spaceship

Spaceships, some of my pictures are on page one of the Google image search for Spaceship pictures

By The Illustrator | 2009/11/21 20:32 Posted in 3D, Blender, Illustration, Review, Software, Spaceships, spaceship | Comments (0)

I was looking for some spaceships as sources of inspiration for my latest 3D spaceship and imagine my surprise when i did a Google search with the words Spaceships and pictures. Two of my images where there on page one.

I’m always a little mistrustful of typing anything into an online textbox. I have often typed 200 word works of genius containing my thoughts on science fiction, spaceships, robots and other indispensable themes so many times, then hit post, only to be told that the page could not be loaded. And of course when you hit back arrow to get to the previous page – it’s empty. NOOOOOOO…

So now I absolutely have to have a blog client on my machine. I’m offline right now and I just saved these first four lines, that’s how paranoid my dodgy computers and other IT technology has made me.

As this is a test post I’m going to keep it short just to see what happens, although I will try to hit the 250 word minimum I once read about in an article on SEO, you might have noticed that an awful lot of my posts are exactly 250 words long.

I have been using the version of Blender that’s now running on this Puppy Linux machine, after heroic efforts to get it to talk to my x windows and graphics card – and my latest spaceship is going well. Unfortunately when I tried to insert a copy of the latest renders of the spaceship interior, and exterior with a nice planet in the background Deepest Sender just asked me for the image location without giving me a browse button to find the file on my local machine.

Oh dear I hope that isn’t’ going to be a deal breaker.

But as I suddenly suspected according to www.surfthemind.com/index.php/2008/09/17/power-blogging-tools-deepest-sender/ it seems impossible to post images from deepest sender. I’ll Just have to give Scribe Fire (another) try instead.

Scribefire’s image handling is basic to say the least, but at least I can upload them from my computer. There switched to Scribefire, and here’s an image, and a rather fine 3D one, of a spaceship.

As you can see this spaceship still needs a lot of work, both inside and out to make the renders look like they are even approaching a nice completed CGI look.

But the 3D meshes are taking shape and it shouldn’t be too long before they are done. Even including delays caused by me playing with my new Bamboo graphics tablet and trying to change the language in Inkscape to English. There’s always something else to fiddle with…

Thinking about designing and making games in Blender 3D

By The Illustrator | 2009/11/16 19:55 Posted in 3D, Animation, Blender, game design, spaceship | Comments (0)

I’ve recently been tempted – prompted by playing lots of FarmVille – to make a game using Blender, so I’ve been reading tutorials like this one –> Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Platformer: Creation and Controls – Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks. It looks hard of course, but not so hard that I’m totally put off from trying.

The next tutorial along makes designing a maze game seem almost easy. After reading it I decided definitely to have a go at creating my own game. It would probably be a space game rather than a maze game though.

And once the game is done I can save the results to an exe file to be used on Windows machines. That’s cool.

But what should my game be about. I think the easiest would be a 3d game with 2d action. I’m thinking of a spaceship having to navigate through an asteroid field.

One of the things I’m not totally over the moon about with modern games is that each level is programmed and set in stone. If there is a bad guy hiding behind a hay bale in level one of the game the first time you play it, then he is going to be there every single time you replay it.

For me, this just makes playing games a tedious exercise in remembering what comes next. I would much prefer to randomize the placement of these obstacles and in the space game I’ve just started to design in my head that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Just reading tutorials, which might seem dry, can be a great source of inspiration for my own art and illustration, and soon game design.

3D Model Spaceship with Interior in Blender 3D

By The Illustrator | 2009/11/14 19:03 Posted in 3D, Blender, Technique, illustration, problems, spaceship | Comments (0)

There is a huge amount of exterior art depicting spaceships, but a relatively limited number of examples of illustrations showing interiors, and I have decided – to even things up a bit – that my latest work in progress, “The Packard”, should have some interiors. Some detailed spaceship deckplans for role-playing games would be cool too, like these nice spaceship deckplans. But first I’m going to concentrate on creating some images of the interior.

