Hello everybody! 
My first post and thread here on blenderartists, so please be kind if I do something wrong 
As the title suggests, I’m currently working on some Spaceships for a personal project, as such there’s no concept art or such available to work upon. The project is meant to have a rather cartoonish/handpainted style - characters will hopefully come later.
I started using Blender about 8 months ago and worked quite a lot with it since then, but am still just a beginner. My main goals right now are to study UVs, texture bakes and texturing (using PS as well) and the Compositor, but I’m open to feedback regarding almost anything! The focus right now is on one vessel, whilst I get the other up to date. The vessels are meant to be used for artwork and animation, so I want to keep them in the 100k-500k polygon count.
The vessel is meant to be about 140m in length. I already separated the mesh in various part, with the main focus right now in terms of texturing is the top part, as selected here every part will get 8k textures for diffuse, specularity and even more if needed. There are 4 big parts as of now (top, bottom, engines and hangar interior)+smaller ones for hangar doors and in the future, the interior:
Here are some other angles, but for now I stay with the top to get the hang of my workflow:
And here’s a wireframe render from the forward part (not sure if that’s helpful or not^^):
And here’s the texture layout. I already rendered the textures and Bake and merged and altered them in Photoshop:
I’ve already stumbled upon some mistakes caused due to some bad UV:
I’ve also had some artifacts with my AO bake. Are they due to too few samples? (I used 25) any suggestions to avoid them?
And here’s a small video showing my vessel in motion (I create those to get a better feel of the vessel und spot shading mistakes. And they look cool
)
And here an image of other vessels currently in production. Some freighters:
Well, I’m looking forward to hear your thoughts and to work with all of you from now on! This is hopefully my first of many posts here and just the start of my career in Blender
