Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2009/04/29/my-3d-robot-illustration-for-traveller-is-starting-to-look-good/

After a couple of hours more work on my 3D droid illustration for my science fiction role-playing game setting, for Traveller, I think I’ve made a breakthrough. The image of the robot is starting to look more like a finished illustration, and less like a work in progress.

I have used Photoshop to put a filter over the background to make it less bright, to fit better with the 3D image I created in trueSpace, (tip: rather than laboriously colour the image in 3D in trueSpace I just render three or four different colours and put them together in Photoshop). I’ve also used Photoshop to give this mech glowing eyes, and a gadget on its shoulder with a green light, which could serve any purpose an ingenious and malevolent game master can dream up. trueSpace is free and available from the link in my sidebar to the left.

If you compare this image with the original 3D droid design image I posted here, I think the progress it has made is obvious, the original looks like a puppet or a toy but this image is the kind of evil, powerful and strange droid often encountered in science fiction role-playing games. I had intended this design to be some kind of messenger droid, see the original role-playing game robot design in this post, but it now seems more powerful and dangerous than that.

I now have to decide if it’s finished or not. I could certainly do more work on it, but I’m itching to do another spaceship next.