I zoomed in on my spaceship mesh and the first thing I decided to do was punch a hole in the wall so you could see the planet outside. I immediately came across a problem however, I wanted big friendly windows with circular edges to the 3D mesh, but how would I make the edges of the mesh a perfect circular curve. I was Googling around thinking that weight painting might be the answer, when I encountered this great idea of simply using a guide and moving the vertexes by hand in 3D Model – Sports Car – Alex Salters Profile. I immediately gave it a try, and it worked like a charm, although it was quite fiddly and time consuming, it got good results.

With the new improved windows, and raising the floor of the spaceship mesh the room started to look a little more like the sort of space where player characters in a science fiction role playing game, or strange little space monsters might like to spend some time. There would be some places to play strange alien card games and listen and dance to alien music only just heard at the edge of human perception.

And it hasn’t deviated too far from the original concept sketch either, at least not yet, and that’s pleasing because it’s often very difficult to get a collection of 3D meshes and textures to produce just the effect you’re looking for.

I’ll be posting the completed Packard spaceship here, both interior and exterior, as soon as it’s done. And probably a few more in-between stages as well.

Gnomad2 for MP3 players for Puppy Linux, for inspiration while I’m thinking up spaceship designs.

By The Illustrator | 2009/11/13 20:28 Posted in 3D, Review, Software, Sound, illustration, spaceship | Comments (0)

I have a Samsung U4 pebble-looking MP3 player that I’m very fond of. The only problem was the heck-awful software that it demanded me to install on my Windows machine before it would let me add any music.

But now that I have a Puppy Linux machine I thought I might be able to find something a little more user friendly and a little less inspired by iTunes. And find something I did, Gnomad2 for MP3 players, which loads in about a billionth of the time EmoDio takes. There was one little glitch when Gnomad2 didn’t add a desktop icon, but I just turned the usual Puppy Linux USB stick purple – like my player – and gave it a black screen also like the one my Samsung U4 player has, and I used that as the logo; and I think it looks quite cute on my desktop.

I’ll be looking for some Star Wars music to put on it, and perhaps that “Ground Control” song by David Bowie, oh yes and that 80s music that David Lynch put on the Dune soundtrack. You bet I’ll be listening to that crazy stuff and reading a science fiction novel on my phone – and the spaceship inspiration for my next piece of 3D sci-fi art will come flowing, at least that’s the plan.

And this week “unbalanced” is the word on Illustration Friday – a cool art challenge site I take part in – and of course my mind turned to spaceships, but a spaceship design that would be somehow unbalanced.

I opened Blender and loaded up the work in progress mesh of my latest spaceship, The Packard, to see if I could unbalance it in some way. And after looking at it for some time I decided to give it really big landing gear. The landing gear on this spaceship is square pods with a strut coming out the bottom which to anyone at all familiar with British sci-fi are reminiscent of those on the Space 1999 Eagle. But with such a diabolical and unbalanced change how would the spaceship look when it got rendered?

Actually I quite like the oversized landing pods… Hmm… Maybe I’ll keep them.

If you want to suggest some music to listen to for spaceship inspiration just leave me a comment.

3D Spaceship Motion Blur, Asteroids and Planets

By The Illustrator | 2009/11/07 19:23 Posted in 3D, Blender, Illustration Friday, Tutorials, illustration, role-playing game, spaceship | Comments (0)

The first thing that jumps to mind when thinking about the word blur – well at least in my science fiction steeped mind – is the motion blur of a spaceship rocketing through the interstellar void. (Blur is this week’s word on Illustration Friday the art challenge website – see the left-hand column for the link).

I decided a blur of a spaceship was a fine idea for my picture for the art challenge site and got going with my preparation. To make my interstellar void I started looking for NASA images of space, such as this NSSDC Photo Gallery: Asteroids where I selected a nice asteroid, or this Gimp fan’s selection of images where I downloaded the big old planet in the background of the illustration.

I wanted the asteroid I downloaded to be in the foreground, so I had to turn it into a png with a transparent background. I used a particle system to make the segment of the planetary ring in the background, loaded up my planet and then set to work on the mesh for my spaceship.

