Starbright Illustrations (blog)

I’ve been modeling spaceships in 3D again, to add to the huge gallery of spaceship art here at Starbright.

It’s not just about expanding the gallery though, playing around with the capabilities of Blender and GIMP is also a lot of fun. I’m working in a style right now that takes advantage of the 3D capabilities of Blender, but then has a lot of work done in GIMP to produce a 3D image that looks like an illustration.

In the illustration above the planet in the foreground has had a lot of GIMP work done on it and looks very painterly, and the planet in the background is straight out of Blender. It has that shiny chrome appearance of a render. It’s going to be the very next element to get a working over as I take this image towards being a completed illustration.

I’m also working on floor plans to go with the spaceship illustration – I know how everyone loves them. I suddenly realised that if I did a screen grab of the top view window in Blender and chose wire mesh as the view option I would have a nice technical drawing of my spaceship without having to do much extra work. So floor plans coming soon, but in the mean time what has been happening with the illustration, well…

Last time we saw the spaceship illustration it looked like this. Just a mesh with the default skin, and not a very complex mesh either, but it is already beginning to suggest the completed spaceship. It’s a simple cube cut in half and mirrored with a few simple transformations; subdivide, extrude and grab.

After just a few more extrude operations the spaceship mesh starts to look much more real. I’ve also changed the colour of the skin that the mesh receives when it is rendered.

Another bump extruded and scaled has been added here to be the cockpit. I’m now very happy with the camera angle and I haven’t fiddled with it for a while, I am still fiddling with the lighting though. I want it a little more dramatic so I added a second light source to brighten up the foreground edges of the spaceship.

More and more detail and complexity being added to the mesh. Even though there is a lot of complexity, it has almost exclusively been achieved by simply extruding and grabbing surfaces I also added a cylinder right at the front of the spaceship.

It’s a tiny detail, but like a cherry on a cake it makes all the difference. I had to join it to the original spaceship mesh to get it to mirror properly. With that little touch I was finished with Blender and it was time to move on to GIMP.

I rendered a nice big jpeg of the finished mesh and dropped it into GIMP. Because I chose a jpeg as the format I had a lot of white background to get rid of, but cutting out a spaceship with hard straight edges is no problem in GIMP. I just held down shift as I used the eraser and GIMP kept my lines nice and straight.

Once I had my spaceship cut out I started to add some details to it. Abstract spaceship details are called greebles in the business and you need to add an awful lot of them before the spaceship starts to look good.

This spaceship has only a light dusting of greebles – an airlock and some windows – it’s going to need a few more.

I also went back to Blender to make a couple of planets – just spheres set smooth with textures chosen from the presets that come with Blender. The foreground planet uses “random noise” and the background planet has the “marble” texture applied.

I’ve made a good start with this image and I have high hopes that it’s going to be my most professional looking spaceship illustration yet, when I eventually get it done.