Command or Capital Spaceship (Mesh)

So I’m new to Blender having spent around 4 months using Maya3D. I’ve always had a particular fascination with spaceships. I guess, to some extent, they allow you to go crazy as opposed to building a standard building like a supermarket or gun shop. EVE Online (which I played for almost 2 years) and Star Trek are heavy influences in my constructs but being very new to all of the tools used to create these complicated models I am still having trouble.

In this case I was going for, what might be classed as, a capital or command size ship (so fairly big.) I’ve tried to break the shape a little with the first ring and then the saucer-esque disk near the front.

Weapons wise there are around 20 slots for primary weapons with 7 slots for secondary lasers (for hitting smaller ships) including a dual-laser/plasma/gauss? cannon attatched to the front. Powered by 2 large and 6 small engines at the back plus 6 additional slots for forward/reverse engines.

All criticism welcome. :slight_smile: Looking to improve my skills (i know it’s far from a perfect model)

Front Angle

http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h101/womble345/CapitalShip1_zpsb9lwfb2c.png

Top Down

http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h101/womble345/topdown_zps4eaheew9.png

Back Angle

http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h101/womble345/BackAngle_zpsa04fynyi.png

Hi there! I too share your fascination with space ships, and incidentally, also play EVE :D. Overall, I think it looks pretty good for someone that doesn’t have much time working with blender. Most of my criticisms have to do with the design of the ship more than the actual modeling of it.

Couple bits of advice for ya:

Coherence - Ships tend to follow design principles that relate to a specific function, so trying to break up shapes in the way you did actually takes away from the sense of coherence. The toughest part about creating a new ship from scratch is keeping it coherent so that it makes sense without compromising it’s purpose.

Purpose - You go into detail about how many gun ports this ship has like it’s going to be on the line taking and dishing out lots of damage. Yet, it looks like if I hit it with a pellet gun, it would shatter. It needs more heft to it to give it the look of strength. If you look at actual ships of the line like WW1 battleships, they’re large and wide because they have extremely thick armor and large weapons that require a lot of power to move and operate. All that power comes from internal generation that takes up space inside the vessel increasing it’s size even more until it finds a balance point that is determined by the requirements of the ship’s mission (and monetary expense). In order to make visual sense, space ships need to accommodate for this just as much as naval ships do.

Angles - On real ships (tanks too), angles were used to help deflect away incoming damage. Having straight, boxy areas on your ship would make weapons hitting those areas cause more damage. That doesn’t mean go crazy with it, just keep it in mind when designing a combat ship.

Mirror Modifier - It’s a great thing, but know it’s limitations. If you have a sub-object that straddles the axis that the mirror modifier is operating on, it’s sometimes a good thing to leave it as a separate object until after you apply the modifier (like the ring and dome).

None of this is to say that you can’t be free with your model, just that to create really good models requires that you put a lot of thought into them. You’re doing more than just creating a model, you’re communicating an idea through a visual medium. And whenever you communicate you have to answer questions that the viewer might come up with, the more you answer the more complete the model/scene is.

Thank you for taking the time to post such a lengthy reply. The points you raise are very good and give me a lot to think about. I am actually now referencing a lot of online spaceship pictures to give me inspiration and ideas (The only problem is translating that into blender). Funnily enough when I started this design I had more of a “blimp” shape in mind but somehow that’s not how it turned out in the end. I have started to model smaller ships (what you might class as fighters, cruisers etc) rather than command or capital ships. I wonder how long it took to model a titan for EVE :spin:

Yeah, I had problems with that too when I started doing ships. The thing that really helped me was starting off with an existing ship, a Rifter in my case, and modeling my own version as a learning project. I used that model to learn how to use tons of modeling tools in Blender like how to use duplication, mirroring, extruding, separating geometry. I eventually went on to learn how to unwrap, use materials, texture, particles, lighting, animation, even a little rigging. The quality was pretty terrible compared to what I can do now, but that was the project that I learned most of what I know about Blender now.

Once you know the tools and the workflow, being creative gets a lot easier.

Funny that you mention using another ship to help with design ideas. I pulled up a few images from Google yesterday and started working on a design and this is what I ended up with so far.

Front

http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h101/womble345/shipfront_zpsm6ib07li.png

Side View

http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h101/womble345/shipside_zpsxpgotnxh.png