I made two duplicate copies of the 3D spaceship mesh, one to act as the outer hull, and the other to act as bits of metal structure that poke out from it. I had the most fun with the texture for the outer part of the spaceship. I was inspired by the surface of the asteroid, and I wanted to give my spaceship a skin with a similar texture so it could easily hide in an asteroid field. In the illustration the asteroid field is a ring of debris surrounding an unlucky planet after its moon has been blasted to bits.

I was just considering what set of table top RPG rules the spaceship would best fit with, and if there were any new free science fiction rules sets I could root out when one of my posts was commented by an RPG enthusiast with some free RPG links on his site. Up With Role Playing Games. The links are in the left hand bar, I do like a good collection of links.

The only thing left to do was load the render into Photoshop and add some windows, a plume of atomic fire coming out of the engines and of course the motion blur that was the inspiration for this image – thanks to Illustration Friday.

The only problem was, I liked all the detail on the surface of the spaceship so much that I couldn’t bring myself to blur it more than a tiny bit around the edges.

Oh well…

Blender 3D: Adding depth to my spaceship – with Wikibooks

By The Illustrator | 2009/10/24 18:56 Posted in 3D, Blender, Illustration, Technique, spaceship | Comments (0)

As I was trying to turn a 2d sketch of a spaceship into a beautiful 3D image I ran into a couple of problems. One problem was that the mesh I was projecting my 2d image onto was becoming more and more complex as I tried to distort it – to add interesting lighting to the finished render.

So I looked for a way to make the poly count on my 3d shape lower. And I think I found one…

The Decimate modifier will do two things for us. Its primary job is to reduce the poly count of a mesh. A pleasant side-effect for our purposes is that it will begin to rearrange the topology into a more manageable heap of triangles and quads. Keep reducing the Ratio slider below 0.5 until it becomes as coarse as you can stand. You want the lowest polygon base you can have that still maintains enough detail in the limbs and shapes you made…

Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Making Your Creation Smoother – Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks

But as I simplified my 3d shape, and then made it more complex again in a repeating cycle of faffing around with the image my the renders got stranger and stranger. The mesh seemed to disintegrate.

First it twisted like it was going through a space warp, and then it broke apart all together.

I decided to go back to a simpler shape as the base mesh for the spaceship sketch to be projected on. It worked pretty well, but it still looks like a 2d image floating about in a 3d space.

I’m losing faith in this whole process and might go back to sculpting a 3d spaceship, and only using these 2d elements as decoration. I could use this technique to add airlocks, logos and such like to the 3d model that eventually gets produced.

I’m actually quite looking forward to sculpting in Blender again. It’s the most enjoyable part of the whole 3d process.

Features

By The Illustrator | 2009/09/18 17:45 Posted in Editorial, Features, Other Systems, Review, SEO etc, Spaceships, role-playing game, spaceship | Comments (0)

All blogs have permanent bits outside the usual day to day business of posting and this one is no exception. I have decided to call these bits a feature section and divide it up into different themes.

Role-Playing Game Art Gallery

This collection of game related images, illustrations and renders has been made a more permanent feature of the site because this is basically the best of what I do. I really enjoy imagining the outlandish visuals of a role-playing game and trying to capture the results in an illustration.

The Mongoose Traveller Sci-fi RPG

Traveller has of course been one of the leading lights, in all its many incarnations, of table-top sci fi role-playing games since the very beginning. When I found the free to download designer’s pack on the Mongoose website I was so excited that I produced a lot of content to use in Traveller games, all in one burst of creativity. It can all be found in this feature section of the blog.

The D20 System

My musings on this game system, and more specifically, how it can be used in science fiction role-playing environments such as Traveller. I like the fact that the D20 system is popular and simple. Once I have created a spaceship illustration I like being able to generate the information needed to use it in a role-playing game quickly, and D20 is a good solution to this need.

Spaceships Gallery

My favourite subject for both 2D and 3D illustrations is spaceships. This feature section of my site brings some of the images of spaceships produced for various reasons across my site together in one gallery. These are some of the best spaceship illustrations I have produced, but they are by no means the only ones.

