The MotherShip Thread

So begins the mothership thread…

This thread will document my mothership project, hopefully from start to finish. Any comments along the way greatly appreciated!

Here’s the basic plan:
– A HUGE mothership - not cool and sleek, but industrial, dirty, rusty, etc.
– The mothership shape itself will be very simple geometry, but all the details will be on and in it…and I’m thinking insane detail, but we will see how far I go with that.
– Will include 1 large landing bay and 3 ‘scout-ship’ type vehicles
– Texturing is no fun for me. It seems every time I do it, Blender does something exact opposite it did before, but I want this thing textured nice. Anyone know of any good textures for spaceship hulls or how to make them as well as tutorials, please let me know.

So, here is the simple start of it…looks silly posting this, I know, but like I said, I want to document it. I will post updates from time to time as it progresses.


v1 screenshots…



Texturing already??? Yeah, I wanted to make some tests. I turned on Blender Cycles for the first time tonight after watching Andrew Price’s tutorial on it…cool, but I wish it was faster. Then I spent probably longer than I’ve ever spent in PhotoShop (over an hour) making this texture. If I keep it, I will use it as the base texture. As far as the texture, interested to know what people think of the bottom view. The top view needs work…is doing something weird…not sure why it showing like there is a bulge there.



You know it’s going to be good when you spend more time working on it. Well… not always, but really great stuff takes allot of work.

I was really worried when you added the subsurf modifier. I thought it looked too smooth and not very industrial. The textures definitely give it a more aged look.

I wouldn’t consider this a base texture (a texture on which your put everything on top of). Instead, it looks more like a texture that you would want to overlay it onto other textures. Maybe make a separate background off white diffuse and change the current texture’s white to an alpha channel? You will have a great start for a dirt map.

It looks like you’re doing some kind of paneling on the underside. Adding crevices with a bump map would probably make it look allot better.

I do have one concern. If this is a mothership, I’m not sure how you’re going to have models of scouts in the same scene. A mothership seems to be a very big ship, but a scout ship seems to be a very small ship. Are the scouts going to be doing a flyby or something?

Keep up the great work. I hope to see more.

Looks a bit like the one from district 9


you can say that it looks familiar to every ufo… :smiley:

I think the base texture looks good.
I know it was a test but for your final, maybe you want to show just a little more rusting?

Thanks for the great comments! I will be doing some paneling, or actually hull plating next. The scout ships will be extremely small compared to the mother ship. In fact, I plan that they will be lost among all the other detail, but won’t know until I get there.

Very observant! The D9 ship is actually the inspiration for why I am going for more of an industrial look. When everything is done, I imagine it will look similar, but with noticeable differences.

Thanks! Yes, I definitely want to get some rust and wear in there if I can.

Ummmm… next time just respond to us all in one post. People usually aren’t a fan of double or triple posting.

Okay…on to ver3. Added to the basic shape a little and added the ‘hull plating’. I know I have work to do on the plating. With these renders, the model is in danger of resembling a wheel rotor and hub cap, but I’m still messing with cycles trying to get something I like.
I don’t usually do any texturing until I finish a model, but in this case wanted something there to help inspire me on the direction I’m going to take this thing.




your ship has the shape of a disc which of course includes a lot of circles. how about making a structure with many towers and needle-shaped buildings on top of the disc? you know, i just think of stargate atlantis and you said your ship is meant to be huge. i think this would add some contrast and interesting details. keep it up, it’s a good start!:yes:

actually you have created great platform for my ship hahaha

patience, my friend. It’s coming :slight_smile:

ver 4…holy greebles, batman! The larger details I am planning should cause these details to be “background”, which hopefully will work out nicely. btw, I looked at the Suicidator City Generator as I thought it might be a nice way to generate some quick greebles, but the poly count would have been WAY too high and there is not enough variation in shape for this alien craft…so I set out making these manually. Poly count is getting up there anyway with these. I was at 10,000+, now I’m at 110,000+.




ver 5…screwing around with the texture is now distracting me from the modeling process, so I pitched it aside for now. Here I have flattened the panels some and added my interior level to the 3 opening areas. Rendering now at 300 samples vs previous 100. And I only just now had a thought on how I should have done the panels which would have been way easier and more accurate than how I created them in an almost manual way. I will probably end up redoing them.




ver 6…one final post for tonight. I decided to go ahead and redo my panels using my new method…they look a lot more ‘alien’ now I think. And I also added some trim to offset the bottom sections :slight_smile:


Hi all! Here’s my latest, with details added to the top of the craft. I think I will get rid of the 12-prong thingys and add something with better detail and purpose. Other than that, what do you think?


Pretty good. My opinion: the tall skinny things make it hard to focus on the image and are distracting. Also, the exhaust pipes are way to big. Logically the flow rate of something that large would empty the spacecraft in no time flat.

I think adding some halo affects would really make the final render better. You can try to change the 12 prong thingys to something that resembles a transformer or tesla coil and make it have an electrical arch. You can add some kind of particle affect on the underside for propulsion.

Have you thought about adding an emission map? It could help if you want to add windows that are lit from within.