Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2009/07/29/3d-spaceship-step-2-of-the-blender-tutorial/

Step two is just to add lots and lots more detail to the 3D Blender spaceship mesh I started in last post’s first installment of this tutorial.

This is one of my favorite stages of the spaceship illustration process using Blender, the free 3D app. As I’m extending faces to form new shapes I try to imagine what use a crew of player characters might put the new feature to when playing the latest installment of a science fiction role-playing game.I might extend a wall to form a radiation or laser shield, I might push an area in to form a nice big air intake for use in atmospheric maneuvers. That’s the fun bit after all when you land on a planet and impress the non player characters with your painstakingly designed spaceship.

I thought the spaceship was looking fat so I squished it in the z direction to make it lower and slimmer.

I also turned one of my cubes a nice light emitting green – (the slider to make shapes emit light is hard to find but rewarding when you finally locate it by trial and error like me, or you could of course read the instructions) -To make windows for the 3D spaceship mesh I punched a row of holes in the hull with subdivide and extrude so that you can see my shiny green cube – extended into more of a sausage – shining behind.

I’m also already thinking about the final positioning of the lighting. My spaceship will be flying past, or orbiting, one of the nice shiny planets from the game universe so I’ve put a nice bright light underneath it and a dim light above. The windows I’ve put into the 3D spaceship hull are already looking nice in this configuration.