I’m starting to have fun creating my 3D science fiction role-playing game illustrations with Blender (exclusively spaceships so far, with droids and other equipment sure to follow). But there are still a few things that are giving me a little bit of trouble. In blender itself I highlight faces on the 3D mesh and this doesn’t seem to influence where changes in the colour of the spaceship happen. I’m reduced to the old trick of rendering four or five different colour images and putting them together in Photoshop, not enormously satisfactory. The spaceship already looks quite nice however, (and symmetrical thanks to mirror modeling) good enough to grace the spaceship section of my sci-fi role-playing game resources.
The biggest problem is coming up with stats for representing these spaceships in games which use the Traveller RPG rules. I’m just finding it difficult to put aside the time for this last but vital step. The Traveller rules have a great mix of complexity and playability with enough options to fire the imagination of any player/spaceship designer. This is great but it does also mean that creating a spaceship to use with this set of RPG rules does take some time.
It’s also traditional to include deckplans with Traveller spaceships, and as this takes even longer than coming up with an image of the exterior of the spaceship, creating a spaceship for Traveller can be the work of several evenings. When you add in the fact that my employer has decided to try and kill me by getting me up at an unhealthy hour every morning and then working me to death, I might have to start cutting corners here and there.
Or maybe not, I do love designing spaceships. Expect this image to appear with my other spaceship designs for Traveller very soon.
One Comment
Have you tried out Truespace?
You can get DirectX 10 models out of it, and it has just about everything 3ds Max does for animations. Oh, it’s free…
http://www.caligari.com/