Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2009/11/12/designing-another-spaceship-with-mesh-and-textures-orbiting-a-planet/

Now that I have my second copy of Blender installed on my Puppy Linux laptop I’ve actually stopped faffing around with disk partition and installing codecs and started modeling again – not Kate Moss modeling, 3D computer generated art modeling. And it seems I’m not the only one, I recently found this this cool thread started by a stats obsessed 3D spaceship designer. Which includes this post from iliketosayblah

i love the stats…i wish all ships had stats…

… and I couldn’t agree more.

This was such an interesting thread to read; it had an argument about physics, it had advice on how to design spaceships, it had a crazy amount of stats, and I learned some new vocabulary. The comments on the meshes that the Blender artist posted included one that complimented the greebles on the surface of the spaceship.

Now apparently, according to Wikipedia,

A greeble or nurnie is a small piece of detailing added to break up the surface of an object to add visual interest to a surface or object, particularly in movie special effects.

Now I didn’t know that, but you can bet I’ll be using these magnificent words a lot more from now on.

I’m going to call the spaceship in this 3D image “The Packard” after the Packard Bell laptop which I did most of the design work on the mesh and basics on. I also produced the jpeg for the texture on the same plucky old laptop in Gimp, which was a pleasure to work with and seemed to be every bit as powerful as Photoshop, even though it opens in a fraction of the time.

There is a lot more work to come on this spaceship. It needs some smoother hull plates mixed in with the basic structure of this mesh, but not too many, because I want it to retain a low-tech feel. It needs a lot more greebleing in the area connecting the bridge of the spaceship to the main body, that’s still looking to thin and aerodynamic, like an airplane, and that’s not what we want at all in this workhorse of the planetary spaceways. And I might even look for another free science fiction table top role-playing game so that I can produce some simple stats to go with this powerful but workaday spaceship.