Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2009/11/07/3d-spaceship-motion-blur-asteroids-and-planets/

The first thing that jumps to mind when thinking about the word blur – well at least in my science fiction steeped mind – is the motion blur of a spaceship rocketing through the interstellar void. (Blur is this week’s word on Illustration Friday the art challenge website – see the left-hand column for the link).

I decided a blur of a spaceship was a fine idea for my picture for the art challenge site and got going with my preparation. To make my interstellar void I started looking for NASA images of space, such as this NSSDC Photo Gallery: Asteroids where I selected a nice asteroid, or this Gimp fan’s selection of images where I downloaded the big old planet in the background of the illustration.

I wanted the asteroid I downloaded to be in the foreground, so I had to turn it into a png with a transparent background. I used a particle system to make the segment of the planetary ring in the background, loaded up my planet and then set to work on the mesh for my spaceship.

I made two duplicate copies of the 3D spaceship mesh, one to act as the outer hull, and the other to act as bits of metal structure that poke out from it. I had the most fun with the texture for the outer part of the spaceship. I was inspired by the surface of the asteroid, and I wanted to give my spaceship a skin with a similar texture so it could easily hide in an asteroid field. In the illustration the asteroid field is a ring of debris surrounding an unlucky planet after its moon has been blasted to bits.

I was just considering what set of table top RPG rules the spaceship would best fit with, and if there were any new free science fiction rules sets I could root out when one of my posts was commented by an RPG  enthusiast with some free RPG links on his site. Up With Role Playing Games. The links are in the left hand bar, I do like a good collection of links.

The only thing left to do was load the render into Photoshop and add some windows, a plume of atomic fire coming out of the engines and of course the motion blur that was the inspiration for this image – thanks to Illustration Friday.

The only problem was, I liked all the detail on the surface of the spaceship so much that I couldn’t bring myself to blur it more than a tiny bit around the edges.

Oh well…