New 3D Spaceship Render Gallery Widget

By The Illustrator | 2009/08/06 17:16 Posted in 3D, Illustration, spaceship | Comments (0)

I’m so pleased with the way my gallery of 3D spaceship renders is progressing that I have decided to dedicate a widget to it in my sidebar, right here on the blog.

Spaceships have been a particular love of mine since seeing Star Wars at a very impressionable age, and I don’t think I’m going to fall out of love with them any time soon. My favourite films have always involved spaceships, my favourite games have always involved spaceships, and I much prefer the science fiction novels I read to be hard edged and have a few nice spaceships sprinkled about.

I first started to visualise my own spaceships in earnest when I started playing role-playing games. From the usual fantasy role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, I progressed on to science fiction role-playing games like Traveller the PRG and Space Master, and the first thing I always read in any rules set, even before the background and character generation sections, was the spaceship construction rules. I never have found a truly great set of spaceship construction rules, but I did start drawing spaceships at that time, and I’ve never really stopped.

I’ve gone from drawing spaceships in crayon on scrap paper at my grandma’s house on Sundays, to drawing in a proper sketch book, to scanning my drawings in in Photoshop and enhancing them, to creating vector spaceship images in Photoshop, to creating 3D spaceships in trueSpace and most recently to creating more detailed 3D spaceship meshes and renders in Blender. And these are what you’ll find in my gallery.

here's the new spaceship gallery widget

My 3D spaceship model is looking more powerful

By The Illustrator | 2009/08/04 18:11 Posted in 3D, 3D, Illustration, Spaceships, Tutorials, spaceship | Comments (0)

I’m happy with my stars as the dim far away stars, but I need some bright foreground ones as well. This pdf Blender tutorial for getting good 3D stars was a very interesting read.

It goes into great depth about which buttons to press and which sliders to slide and why, but it’s based on an earlier version of Blender so it’s all a little different now.

I experimented based on what I read and pretty soon was coming up with some scary looking monster nebula effects, not the realistic gas clouds of space, but promising things that made me think I was heading in the right direction. when it’s eventually done I’ll add it to my new 3D only spaceship illustration gallery here at Starbright.

As I was creating the spaceship gallery specially for all my renders and models I’ve also been working on the main site and galleries to give them the same look as this blog, so that if you click between Starbright and the Starbright blog it no longer looks as though you have landed up on a totally different site. I have kept all the classic-style pages online, I hate deleting pages, there’s nothing worse than following a link only to find that the page you want is gone 404.

If I compare the old style with the new I think things are now more elegant and logical – and not just for the new spaceship section – and I have pruned some of the images and illustrations out to raise the overall standard. It’s a work in progress and it’ll be a while before I have rebuilt all the links but I think it already looks good. A good umpteen hours work… phew, I’m beat.

Learning how to do glass and stars in Blender

By The Illustrator | 2009/08/03 19:20 Posted in 3D, 3D, Illustration, Tutorials, spaceship | Comments (0)

I decided to use a royalty-free picture of space as a background to the spaceship I’m designing, but as you can see (left) it turned out to be a little bit, in your face. So I decided I could put a sheet of dark glass in front of it to take the edge off it a bit, kind of like a filter.

The only problem was I had no idea how to do that. After experimenting with the sliders a bit I got nowhere, so I stared looking on the internet for some documentation or a tutorial. The first I found, Doc:Tutorials/Materials/Glass (Solid and Hollow) – BlenderWiki, turned out to be a little complex for what I wanted to do.

But hidden in all the complexity there was an answer, just hit the Ztransparency button and move the alpha slider left and right, couldn’t be simpler, and certainly a lot simpler than I expected. In the image this dark filter I created is covering half the starscape.

Wile I was fiddling with Blender trying to get the starscape to work I found a few sites talking about how to add stars to a 3D image, including this one > http://showcase.netins.net/web/fourcats/index.php?id=33. Wow there is a stars button in blender.

Oh and as I was checking my site stats today – I’m obsessed with them – I noticed that a few people were being referred by Shawn Driscoll’s CG Blog. So I checked it out and found a very nice, and funny read indeed. He is very knowledgeable and skilled with the old 3D, but he’s also into trains. Cool.