Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2010/08/08/andolians-a-faction-for-the-vega-strike-spaceship-game/

a sprinkling of stars

The spaceship I’m building for Vega Strike* (read all about the spacesihp construction process here) is intended to be an Andolian design. Andolians, “…in their distinctive, black environment suits..” are most terrified of computer viruses. Quote from this page of the game Wiki. And there is another great page of Andolian stuff here, an art guide to the game faction. They wear these environment suits to keep the electronics integrated within them secure.

It’s an interesting concept, like the technological implant using people in the books by Alastair Reynolds. Some of his characters are forced to spend their time in a sealed hovering box, for fear of infection.(He has a website on Tripod, and his books are really good, he doesn’t have any of his stuff to download on his site but there is stuff available, six great short stories here at freesfonline)

And as you can see in the art guide the Andolians seem to take this aesthetic of security and protection as a running theme through their culture. Their spaceships and buildings all have thick slab of armour on, armour against the usual things that can damage a building or spaceship, but I’m sure it also has the ability to protect IT and implants from sabotage and infiltration.

As I’m sculpting the spaceship – the basic shape is now pretty much fixed, so this is a process of adding detail and moving individual vertexes – I’m trying to make the armour look thicker and the passengers more well protected. I think the spaceship is looking more and more Andolian all the time.

My spaceship now has a sleek brushed aluminium look. It’s not a texture, just the material with the softness turned way down and reflectiveness added at a value below 1 to make the reflections blurry.

*What! You haven’t finished that yet? I hear you cry. Well the problem is that I’ve learned so much about manipulating meshes since I started that when I go back to a section of the spaceship to add greebles it’s awfully tempting to do the bad mesh over. In fact that’s what I’m mostly doing, but once this process is complete it should be read for unwrapping and textures.