Author Archives: The Illustrator

I’m the talented illustrator behind this illustration blog. It is the blog on my Starbright Illustration site and it’s a lot of fun – oh and of course there is a lot of illustration.

I’m a UK citizen (although non-resident) and I’m living in Austria right now – my German is getting better and better. I make my living mostly through teaching, translation and, of course, my online illustration related stuff.

Ogg Theora vid of 3D spaceship model development

sorry your browser eg Explorer Safari does not support the video tag but Firefox does

My enthusiasm for all things open source and free is now expanding to include video codecs. Whenever I have generated a video of my 3D work in the past I have saved it as a mov file to be played by [...]

Quick and dirty partial render with Blender 2.5

After a little bit of searching I’ve found a way to dramatically speed up my test renders. I’ve been greebling the surface of my spaceship lately, and each greeble is only a tiny part of the hull, some bigger (engine hatches, thrusters) some smaller (antenna, door handles), but to take a look at each new [...]

Which Creative Commons licence for my spaceship art?

Today I was approached about my spaceship being used in a movie. It’s great that my spaceship model is getting noticed, but with people beginning to show an interest in actually using this 3D spaceship model and the renders generated from it, it looks like I’m going to have to give some serious thought to [...]

Noob to Pro navigation tip to keep 3D window centred

I have been using Blender off and on for a couple of years now and one thing always bugged me. When I rotate a model this way and that in the 3D editing window, to get a better view when I’m fixing stuff, (right now I’m replacing all my triangles with quads for [...]

Be Vewy Qwiet, I’m hunting tris, again

As usual the latest renders and the blend file for this spaceship is at the dedicated game spaceship model project page.
I’m aiming for a completely triangle free model. I’ve been reading my offline ebook of theBlender documentation wiki and I discovered that it is possible to select all the triangles on your model from the [...]

Franklin deicated page, now with renders and a blend file

I’ve spent some time working on the project page for my latest spaceship work in progress. Before my little makeover it included just two images. It had an image of the latest render on the project and a render of the model as it originally very low poly appeared in the game.
Now the page has [...]

Blender Wiki as eBook in Kindle format

I found the Blender Wiki to read in .mobi format (on a Kindle for example) on this cool archive site
I’ve been looking for a good meaty book about Blender to read offline in Kindle format (I don’t actually have a Kindle, but I do have Mobipocket on my dear old Windows smart phone, and that [...]

Andolians – a faction for the Vega Strike spaceship game

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 [...]

I’ll have a P please Blender

Today I was making a cute little spaceperson for the inside of my spaceship. I wanted to make sure that they were the same size as the pilot, who is already attached to the mesh. So I duplicated him, and then realised that I would have to split him away from the spaceship mesh to [...]

Magic Hour look for Spaceship mesh, in Blender 2.5

I’ve been messing about with the lighting in my Blender spaceship scene. I’ve now got a nice purple light coming in at the model horizontally, as though it is just climbing over a planet’s horizon, someplace in the outer reaches of the Vega Strike game universe. The magic hour look. Or at least that’s the [...]