Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2009/05/05/blender-is-great-for-creating-spaceships-and-easier-to-use-than-expected/

I’ve been playing with Blender the free 3D software for a couple of days now, off and on – mostly off, I had to clear out a shed and there has been a lot of work at my day job – but I think I’m already getting to grips with it. My experience playing with trueSpace (another free 3D package) has been great preparation; the interfaces of the two programs look a little different but are used pretty much the same. Of course my first impulse was to start designing spaceships and creating 3D spaceship illustrations for my resources for science fiction role-playing games like Traveller.

Of course I’ll also be creating mechs, droids, transports and all the other powerful and futuristic technologies that player characters need to get through a session of a science fiction role-playing game intact.

As a bit of fun I have put the spaceship mesh that I’m working on at the moment into the sky above Newcastle, my home town. It was very tempting to add some energy beam weapons and use them to level the city, but there’s no time, I have to get right back to learning how to use Blender to get the best single frame jpeg illustration for my science fiction role-playing game stuff.

I have a little help with the learning curve because there are a bunch of free eBooks out there that teach Blender techniques. The biggest and best is Noob to Pro, the one at Wikibooks,, but when I tried to import the pdf into Mobipocket to read on my mobile phone it got as chewed up as an audio tape in a car stereo. Blender Basics (another free eBook) however, which was written by a teacher, survived the process very well and I have already needed to refer to it to work out how adding textures to the mesh works.

The spaceship mesh is almost ready and it’ll go in the spaceship section of my sci-fi role-playing games resources pages.