Rocinante (The Expanse fan art)

While I’m hardly the first person to try and model the Roci, I love the show and the design of the ship so much I wanted to try my hand at making my own. Started with a quick blockout following some reference sheets I found online, then started adding more detailed pieces over that. Trying to work my way down the detail hierarchy, starting with the big shapes.

Wireframe view, courtesy of a brief visit to 2.8:

Have most of the main pieces in. Next I’m gonna tackle some more details around the cargo decks, the struts and fins around the engine bell, and swapping out the temp comm array for the real one. Then the reactor housing, and the PDCs, and all the little bits like RCS thrusters, torpedo bay doors, covers and seams…

At one point I was thinking of UDIM-painting this to texture it, but the more I look at it, the more I think I might try and do it with just decals and tiling substances.


Latest:

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the model looks very nice, ther are alot of stuffs around
i watched the serise and i think your doing great

Nice, as a big fan of the series I would like to see objects of this universe created in blender!

A nice sunday of modeling, some updates:


  • Replaced blockout engine/reactor housing with final proper shell
  • Added engine bell struts
  • Added pipes/struts (whatever they are) along the cargo deck area
  • Roughed-out PDCs and did some fit checks
  • Added beginnings of final comm arrays (want to detail the masts a bit still)
  • Fixed the chin area of the main hull, had been avoiding this since it’s hard to find reference for. Think I finally got it all sorted out
  • Fixed a bunch of non-planar faces that were hiding in spots
  • Changed the side pods area bit

TODO (maybe not exhaustive?)

  • “cladding” around the reactor housing
  • PDC hinges and “holster” pods
  • nose RCS thrusters
  • “keel-side” thruster pods (apparently used for horizontal landing)
  • Add various greebles, seems, and other misc doodads
  • airlock and torpedo bay doors
  • make the connection between engine bell and struts looks less like it’s just intersected
  • detail comm array “sleeves”
  • engine “fins” (not sure if these are landing gear or some sort of thrust vectoring devices?)
  • check over reference to make sure there aren’t other RCS or landing thruster pods I don’t know about
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Finally got some time this weekend to sit down with this model some more!

  • Added PDC “holsters”, including mount arm for side guns
  • Added most of the RCS thrusters, might adjust this/add more/remove some still
  • Added landing thrusters
  • Various greeble bits and panel seams
  • Detailed crew airlock door, added torpedo bay doors
  • Numerous fixes with the side weapon pods which looked weird/didn’t match the reference. I think I may have gotten it right finally? (there were several other iterations since I lasted posted)
  • Added reactor cladding
  • Detailed drive nozzle, including fins around the engine bell, some tweaks to the struts, and various structures in the throat of the nozzle
  • Detailed comm arrays a bit more, still not really happy with this part though

TODO:

  • Various bits on the nose above the crew airlock door
  • Cargo airlock and surrounding seam details
  • Rework PDC dupligroup structure so they can actually be controlled sanely
  • Add some more larger greebles up front, kind of a lack of secondary shapes up there right now
  • Might change the engine structures a bit? Undecided right now
  • Take another pass at the underside of the nose, see if I can clean that up a bit.
  • Oh yeah, unwrap and texture this sucker.

Whew. I think I’m ready to call the mesh done and move on to unwrapping and painting this beast. A non-exhaustive changelog:

  • Reworked PDC groups for some semblance of rigging, added heatsinks, recoiless vents, holster greebles
  • Added extra detailing to comm mast sleeves
  • Finished cladding and heatsinking around the reactor
  • Added cargo airlock door and…whatever that panel is on the other side that isn’t the cargo airlock. I decided it’s another heatsink
  • Added running lights
  • All sorts of additional greebly bits
  • Added some cladding around the nose section to add some mid-level details (I THINK the show model has this? Several fan-made ones do)
  • Added grapple points/dock locks to underside
  • Fixed some mesh glitches, missing mirror modifiers on greebles, and so on.
  • Removed one of the torpedo bay doors, apparently it’s one 1 door and some greebles per pod, not 2 symmetrical doors like I thought.



Working on the drive textures and FX

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Really nice so far. Just finished book 1 and starting book 2 so nice to see this here. Keep up the great work!

Got a good chunk of the texturing done!



Obviously the airlock hatches and PDCs still need to be painted. Decals are also missing (ex, MCRN logo). Plus the main painted texture has some areas I haven’t gone over and just have the “default” pattern I had at the bottom of the stack. (that’s why you see the black thermal tile shader on the reactor radiators, for example). Comm masts have essentially a placeholder texture, and the drive FX have a lot of work to do too. Onward!

Some more painting. Lots of little refinements still to do, and I wanted to add some dust, marks around the RCS thrusters, etc. But the PDCs and airlocks have some basic mats in place, and all the decals and major points of the livery are in the main painted texture. (thanks to /u/Tzsycho on reddit for letting me use their MCRN logo graphics, saving me the pain of having to try to copy it myself)

So I think that takes care of all the glaringly-missing parts of the textures. Just detailing and polishing from here. Plus I need to finish the drive plume still, and I’m not totally happy with the airlock/metal texutres.


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Finished the project! Rocinante (The Expanse)