Illustration

High? polycount spaceship, Blender

By The Illustrator  |  2010/07/27 21:42 Posted in 3D, Blender, Illustration, spaceship  |  Comments (0)
blender polycount

My spaceship's polycount

I’ve been wondering what the polycount on my spaceship model is for quite some time. Today Morpheus (a member at sci-fi meshes – where I’ve posted a couple of renders of this model as a work in progress) asked my polycount and prompted me to act.

After a bit of Googling I found out that the polycount of my model was listed there all the time at the top right of the main Blender window. The Fa (short for faces) is the polycount. That means my spaceship has the whopping huge polycount of 75181, and it’s only going to go higher as I add more detail.

I’m away from home and can’t remember my Sci-Fi Meshes login so I’ll have to post and answer Morpheus’s question later.

I Googled around a bit to see it there were any other spaceship models out there with such a high count, and it turned out that there are. I just hope this is going to be OK for inclusion in the game.

Another member, Lennier1, mentioned that it looked like there was some influence from Firefly. And this sin’t the first time that my spaceship has been compared to the spaceship from the TV show – and one surprisingly good movie.

I thought I’d better go Googling for images of the Serenity (the spaceship from the show) to see if I had a problem. Here is the Serenity.

Serenity - a spaceship off of TV

Hmmm, I don't see it.

It’s a fair usage low res image from Wikipedia before you call the show’s lawyers.

And here is my spaceship.

Similar looking spaceship

Hmm, maybe

There are, I must admit, some superficial similarities. Both spaceships have a vaguely triangular bridge/cockpit, both have thick mid sections and engines/thrusters out to the side on struts, but that’s about it. I don’t think there’s much of a resemblance at all.

Flattering though the comparison is, the Serenity is nice spaceship model.

Franklin – spaceship for Vega Strike – first AO bake

By The Illustrator  |  2010/05/10 20:42 Posted in 3D, Blender, GIMP, Role-Playing Games, Vega Strike, spaceship  |  Comments (1)
ao bake

What could this be?

It’s a spaceship, of course!

ao bake franklin spaceship

first ao bake - with shadows in other words

I’ve been pushing buttons and sliding sliders for a couple of days now, mostly following this tutorial on creating spaceship units for the Vega Strike space simulation game. The end point of the tutorial is a the creation of a wavefront object which can be added directly into the game. I haven’t quite manged that yet, but I have reached an interesting half-way point – an ambient occlusion bake.

An ambient occlusion bake is a way of making realistic shadows, and then gluing them on your model to make it look more believable, to make it easier to sell as a huge 200 ton spaceship – rather than a few insubstantial pixels.

spaceship with gap in belly

oops, I put a hole in the hull

The ao bake makes the spaceship grey all over with a few grimy dirty bits in the corners where shadows collect. It makes the renders look a whole lot more complex and interesting – but it also makes it easier to spot the inevitable little problems with the model. Usually small uneven or badly folded areas in the mesh make shadows where they shouldn’t be, but in the case of my model I’ve manged to tear a hole in the craft’s underbelly – oops!

engines baked out ok in this render

ok engines

The engines on the other hand turned out pretty good. I was expecting these to be a disaster area of shading artifacts. One of the rings around the engine looks a little darker than perhaps it should, but I think it looks pretty good.

highlights on spaceship nose

shiny highlights

White lights in the Blender virtual studio reflecting in the smoky grey surface  of the ambient occlusion bake make some nice glossy highlights. I suppose I’d better watch out with this effect though – it might look a little to organic for a spaceship intended for a near-future-type space simulation game like Vega Strike.

lots of nice shadows between the greebles of the spaceship's back

mmm.. shadows 'n' greebles .. yum yum

The shadows in the grooves of the complicated bits of the spaceship – the greebles – really make them pop out. The same effect is achieved on plastic models by washing thin black paint over them which collect in the grooves when it dries (nerdy but interesting, maybe).

action shot

I like to think of this as the action shot.

I’m going to need to a little more work on this model of course, not least welding it back together on the underside, but eventually I hope to have it all neatly packaged up as a Wavefront object.

In the mean time here is the blend file.

Using Edge Split in Blender to make my Spaceship model look less melted.

By The Illustrator  |  2010/04/27 12:56 Posted in Illustration  |  Comments (0)

It's like it's coming into focus

I’m using the modifier suggested here in this Blender wiki page to add some definition to my spaceship mesh. It’s a do-over of the Franklin, a model from the Vega Strike open-source space trading and combat game – or at least that’s the intention.

At the moment my mesh is “set smooth” which makes it a little organic looking and, well, smooth. A technological object like a spaceship needs some hard edges, even in games with a far future setting like Vega strike, and there is a simple way to add them. You just add a modifier to the mesh and chose edge split from the list of suggestions.

