is really, really expensive. And then you get into the actual wood type, and if it's a rare hardwood, it's super, super expensive.
Yeah. Actually, on the forums I had people sending me links and wood types that were really rare, usually because they're endangered species of tree. And some of them just didn't look good if they were cut. But yeah, I got a lot of suggestions online. As some of our viewers know, I'm on the forums quite a bit. I like to see what everybody's saying.
So I initially took a stab at doing the bedding and stuff, and when it came down to scheduling, I couldn't get back into it. I had to load up ZBrush, and I needed organic sculpting. So we got a lot of help from the props team when it came to some other stuff, to pick up some of the other areas so I could concentrate just on the ship itself. So the props team contributed the linens and the bedspreads and a couple of other things that we shall see. No idea on the thread count, though. If someone wants to go in there and actually count the threads, that would actually be kind of fun.
Yes. Air Force One, luxury airliners, yachts. Luxury trains were referenced a lot. Most have a side split going down the side, like the European train style, if you've seen Harry Potter, that kind of thing. I pushed that as much as I could. There are some things that kind of push the design: you see this column over here, on the inside this is actually the housing for the hydraulic struts for the lowering of the cargo. So the four pillars in this room have to be there, and then the design went around that. So this would be your lounging area for space flight. You want to cruise around and just check out space, this is where you'd be. We've got more of a communal type seating arrangement here. Props team also with some nice fabric texture contributions here on this chair.
Yes. And that brought up a lot of unique questions about style differences, because RSI has its style, and its style really isn't luxury. It's not a luxury style.
Outside of the Phoenix, yes. So I kind of considered it like you take a lower-end car company and then they would do maybe the Eddie Bauer edition or whatever. And I approached it kind of like that.
It is absolutely a dishwasher. I think the original Phoenix actually had a dishwasher in it, and I think it just stuck in my head. I was like, it has a dishwasher.
TL;DRThe piano is a setup item swapped with the conference table via the mobiGlas VMA loadout, owners without a Phoenix are intended to use it in hangars, and whether it returns for purchase is undecided.
So that is a setup item, so you can either have the conference table or your piano, depending on, I guess, your preference. If you want to have more meetings, you can have that, and if you want to have more parties, you can have the piano.
So if you're in-game, what you have to do to get to the piano is you're basically going to bring up your mobiGlas, and you can change your loadout through the VMA, and you'll be able to switch out the conference table and the piano just like you would a weapon on the ship.
And this is a good time to remind folks that not everybody who owns a Phoenix owns the piano. The piano was an early pledge item when the Phoenix was first introduced in 2014. So folks who bought it in the original concept promotion, it came with it automatically. It was also sold individually. So there are actually people in the game who own the piano and don't own the Phoenix, at which point I believe our intention is to allow you to use that in hangars and stuff like that when that comes in. As for whether we will bring the piano back as its own item to buy or to pledge for in the future, that is still TBA. Let us know what you think on Spectrum. But no decision has been made in that regard yet.
What do you want to do? It's just space right now. But there's some extra space for you to have a party. And if you want the hot tub, you can open up the covers.
In what I'm in right now, no. But what's below right now is still just the placeholder. We do have the props team. They picked up the hot tub after I took a single pass on it, and they finished it up, and they did a fantastic job. Right now I'm working on a couple of metrics issues with it so I can get it to fit in here. And I think they also remodeled the cover, and that was another one of the issues. Because it's animated, I think we had a little bit of a metric issue there that I have to just correct really quick.
If you put someone in the hot tub and they're sitting, and then you close the doors, it actually just chops their head off. Not actually, but they would probably clip through.
It'd be cool if I pushed them down in there and you could actually drown them in the hot tub. Or boil them. You could turn the temp up. Don't get in the hot tub. It's a trap.
So for the master bedroom, I think this is also a question about glass, about different types of glass. You don't want people looking in, so I wanted to do a frosted glass. This is my first run at it for the master bedroom. And you'll notice when I go inside that it's not frosted from the outside.
Yes. And this is the master bedroom quarters, and you have a good clear view out that side. That same glass technique's being used on the exterior windows. They're perfectly clear from the inside, but on the outside you've got appropriately limo tint.
They do have some frosted... I think they have two or three frosted glass materials in there for different purposes. And I referenced those just a smidge when I was doing mine.
Yes. So the bathroom is going to be located in a familiar spot, which is in the neck area as well. The space in this room is more devoted towards, think of it like a really nice bar that you go to. The bathroom's not really in the middle of the party area. You kind of have to walk around the corner, up some, down some stairs to go to the bathroom. The latrines are located in the neck. There's always the hot tub.
No, there's no hatch. This one's fully floored. Oh yeah, when you lay down in here, you should have a nice view of the cosmos as you're zipping by. I can't wait to see this thing flying at speed and just standing here and watching out the window.
It was a little menacing to walk into a room and you're just looking down the barrel of all these missiles aimed straight at your head while you're sleeping. I wouldn't want that.