I was following this on Twitter - pretty fascinating. The way main gear fold’s is pretty amazing. Robert’s Space Industries should hire you : )
Nice works, looks really good. How did you texture the spaceship? UV mapping? Im kind of working on something similar right now and was wondering if you can help with some links to tutorials to get that finished look if possible.
That is really amazing. The mechanics of it are really precise. Great work.
Sweeeet! Gorgeous work.
Love the design, and the attention to texturing. Great work!
Very weird they stopped working for me as well, just now. I’ve put them on imgur for now: https://imgur.com/a/wlCpY and will embed these instead
Thanks Pete!
Praise from the master, thanks man 
Honored, thanks!! They are doing some groundbreaking work. Been watching ATV(Around the Verse) a lot lately too, great insights for artists.
Thanks Brent! Cycles + Compositing inside Blender is just a dream.
Much appreciated Pascal, thanks!
Thanks man, happy to hear that!
Thanks for your interest, much appreciated. Let me try and take you through the process. Before I do, let me just say that the project took way longer than initially planed. I set out to do it in 2 months, + maybe a week or two max. All in all it ended up taking 6 months of work. Ridiculous I know. A good chunk of that was spend on pipeline work aka scripting to automate and simplify various tasks. Without that, I was probably doing 3-4 months on pure art/design/3D/texturing. However without the scripting those 3-4 months would have been longer and filled with monotonous and boring work.
The main reasons it took so long are:
- I wanted a complex landing gear rig. this was to be a main feature of the asset. But I knew next to nothing about rigging, and so I did a lot of tests and experiments to figure it all out and break things down.
- I did a very detailed highpoly model, including various interior parts you only see when you take apart the main sections. I argued with myself, that this way texturing will be sped up, as I can bake down all the paneling and details to normal maps and can bake out id maps for quick selection in Painter. Texturing was a relative breeze, mostly just assigning different materials I had from the previous asset(The Probe). But in the end, the highpoly was just so much of a time sink.
- The lowpoly is quite detailed as well, arguable its more of a ‘medium-poly’, coming in at 66k tris. Despite some scripts I did to ease the process, creating a lowpoly from detailed high poly hard surface asset is a painful experience. I’ve experimented with retopoflow before on the probe, but found it not to be very usefull for hard surface work.
- I’ve made some mistakes when transferring the rig of the original high poly to the lowpoly. these were close to show stoppers, luckily I could fix them.
4.1. Getting the rigged lowpoly to export and bake in substance was tricky as a result of these mistakes, again almost a show stopper.
4.2. Getting the animations out of blender was easy. I’ve found the fbx export extremely solid and reliable. Getting the animations to work in unity was painful. Unity is garbage, esp in UI terms, just a mess. Huge potential for automation - untapped.
Now to the process.
Going into this I knew what I wanted: A classic starfighter archetype, looong formula 1 style nose, cockpit in the back, wings in the back I’ve always found starfighters in scifi to be quite unrealistic in terms of scale and proportions, esp in regards to cockpit size vs the rest of the ship. i’ve pushed in the opposite direction taking in reference form modern day fighter planes. Just look at how big fighter planes are, they are not cars, they are bus sized. around 20m in length, some more some less. So, I’ve made the starfighter a bit bigger than that, being a spaceship and all.
I’ve started with some kitbash of ancient lowpoly pieces i have laying around. Knowing what I wanted in terms of proportion, this was pretty easy.
To make this more interesting and avoid me picking my favourite parts repeatedly, i’ve created the simple_kitbasher.py script that randomly picks parts from a folder, imports them und puts you into scale mode. so you just hit a button and a model part is at your finger tip, ready to be scaled, rotated and positioned or deleted. I hope to release this soon, as part of the free MACHIN3tools. It’s a fun little tool and gives you a head start as opposed to blocking out with simple purpose made geometry. As my kitbash parts suck, I had to completely remake everything later when I did the actual modeling of course.
I don’t like the 3 image limitation here on BA, so see https://imgur.com/a/AU3H6 for images.
Also I’ve posted many short clips of the progress on twitter, you just got to scroll back to September 15, where it started: https://twitter.com/machin3io/media
Once I was ok with the kitbash, I’ve started sketching on top of it in Krita. I’ve played around with various things and it’s here where the detachable cockpit idea was born. It forces you to plan and think things through. Initially the probe socket should go to the front(on top) and somewhere below. But I couldn’t make it work and so ended up with just the one socket at the bottom.
Some of the detail in sketches translated into the 3d model, some didn’t.
So based on the sketches, I’ve put the major forms in place and did some surface transitions. You want to do that before you cut things up. From here on, started my love afair with the grease pencil. How cool is it to be able to draw in 3d space, or in my case on surfaces, without any UVs? It’s magical and has become an indispossable tool in my design workflow. Just draw lines on the model to plan your detailing and paneling! Check out this tweet for example: https://twitter.com/machin3io/status/804472796927721472
Once happy, cut it in. I’m using HardOps btw, which simplifies things a lot (but it’s still a lot of work with a model like this).