This particular spaceship mesh already has a mirror modifier applied so the edge split makes two so far. I’m sure there will be more.

I would never have had the idea to use this modifier myself, it was suggested in critique on my models I received at the Vega Strike forums.

When the model is done I’ll be marking the edges that I want sharp manually, but until then I’ve already added the modifier at the default angle of 30 degrees just to make my work in progress renders of this spaceship model sharper, and closer to what the final mesh might look like.

I’m also working on the thrusters, and as I was doing research I discovered that thrusters are a real thing which can be used on real spaceships.

A real life thruster

Not just for games

I grabbed this thumbnail from the royalty-free content at Wikipedia. I particularly like the detail of the second beam of ions being added to the main beam from the top. This seems to be a common feature of real world spaceship engine thrusters. I’ve added a pipe to the top of the main thrusters on this spaceship to suggest this little technological querk.

3D spaceship coming at ya

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/12franklin_render_askew.jpeg

3D render spaceship rear

It's going away

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/12franklin_render_back.jpeg

from the side

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/12franklin_render_side.jpeg

from above

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/12franklin_render_top.jpeg

3D spaceship render

Spaceship from below

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/12franklin_render_under.jpeg

This spaceship is getting gnarly

By The Illustrator  |  2010/04/17 14:48 Posted in 3D, Blender, GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, spaceship  |  Comments (0)

My spaceship illustration is coming on in leaps and bounds, getting more interesting all the time. It has twice as many greebles as the last time we saw it, and of course it was almost completely smooth when I rendered the mesh in Blender.

Another fine spaceship image made with Blender and GIMP

By The Illustrator  |  2010/04/17 01:10 Posted in 3D, Blender, Blender, GIMP, GIMP, Illustration, Role-Playing Games, Tutorials, spaceship  |  Comments (0)

I’ve been modeling spaceships in 3D again, to add to the huge gallery of spaceship art here at Starbright.

It’s not just about expanding the gallery though, playing around with the capabilities of Blender and GIMP is also a lot of fun. I’m working in a style right now that takes advantage of the 3D capabilities of Blender, but then has a lot of work done in GIMP to produce a 3D image that looks like an illustration.

In the illustration above the planet in the foreground has had a lot of GIMP work done on it and looks very painterly, and the planet in the background is straight out of Blender. It has that shiny chrome appearance of a render. It’s going to be the very next element to get a working over as I take this image towards being a completed illustration.

I’m also working on floor plans to go with the spaceship illustration – I know how everyone loves them. I suddenly realised that if I did a screen grab of the top view window in Blender and chose wire mesh as the view option I would have a nice technical drawing of my spaceship without having to do much extra work. So floor plans coming soon, but in the mean time what has been happening with the illustration, well…


Last time we saw the spaceship illustration it looked like this. Just a mesh with the default skin, and not a very complex mesh either, but it is already beginning to suggest the completed spaceship. It’s a simple cube cut in half and mirrored with a few simple transformations; subdivide, extrude and grab.


After just a few more extrude operations the spaceship mesh starts to look much more real. I’ve also changed the colour of the skin that the mesh receives when it is rendered.


Another bump extruded and scaled has been added here to be the cockpit. I’m now very happy with the camera angle and I haven’t fiddled with it for a while, I am still fiddling with the lighting though. I want it a little more dramatic so I added a second light source to brighten up the foreground edges of the spaceship.


More and more detail and complexity being added to the mesh. Even though there is a lot of complexity, it has almost exclusively been achieved by simply extruding and grabbing surfaces I also added a cylinder right at the front of the spaceship.


It’s a tiny detail, but like a cherry on a cake it makes all the difference. I had to join it to the original spaceship mesh to get it to mirror properly. With that little touch I was finished with Blender and it was time to move on to GIMP.


I rendered a nice big jpeg of the finished mesh and dropped it into GIMP. Because I chose a jpeg as the format I had a lot of white background to get rid of, but cutting out a spaceship with hard straight edges is no problem in GIMP. I just held down shift as I used the eraser and GIMP kept my lines nice and straight.


Once I had my spaceship cut out I started to add some details to it. Abstract spaceship details are called greebles in the business and you need to add an awful lot of them before the spaceship starts to look good.

This spaceship has only a light dusting of greebles – an airlock and some windows – it’s going to need a few more.

I also went back to Blender to make a couple of planets – just spheres set smooth with textures chosen from the presets that come with Blender. The foreground planet uses “random noise” and the background planet has the “marble” texture applied.

I’ve made a good start with this image and I have high hopes that it’s going to be my most professional looking spaceship illustration yet, when I eventually get it done.

