I’m new here and am just getting to know everything, so please forgive me if this isn’t the correct place to post this, or I come across ignorant- it’s not intentional.
I started using Blender about 8 months ago and so far I’ve only really used it to create interiors, or sections of interiors to render and use in film projects.
I would like to try my hand at modeling a Starship and although there are plenty of tutorials and/or speed modeling videos out there, they all seem to be either based on circular (Enterprise/Falcon) style ships, or hard square shaped ones and not really a combination of the two.
This design has recently been doing the rounds on DeviantArt and I’d really like to try building this one.
Problem is, no matter what method I try (and I’m not an advanced modeler by any stretch), I can’t seem to get it to look right. Or I run into a problem and can’t figure out how I’d do the next part from the geometry I already have.
I do appreciate that this is a very “dude wants to run before he can walk, [sigh]” post and I realize that probably no one has the time or desire to spell things out for my dumb ass.
But I was wondering if anyone might give me a brief overview on how they might go about modeling it?
Or point me to any resources that I might not have already found on techniques that would be suited for this particular project.
Again, apologies if this is a frustratingly ignorant post. I’m trying to get better.
Well, i would say that model is pretty easy to do. I was in your situation as well, my problem is slighty diffferent. I asked time ago what is the proper way to uv/texture a ship made with grebbles focused to gaming. Nobody answered me. Because 99,9% of the ships you find in youtube or tutorials are just one single pieces made but a really low number of extra pieces and using displacements and so on. A total different method than the one i was asking.
What im saying is… beside the tutorials you will find in youtube, i dont think anyone here is going to be able to give you a real useful advise. Ive been there… and you are lucky the model you want to do is easy, the one i wanted to do wasnt… so i eventually gave up on space ships.
But i dont see the problem. The shape of the ship you want to model is really easy and just dividing the model into pieces you can get it done fairly fast.
Start with the back - center part of the ship. Once you do that, start with the front, and after that, the sides, of course using a mirror modifier. The only problem you could have is to make those detailed parts in the sides (the ones you can see with a darker color). My advises is to use just a displacement map if you want a lot of detail. If you dont, then just place some pieces here and there and thats about it.
Honestly this model is really fairly easy to make. As long as the ship is not composed by multiple grebbles that you need to texture/uv separatedly and it can be really tricky specially if you want to export that model to a game engine, starship modelling in this case is not really problematic.
I think that would lend itself well to subsurf. And you could keep the base mesh fairly simple too.
Don’t look for tutorials on specific objects. The chances are you’re going to come across something that’s never been covered. And then you’re stranded. Learn modeling techniques you can apply anywhere. Break the model down as N3mes1s suggested. Reduce them to the simplest form you can, and then create those shapes. Don’t rush to put in details early on. And the symmetry cuts the work in half with the mirror mod.
There’s some decent reference in that image to get the basic shape going. The reference is already implying hard lines where you can break the mesh into more manageable pieces. Don’t worry about smaller stuff until you have the basic silhouette. Details can be refined later.