I kept doing this till I was through with the entire model. Switching between modeling and rigging the modeled parts.
As you can see with the purple images, I’ve pushed the detailed a lot in some areas.
I’ve then done the lowpoly, by basically creating a new mesh on top of the high poly one. I think that alone took 3-4 weeks.
UV’s are pretty straight forward, and I tend to enjoy this process somewhat, it’s simple stuff, put on a movie and enjoy not having tho think for a while
I have a simle_uv.py script that does three or four things with one button press and I’m gonna put that out as well. It’s just select polygons you want to unwrap as one chunk, press button, select next polygons, press button, etc.
Automatic packing with adetailed model like this get’s you quite far and is generally pretty good, with only 10-20% needing fixing and optimization to squeeze some precious texture space out of it. This is true specially if you are texturing in a 3d painting tool, where you don’t have to group your uv parts to keep on top of things.
I’m baking using the substance batch tools und a substance exporter I’ve built. What it allows me to do is press a button in blender, which then exports the prepared model parts as lowpoly/highpoly pairs and according to the layer they are on, assigns them to texturesets accordingly.
Once all is exported, I have script that fires up the batchtools and bakes all maps I need, for all texturesets in one go. So, my baking these days is 2 button presses, one for export and one for baking. Don’t even have to upen Painter or Designer for it.
The last bunch of images is then the low/medim poly in Painter, 2 of the 4 paintjobs I did, about 80% done each.
Hope that was useful to you. Things are pretty busy for me right now, having just released DECALmachine but I’ll release many of my scripts I did on the Starfighter for free. Just need to sort through them and polish them up a bit to be of use to others.
Feel free to scroll through my twitter, esp the media stuff. I only post about my work, so there’s no garbage in between.
Hey thanks GCastro! Check out my reply to Yanclos, let me know if you have any unanswered questions!
Whoops. hit the 10000 character limit there
Thanks, really really appreciated
Thanks fox! Glad you like it!
Thanks Pawel, appreciate you commenting! It’s based on a standard gear fold, it’s just this essentially: https://static.rcgroups.net/forums/attachments/2/1/3/7/5/a319212-67-bealeg.gif Simple, but pretty clever and would recommend everyone to rig this and play around. Just bones and Ik.
Maybe they should
I’ts 5 texturesets, each 2k in resuluion. Yes, UV mapped. I don’t know any tutorials sorry. I just look up feature spefific things when I don’t know something.
Thanks, see my previous reply to PLyczkowski.The mechanics are pretty simple, if you break it down.
Thanks man!
Thanks, all in all this was a very rewarding project, but I’m glad it’s done (for now)
Finally, thanks to whoever featured this in the top bar. Hugely appreciated!
Wow… How long did that take to render?
Very reasonable times IMO. I’ve rendered at 256 samples at 4k on a laptop. 15-30 minutes per seed AFAIR. I’ve done two renders per image, with different seeds. I’m then comping those to get rid of fireflies. I’ve automated this with a script, or rather 2, one for rendering and another for comping.
Lately I’ve started using render street to lessen the load on my laptop, and I’m very happy with. It’s a peace of mind, to just push the settings and samples without worrying, dof and all, send a render off and be free to do something else and not have the computer more or less frozen.
Amazing design!
I like the landing gears concept though it will be hard to move in the hangar because they are not wheels.
Amazing work! And truly incredible on how well you’ve rigged it! I have a quick question though, how’d you get such realistic looking textures? I’ve needed help with this problem for a long time now.
well done Machin3, amazing skills
I love the attention to detail. It very much seems like homage to old world war fighter jets! (If this term is incorrect, I apologize; I’m not especially versed in military aircraft, despite my sister’s best efforts x’DD) It’s like that style was upgraded to space age. All it would need is a silhouette of a foxy lady on the side. (Or underside of the wings, because of how it lands…?) My favorite was the orange-styled one. I look forward to seeing more of your work!
Wow, thanks for the long and detailed reply!
It was really really useful, i’m taking down notes.
I plan on making a few videos based on a book series I wrote.
And the first one has a large starcraft that splits in half and shows it’s inner workings as it flies through space.
A lot of small details, I don’t even know where to start. Since I wrote the world the ship comes from, then every detail and curve on the ship has to have a purpose. From weapons to plumbing.
Another video is a spacecraft very much like yours, that flies from over a city, to the atmosphere and eventually breaks through space.
It’ll have a lot of small mechanical movements, and it’s wings are going to swipe back as it leaves the atmosphere.
I’ll get your decal add on once I storyboard and lay out a detail production plan for my project.
Thanks for all the info!
incredible work !
You must have an engineering background or something. I’m drooling at the sight of them landing-legs. But don’t mind me, I’ve always been a leg man.
Amazing work!!