First of all, Thanks to the admin for making this great forum.
Now down to business. This is a 1-2 minute battle short I’m making for a friend. As I am not very good at blender yet I need lots of crits.
Here’s my first ship, I plan to spend at least a week on each ship so I can get it right.
Here’s the first:
[edit] old imgs removed[/edit]
Today I’m just working on the overall shape, later i’ll add greeble and textures. Thanks in advance for the critisism
you have to either increase the mesh detail or finish up the ship with a good texture. sofar it looks to simple and in a more early idea stage.
claas
The reason it looks so detailless is that it represents a class of ship, In the fleet there will be 10-15 of each class and 10 or so classes of ship. I havent added detailbecause each ship in the class will be slightly differant and i wanted to find any serious defects in the main shape before adding greeble and textures.
Thanks for the crits, I will work on the detail if there are no complaints at the general shape.
UPDATE:
[edit]oldimgremoved[/edit]
As you can see i am adding more detail now, there is a problem in the front (by the window, that’s just five faces with the window face rotated) I should probably find a better way to make that effect. Any ideas? Also, i still need to add more pipe and greeble. Comments as to the nature of the greeble welcome.
Thanks in advance for replies.
A tool you may want to play with to add detail is the discombobulator script in 2.37a. (it may be in 2.36 but I can’t remember) It is in the the Scripts>Mesh menu section and makes the geeble thing much easier.
Might want to play with the variables a bit first to know what does what, but that is my suggestion.
Also, keep some of the earlier versions to use in BG shots. The lower detail/poly counts will help increase render speeds in the final production.
Yes, Thanks for the tip. Allready my greeble is a seperate object but i’ll save an extra old version quick.
And another update:
Here i’ve used the greeble script on some select faces as you can see, i will, however not use it on the first section of the ship. with the way it’s set up it would interfere with the pipes and wouldn’t look good. besides, it seems to be mainly good for the top surfaces, the sides should have long deck-like extrudes and its not set up for that. Thanks again though.
I’ll have to manually to greeble on the frontmost mart, with skewed quads like that the greeble comes out really messy.
Hey guys, Here’s my next update, i tried greebling the sides with the d. script but with bad results so i gave that up…
Also, I added solar panels
And a pic without…
OK, ive been working with textures and did a little more greeble. please tell me which of the following you prefer:
I think I shall have to make a new solar panel texture, somehow the blue just doesn’t fit with the other colors on the second render.
BTW the procedurals are just there to have the feel of dirt, i’ll do them better or uvmap some dirt and rust on later.
Thx.
If those are solar panel then they’ll need some supports running down the sides to hold those guns.
Those red windows look terrible. You need to build some kind of frames around and not have them that shade of red.
Coming along
Alex
are this big cannons or other tubes?
i cannot read them. you need to add something so people know what it is!
they distract me the most! otherwise the increased nicely the detail level but try to stay within a theme / style!
Ok, next update. I’ve tried several differant window colors, these are the best so far, if you have an idea for a color to try please tell me. i also added some supports for the solar panel.
Please tell me which you prefer unless you have other ideas or like red better… perhaps a differant shade of red?
anyhow, Thanks alot for the comments.
I will post more in 30 min to an hour from now. (now is 3:30)
[edit] i made a sensor drone, here’s a render with some scattered around the ship…
BTW, i think i prefer the blue windows.
blue windows are ok
one thing that strike me like a thunderbolt when I first look at your design is this,
the part at the back that curves on each side of hull (in front view they looks like this: < > )
The front edge of those part are like paper thin and serve no purpose in space. It just looks wrong. I,d try putting some width there, it would really help the design. Because it’s the only part on the ship that looks odd.
Also just on the middle hull at the back, under those curved “wings”. There is a “white spect highlight”. That area is also very thin hull wise…and would be totally useless for the design…no piece of equipment could fit inside that area…and the plating would not be very strong. The angle of your face in this area also make triangles to show up, you should try getting better face angles (not “twist” the face on 2 different axis at once).
Otherwise, it looks better than when yo ustarted, which is good!
ok, i fixed some of the problems.
I kind of cheated, for the quad in the front that looked like two tris i made tris then set smooth. oh well, i can change back if problems arise, also, i made the ‘wings’ thicker at the front and really fixed the other misshapen quad. also, i messed with the materials a bit.
Thanks for the comments.
BTW, Ecks, you said
Also just on the middle hull at the back, under those curved “wings”. There is a “white spect highlight”. That area is also very thin hull wise…and would be totally useless for the design…no piece of equipment could fit inside that area…and the plating would not be very strong. The angle of your face in this area also make triangles to show up, you should try getting better face angles (not “twist” the face on 2 different axis at once).
I don’t quite understand all of that, could you draw on one of my renders to show me where these problems are exactly?
Does anyone know where i can get some good, free space hdri imgs for this?
looking good so far jessethemid! can’t wait to see the short.
hmm, space hdri? imo it would be kind of moot to try to use a space hdri. usually objects in space would be illuminated mostly by the closest light source to them, right? probably a few spots would make more sense, with a slight touch of GI to assist a bit…
are there any large celestial objects nearby in your scene? planets? stars? if so, i would just use those as your light sources…
OK, update time
thx for telling me pld. 
I wasn’t thinking well.
Also, if nobody has any more ideas/ complaints i think this model’s done 
Now i’ll get to work on the background objects… there will be a sun, a planet, and three moons.
(two of the moons collide halfway through the animation %| fun fun fun)
-jesse
anything i can do to help!
out of curiosity, why so many drones? seems like alot of drones, or seems like alot of drones clumped together…
the drones are just clumped together. the idea is that instead of hitech sensors like on most sifi space battles you have a couple hundred drones using optics and radar to make a 3d model of the entire battle for the commanders. They just havn’t dispersed yet.
BTW. does anyone know any good tutorials on how to make explosions? i can’t find any.
also, today i started messing around with the planet, i’m just using img textures so far. i will probably change that later though.
as you can see i have the first moon completed also.
time for ship #2. if anyone has any designs/concepts they think i should use in the short i would welcome ideas, otherwise i’ll just sketch out some ideas.
You should check out this tutorial here:
http://www.enricovalenza.com/realplan.html
It really improved the planet I was working on. Good luck!
ok, i started on the next ship. this one is a 2 man shuttle, i will add weapons and make it a 2 man fighter later. sorry for not writing more but i’m in a hurry. i just got back from a trip.
