There have already been a lot of changes made to this blend, which now has quite a few lamps, meshes and even a bit of text scattered about, but there is still a long way to go. The latest big change is that the scene has now got a planet in it.
And a planet should be simple compared to a spaceship you would think, but there was a problem. I plopped a nice spherical mesh into my blend without any great problems, and I easily changed it’s colours to make it look like a methane gas giant, but it looked more like the nose of a zeppelin. It looked like a plastic bag wrapped around a wire frame.
Whatever I tried I couldn’t get it to go smooth. But as always the internet came to my rescue and I found this Blender: tutorial: EnvMaps which told me to hit f9 and click the set smooth option.
Pow problem solved. With a bit of subsurface scattering this ominous gas giant even looks like it’s made of clouds.
The surface texture of the spaceship mesh itself however looks more like a circuit board than the complex but smooth spaceship hull I was hoping for. I quickly knocked this jpg image up in Photoshop to use as the surface texture and it turns out it looks a little busy. So I guess it’s back to Photoshop to simplify it a little and then I’ll try it again in Blender. I’m enjoying posting all these different versions of this spaceship illustration as it evolves from mesh to completed image, it’s already come quite a long way.
I’m not going into a great deal of detail about every single button that I pushed to create these images, but I hope they are a useful tutorial nonetheless, more of an example of my illogical but creative workflow.
- » Sci-Fi RPG resources site gets a make over
» GIMP Digital Spaceship Painting Tutorial part 3- » A spaceship called The Artful Dodger
- » Back in trueSpace making the next 3D spaceship science fiction role-playing game illustration
» Getting the spaceship for the Vega Strike game crowd just the way they want it