Links to my Traveller Blender GIMP eBook and Spaceship stuff

By The Illustrator  |  2010/04/08 18:00 Posted in 3D, Blender, Illustration, Role-Playing Games, spaceship  |  Comments (0)

Checking my Google Analytics site stats today I found that the top search words sending people to my site were;-

Number 1, Traveller RPG

Traveller is a role playing game set in the far future, where brave adventurers pit their wits against the evil plans of bug-eyed aliens and fiendishly intelligent robots – or at least that’s the way I play it. It is of course possible to tailor your game campaign world to better reflect whatever your science fiction proclivities happen to be.

Some of the cool Traveller stuff here at Starbright includes;-

Index of Traveller content

A transport spaceship design

A military spaceship design

A map of the Tarazet sector

A bunch of spaceship illustrations

Other RPG art

A robot design for Traveller

An evil robot bad guy

Space Dragon Monster

Lurking Monster

Huge Space Whale Monster

Special spaceship rules for the Tarazet setting

Psionic knight character

Spacewoman NPC for Traveller

Civil spacecraft for Traveller

Luxury cruiser spaceship design

Convoy escort spaceship design

A scoutship design sketch

A spaceship design sketch

Should I use D20 for Traveller?

Another spaceship sketch

Attack spaceship sketch

Giant Robot (Mech) design

A mining planet for Traveller

Another mining planet, a better one

The main planets page

A robot NPC

A killer spaceship design

Kadar spaceship design

Number 2, Spaceship

These are the savage beasts of any science fiction role-playing game. I love spaceships very much, I have ever since watching Star Wars at a formative age. I produce lots of spaceship illustrations using both GIMP (an image manipulation and illustration application) and Blender (an application which I use to produce nice 3D models of spaceships).

Some of the spaceship illustrations on this site include;-

The Starhound, a 3D illustration

The Legendary, a spaceship painting

The Caravelle, a simple 3D illustration

Number 3, Embed VLC

I was having problems getting QuickTime to play a 3D animation I had produced using Blender. I found that VLC Player would play the .mov file even though QuickTime – the application this file type was designed for – would not. I thought a quick fix for my problem would be to embed the VLC Player into my web pages instead of the more usual, but more rubbish, QuickTime. It turned out to be beyond my technical abilities, although I thought I had cracked it at one point. I went back to the drawing board and worked on the .mov file settings that Blender was using until it finally spat out a file that would meet with QuickTime’s approval. Judging by the number of people who come to my site searching for a way to embed VLC Player, I’m not the only one who has had problems with finicky ol’ QuickTime.

Number 4, Illustration GIMP

As I mentioned above I do a lot of my day-to day illustration tasks with GIMP. GIMP is the open source alternative to Photoshop and although it is a bit more primitive and doesn’t seem to be able to use memory as efficiently it does just about everything I need it to and it is free. Let me repeat that, it doesn’t cost any money. I use a plug-in called save for web to document the illustrations as I make them. I end up with a series of snapshots of the process that led to the finished illustration and which form a sort of step-by-step tutorial for anyone crazy enough to want to illustrate in the same way as I do.

Number 5, Bamboo Quick Sketch

The other indispensable piece of kit that I use on just about every illustration is my Graphics Tablet. It’s a cheap little thing called a Wacom Bamboo Pen and I am as happy as can be with it. It is quick and responsive, there is no lag between the stylus, pointer or paint effect and the textured drawing surface is very pleasant to use. All in all it’s no surprise that this search is so high in my analytics results.

Lower than number 5, Sci-Fi eBooks

And way down the list, some people also come to this ite looking for free science fiction eBooks.

I have indeed found a few links to free sci-fi eBooks, and they include;-

Books by Jeffrey A. Carver

Science Fiction Books to download

Star Dragon an eBook

More free science fiction eBook links

A couple more links to eBooks and pdfs

Back to 3D spaceship art with Blender, and GIMP

By The Illustrator  |  2010/04/05 23:31 Posted in 3D, Illustration  |  Comments (0)

I’m missing all the fun I had creating spaceships with Blender and GIMP, and I was in the mood to do another. I already have GIMP on my Ubuntu Karmic Koala system so all I needed was Blender. Clicking install packages from the menu had Blender installed and ready to go in about seven minutes, the quickest Blender install I’ve done yet, yay Ubuntu, but of course it didn’t work straight away.

I had the same problem as last time I installed Blender on this machine, back when I was working with Puppy Linux, namely lots of pixelation and the text missing from all the buttons.

It took about ten minutes of Google research before I found a solution. This forum post solved my pixelation and text missing in Blender buttons problem . And I found another forum post explaining how to make a Blender launcher from this fix here . I made a link to it for my desktop and updated the icon with a png of the Blender logo that I found here .

All in all the install took only about twenty minutes, which is amazing when you think how uncooperative Blender can be if it doesn’t like the look of your graphics card. Although to be fair the problem usually lies with corner cutting in the graphics cards you find in laptops rather than with Blender, which is a very small, quick and well behaved little app.

