I’ve been wanting to tackle some Stargate ships for a while now. However I’m in college right now and may not be able to make much progress if any…
If anyone remembers me, you may know that I have never had a finished project…I would like to change that some day.
Last time I checked, there were more Blender specific animation tutorials than ing tutorials, and more Books books on animation and no advanced ing tutorials, other than some organic/human ing.
So it just came to me that I might try asking a general question: How would you this (insert ship)?
I’ve been wanting to the Ori mothership from SG-1 season 9-10.
I’ve been thinking I could either try to use mirror since its symmetrical, or take it section at a time and fit them in place; for example, the first picture contains the command deck and main energy weapon. The second shot contains the power core and the engine pod (which contains the sublight and hyperdrive engines). I could model those separately, using mirror, and try to fit them in later. But I think I could have scaling issues, which is my main concern.
How would you guys go about this?
PS, I also tried Atlantis once, although that proved too comlplex for my skill level (which is like in the negative or something :p).
Thanks
LC
Here’s some good shots of the front and rear angles of the ship:
Ok I’m not the hardsurface modelling guru and I’m still learning but from my experience it is best to go from rough to detail and to model in pieces. So try to separate the component and model them individually fitting them into each other. This way you can decide if you want to subsurf or subd modell parts or if you want to model them the straight way. You can also bevel each part separatly although this is made obsolete with the new bevel modifier in my experience.
Texturing will be a lot easier if you do separate components as it will allow you to uvunwrap each part individually.
Oh and you might want to try something easier for a beginner project. But as we say in Germany “Man wächst mit den Aufgaben” (Loosly translates to: You grow on the tasks you do)
You might want to start by modelling small things that have slants and curves like coffee cups, computer mouse then move on to simple plane shapes.
Another good start is the Blender Week Day Challenge the current one can be found here http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=136234
And last but not least a forum dedicated to subsurf (subdivision) modelling http://www.subdivisionmodeling.com/forums/
The main body of the ship is no-doubt a “NURBS surface.” It looks rather like a bowl. There are lots of other pieces, and I too would assemble the ship in pieces so that you can easily concentrate on one-at-a-time. (Put them in separate layers so you can easily hide and reveal them.)
A lot of the “surface detail” is just painted-on, and you can do the same. So-called “bump maps” can be used to make the surface appear irregular without adding geometry.
But only because I don’t know how to make things curved or slanted like that yet.