Thanks.
I am still working on the landing gear and adding more greebles (you can never have enough greebles.) I think that I will start working on the interior soon.
Thank you so much for the run down of the materials! I’m always impressed with how people do materials! Thanks a bunch!
The landing gear looks cool. You might consider changing the speed of the back part of the landing gear so it’s coming down at a different speed, might give it a cool look. And you’re right, you can never have enough greebles. Thanks for sharing.
This is very cool. 
I love the ship and am very inspired by the alien. I have yet to play with character modelling or sculpting in Blender yet. I may have something to play with tonight.
Here is the current state of the ship. Modeling the interior is going to be harder than I thought so I will try to finish up the exterior completely first and do some texturing.
This is a really cool project! The ship is a good design, with some nice greebles. The alien itself is definitely a good model for the whole martian style, and I love his suit. As for the gun…the projectiles should “fill up” the barrel more, as they now seem to come out of some random spot in the middle. Otherwise, I love it!
I am 90% done with the exterior but I am procrastinating texturing because I know that it is going to be a pain to unwrap and texture paint so many pieces.
P.S. I also don’t know what color to make the ship. As you can see from my WIP, the color of the ship changes almost daily.
In the mean time, try setting up vertex dirt and using an attribute node to use that vertex dirt as a multiplier with the shaders you do use
Very closely following this thread because it resembles much of wath I creating (e.a. cartoon character + mecha thingie). Interested in the vertex dirt thingie, have to google that one bc I dont understand how to do it (but I understand its effect).
This thread is really interesting, and I’m eagerly looking forward to your animated short. But are a couple of things that I thought I would comment on. Firstly there seems to be a design discontinuity between the technology that the alien is wearing and the ship and gun design. The helmet is quite organic and smooth, but the design of the ship and the gun is very angular and not smooth at all, it’s almost as if he’s stolen the ship and gun from another alien race!
The other comment I wanted to make was about the blue area at the front of the ship, it’s the same colour as the engines at the rear and it could cause some confusion as to which end in the front! When I first saw the ship it is not immediately clear where the front is and how large it was.
I do love the design of it all 
I modeled a landing pad tower for the ship which I will use as part of the final image/animation.
I get what you are saying about the discontinuity between the character and the ship. This is because I created the ship off of an idea that I had in my head before I made the character. The ship wasn’t designed specifically for the character but I don’t have anyone else to fly the ship. I am thinking of making a flight suit for the alien that might fit better with the design of the ship.
Finals week is next week so don’t expect to see any updates to this thread for the next two weeks. But after that comes break so I will have plenty of time to finish up the ship and maybe do some animating.
After some thought I wondered if you could use the difference in the design of the ship as part of the plot? For example, the alien character could be on a mission to steal the ship from another alien faction/race, or he’s just escaped and steals the ship from his captors.
Loving the landing pad by the way, very nice!
Maybe you can just give him some accessories that match the style of the ship, since the ship doesn’t really preclude your alien form having smooth geo in his suit and helmet. Maybe a wrist device, and a back pack, or some armor bits on the shins, etc. that match the angular look of the ship’s.
One more final to get through and then I can get back to work on this. In the meantime, here is a turntable of the (almost fully modeled) ship.
I have started animating the ship. I will probably create a thread in the animation support for animation questions, but while I am here, does anyone have any good methods for creating vapor trails behind the ship. I am going to try using a particle system and I will see how it goes.
Wow, this is realy progressing towards a nice short.
love everything about this little project … nice idea very well done. Keep it up Daniel
Cool shot in post37, with some materials/textures on the architecture, this would make a nice still, already looking superb, though a bit empty.
For the animation you got a bit of inconsistency/repetition on the transition in the 7th second. in the far shot the hip comes to a stop/hover, then the next top down shot plays a bit of a different animation of the ship transitioning from flight to hover and descent phase quite good. I would say cut to the top down view a bit earlier and you should have a better flowing animation.
As others said, cool landing pad tower, nice camo paint, but its too perfect, missing the grunge and dirt stuff. I love the thruster effect in post27, did you do it with particles, or PS after render?