The plan is to create a scene with a shuttle prepped and waiting to launch, not like a space shuttle we would think of today, but a passenger shuttle. I’m drawing some inspiration for the scene from TV shows I watched when I was younger. The shuttle itself takes influences from modern passenger aircraft. Anyway, progress on the shuttle so far:
Cool, I like the engine the best!
Okay, so I got a chance to do a little more work today, not as much as I would have liked, but tomorrow looks promising so that’s okay. I added in the passenger cabin and cockpit windows, no renders there, sorry. I also worked some more on the engines, it’s a little slow going at the moment since I am still deciding how they should look/work. For now I know that the smaller nozzles will be attached to fuel tanks that are based on liquid fuel rockets we use today. I’m thinking those are extra booster style engine that are used when launching the shuttle. The larger nozzles will be attached to some sort of more futuristic engine that serves as the main propulsion system.
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very nice rocket engines but the nose looks too much like a normal aeroplane.
I wish I had your knowledge how to use Ambient occlusion… I really like that look but it is impossible for me to archieve such a result as your render. Good luck in competition!
very nice rocket engines but the nose looks too much like a normal aeroplane.
That is the idea. In particular I am drawing some inspiration for the design from the passenger shuttles found in basically any Mobile Suit Gundam anime. I’m sure several other scifi futuristic type of shows have used similar designs, that was just the one that popped into my head.
I wish I had your knowledge how to use Ambient occlusion… I really like that look but it is impossible for me to archieve such a result as your render. Good luck in competition!
Thanks! Test renders like those are super easy. For these I as using Cycles. I added a default material to all the objects, I might have tweaked the color a bit. In the world settings I changed the color in the surface section to be a lighter gray, then just checked the ambient occlusion box.
Here is the result (the left side of the image is without the AO box checked, the right side is with the AO box checked).
I quite literally changed almost no settings here, the objects that are a tad darker have a different material. Also as a note there are no lights in this scene, just turn up that world color to something lighter. These are rendered at 100 passes.
Those engines are coming along really nice 
Yeah, I agree with Wega.
Okay, the engines are basically done at this point, they might need some more modeling (I’m still deciding on that) and materials. It really is time to move on to doing some detail on the rest of the shuttle, I got way to distracted with these. Anyway, some more renders and a 3D preview.
Okay so the nose gear is done too. Here is a quick render and another preview.
Can’t wait to see it textured
Okay, so it has been a bit, but I have been working. The materials are done, for now at least. I’m sure I’ll tweak them more. The textures are like 90% done. I’ve also got the final shot and story solidified. At this point the lighting needs some love and I need a background plate. I would love to post a render, but I can’t seem to get a render to finish on this “workstation” that I am currently on. I’ll need to get one done later on another PC.
The specs on my workstation here, I use the term workstation loosely, are as follows:
Dual Core Intel Xeon @ 2.53GHz
3GB RAM
nVidia Quadro FX 380 (256MB GDDR2)
Anyway, so I’ve not been able to get a cycles render to ever happen on this GPU, not surprising really. In general I’ve found this configuration to be very limiting. If I use progressive refine I can get a render on the CPU to happen. However a render using progressive refine seems to stay really noisy and needs a ton of samples, push render times to unacceptable lengths. If I try to render tiles, at 16 x 16 as per Andrew Price’s recombination over at BlenderGuru, Blender crashes partway through building the BVH.
Now, I’ve just assumed this system can’t handles the scene (I have no problems on my other system). I guess I’m just wondering if that assumption is correct.
Stupid question: How are we going to see the engines if they’re inside the shuttle?
Honestly, you won’t. I got a little carried away modeling them, it started out as just a little bit to fill the space and then I just kept going. I’m figuring I’ll use the basic models for something else down the road. I had it modeled so there was no sense deleting completed work. Same goes for the landing gear. My initial idea would have used it, then some time after I had basically finished it all the idea had morphed into something that told a more compelling story, or at least I hope so.