The install was quick, but it wasn’t perfect, Blender still has some ugly effects on the menus and selecting with the right mouse button is a bit hit and miss.

I fixed it by switching to international fonts in the menu hidden off the top of the screen and turning the font size down to 8.

And as I was playing around getting things just right I thought to myself, why don’t I also download Blender 2.5 Alpha 2 (the latest bleeding edge Blender) unpack it and run the executable, just to see what happens?

It painted my screen black, filled it with icons and then crashed. Apparently I have a rubbish 3D card. I’ll just make do as best I can with the old Blender.

So with Blender working it was time to turn my thoughts to what kind of image I was going to produce. to show off what Blender and GIMP can do.

A wrecked spaceship for some reason came to mind, a long abandoned and overgrown wrecked spaceship. It might take a little while to remember all the shortcuts that Blender uses, but I’ll soon be back in the swing of it. I’ll post results as soon as I have them. I already have a basic 3D trident shaped mesh.

GIMP step by step Moby-Dick tutorial more detail

By The Illustrator  |  2010/04/04 22:05 Posted in GIMP, GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Tutorials  |  Comments (0)

After a quick pause to post my entry for Illustration Friday it’s back to the Moby-Dick painting. I quickly added some spume to the big wave at the centre of the painting and then was about to turn to the whaling boat, when I realised that I don’t really know what a whaling boat looks like.

Thank goodness that all us artists have Google now. To find a nice boat to use as reference I simply had to do a quick Google search. I did the same to remind myself what a whale looks like and to find out what made Moby white. It makes the whole illustration process a lot easier. Here is the page where I found a nice detailed view of the inside of the craft. It’s actually a website for people who build model boats and has a lot more detail in sharper focus than I was able to find anywhere else.


I’m just going to be using it for reference, and I’m pretty comfortable that finding a picture of a boat to use in painting my illustration isn’t cheating. Here I’ve dropped the picture I got from the internet into the GIMP xcf file to make sure I can do it justice.

With the boat in place, and a few alterations made to turn it around to face the danger coming from the background of the illustration, it was time to add some detail to the figures in the boat. At the moment they still look like the match-stick men of an L.S. Lowry painting.

As I’m not entirely sure what the 18 th century adventurers I want to put in the picture might look like It’s back to Google.

I found a great bunch of whalers to use as reference. I found them on a blog post where the blogger was boasting of his friend’s performance in the Alaskan Whaler category of the World Beard and Moustache Competition. Based on this photo, I guess the most important accessory to give my crew is an Aron jumper.


I got distracted after working on Ahab for a while and did some work on the eye of the monster whale. I added detail and got it to pop out of the image a bit more. Then I sketched some white lines on the whale.

I did this to give the impression of sheets of water floating down the monster’s hide as it emerges from the depths. To help sell these white squiggles as sheets of water I used the smudge tool to smear them a bit. It’s quite a nice effect.


The picture is really starting to take shape now. Next I decided that the wave needed a bit of detail too. So, going about adding detail to the image in exactly the same way as the stage before, I just drew some lines on the wave in the same colour as the wave’s brightest point.


Then to sell these little touches as natural I used GIMP’s smudge tool to make them a little more complex and smoky looking. I think it looks quite good and gives a good impression as a boat wake.


So now I’m going to keep on adding more and more detail in exactly the same way, until of course I suddenly decide that this illustration is done. I have a feeling that won’t be for a while yet though, I think this image is good for at least another couple of blog posts.

Computer graphics painting, elephant, done with GIMP

By The Illustrator  |  2010/04/02 17:49 Posted in GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration  |  Comments (0)

It’s Friday, and you should probably know the procedure by now.

Every Friday I visit a site called Illustration Friday which provides a showcase for the work of artists from around the world. Every Friday they post a word which is to be used as inspiration for a piece of illustrative art work.

Once I’ve found out this week’s word I look through some of my old illustrations to see if any of them are related to it or, if none seem to fit the bill, I fire up GIMP and create a new piece of digital art with my graphics tablet.

The word this week was “ dip” and I immediately thought of a picture I had painted in GIMP of an elephant dipping his front feet into a pool as he looked at his picture reflected in the surface.

It’s a very dark, atmospheric illustration with a pronounced use of chiaroscuro.

I’m a big fan of this artistic technique, probably because my earliest influences were the black and white ink illustrations of primitive British science-fiction comic books like 2000ad, Starlord and Tornado. Starlord was my favourite and I was quite upset to see it fail and be gobbled up by the inferior 2000ad. An early run in with the triumph of the lowest common denominator, even within a niche market like sci-fi comic books.

Anyway I hope you like this week’s image for Illustration Friday, if you like it there are more illustrations here at the blog (take a look at the menu to the left), and also on the main illustration gallery and GIMP tutorial site.