Hello everyone!
New blender user here, still a lot to learn but incredibly happy to use this wonderful piece of software!
This is my first blender project: to celebrate the 50 anniversary of the Apollo 11 historical journey, I tried to model the Lunar Module LEM 5 coupled wit the command and service module.
Started in 2.79b now is in 2.80 RC2.
Screenshot directly from the viewport in eevee.
Many things are still to be done but I don’t know if I will have time to complete it.
Still, any comment and suggestion to improve it are more than welcome!
Thank you!
Nothing fancy: the shader is a principled bsdf with textures for base color, roughness and normal.
The normals are baked from a high poly sculpted mesh projected on the low poly version.
Still not completely satisfy whit the result but at least they looks like mylar foils.
The Moon is still missing, I’m trying to achieve a decent result for a surface shot, but till now I’m not satisfied.
I’m using eevee now
The models are built completely from scratch, using as references hundreds of pictures, tecnical drawing and manuals to figure out the exact shape of this wonderfull machines
I’m a NASA engineer and scientist working on a new astrophysics mission called ESCAPE at the University of Colorado Boulder. Our mechanical CAD is all about function but I’m working on making some pretty renders and animations of it for presentations and public outreach. Aerospace CAD never includes the MLI and the software tools we use (usually SolidWorks but I’ve also done some Fusion 360) aren’t designed to produce textures like this. So now I’m hoping to learn from what you’ve done in the post to do it in Blender or 3ds Max. I only used Blender a tiny bit years ago. Would you be willing to do a tutorial video on a simplified model (like just a block with a cone on it or something) to demonstrate how you’ve done this?
Hi, great work! I am learning Blender at the moment for my project, and I got stuck on modelling the MLI surfaces. You said that you duplicated the base mesh of the model, sculpt it using crease brush, and then baked the normal maps from that and applied them on the base mesh…
Can you please explain to me, why did you choose to bake the normal maps if you already had all the features modeled using the sculpt tool? As I understand, normal maps will create a “fake” representation of the bumps, scratches and any heights… So, why do that, if you already have all of that modelled? I am just trying to understand why this is usually done that way (I understand why it can be done for video games and so on, but not for a short clip)
Also, how did you select the colors for MLI? Did you use any color textures from internet or did you just select the closest color from the palette?
