I wanted to model something to use as promotional artwork for an asset pack I recently created. It’s an asset pack containing greebles for detailing spaceships, corridors, cityscapes or anything sci-fi in general. So what better to showcase it than building a spaceship!
I will be posting all my progress here so I would appreciate any comments or constructive criticism.
So here it goes: Just putting together some basic shapes to get a feel of how the spaceship will look like and testing camera angle. To get the size and scale right I modelled the bridge and main section over the schematic of a commercial tanker ship.
I’m quite happy with these shapes so next I’ll start paneling this thing. The overall shape might still change as I progress…
Forgot to mention this earlier but my main references and the look I’m trying to achieve is something that combines traits from Star destroyers, modern day warships, and starships from old anime like Macros. I hope that I will manage to make at least some of these design elements to shine though the design of this ship.
Just a break down of the different parts of the ship:
Starfighter hangar bays.
Standard docking bays.
Engines.
Bridge.
Main hull.
The mind set behind this design is that it is modular, the base configuration is just the main hull with the bridge and a single engine and the rest of the parts are upgrades.
Also something about the overall shape of the ship just didn’t click with me, so I exaggerated the shapes of the docking bays and the bridge and I think it improved the silhouette of the ship a great deal! The bridge also now has a shape reminiscent of a mantis head, making the ship look more menacing!
@qomolangma888: Thanks for your kind words, I believe a good basic model is the key for a great final one
Have you by chance played the game Avorion? This looks very similar to the style of that game. This is a compliment by the way great game. I really like the progress and look forward to seeing more.
I’ve completed the plating and paneling! Also made some changes to lighting, added some variation to the color of the plating (some are a bit darker and more rough to break uniformity) and added some lights to the bridge!
I think everything is slowly coming together now. The engines are left for detailing and some minor tweaks like extra lights and a few more details here and there.
Slowly but steadily I progress, I’m on vacation now so I don’t have much time on the computer. In any case I finished detailing the hangar and docking bay doors and the engines section.
I’ don’t know what you guys have to say but I think its coming along nicely. Just a few more details and some lights to make the ship look alive and its almost finished.
Back again. Added some additional detail to the bridge, added additional detail to the engines and the docking bays. Added details on the plating of the Hangar Bays and most importantly of all I added lights to the greebles sections to make the ship look alive and functioning.
Using premade assets made detailing the ship easy and let me focus on more creative aspects of the prosses. These are all the parts that were used during the detailing process.
This is absolutely awesome! Close-ups look as enticing as the full scene. I suppose a little more space background ambiance might be nice - but I’m sure you know that. My question is - why are you working on vacation?
An impressive looking ship. Lots of fine detail which helps to give the viewer an impression of the large scale of the ship, a battleship or dreadnought at a guess.
The only thing that seems a bit off to me is the size of the turret guns. If I compare them to the size of the windows on the bridge then they look huge, much bigger than I would expect them to be. Maybe double the amount of turrets and reduce the size by half. That’s just my opinion though.
@EradifyerAO: Thank you for your kind words! A space background and maybe some planet is what I’m working on for the next update. To answer your question, this is a project that I work on my spare time, 3D is actually not my main occupation
@caz747: Thank you very much! That’s the impression I was going for! For the size of the turrets I referenced turbolaser turrets on star destroyers which are quite large and each is manned by a crew of several persons. I thought about it too though about the size of the turrets and I actually tried smaller ones but smaller turrets seemed to have less of a visual impact and were lost among the other greebles.
I also played around a bit with an earth from space photo in gimp and then used it as a background. (Might be a good idea for me to get the Space VFX course ) I also added a second ship in the mix.
So here is the SNU ICARUS and her sister ship the SNU DEDALUS patrolling in orbit above Earth-3:
So that’s it, I believe I can call this finished! I hope you guys liked the creative prosses behind this ship and the final result!
Since I won’t have access to my pc, I wont be posting any updates on this project for a while but when I return I might render a few more closeups and a back view and maybe some orthographic renders from top, side and front.
) I also added a second ship in the mix.