3D

Fast like a 3d spaceship hyperdriving through a shaft

By The Illustrator  |  2009/10/23 20:01 Posted in 3D, Blender, Illustration, Illustration Friday, Spaceships, Technique  |  Comments (0)

here'is that spaceship sketch

I’ve been experimenting at the interface between 2d black and white sketches, Lights, action, spaceship! and full-colour 3d images again – this time with one of my cute little spaceships. I had had a sketch of a small elegant little spaceship hanging around for a while, here’s that spaceship sketch as if first appeared on Spiralcat, but when I saw that the word on Illustration Friday this week was “fast” I decided to work on it a bit more – and maybe turn it 3d.

darker meener spaceship On one of my many photosafaris I had taken a picture of a corner of a train corridor which I thought would look very nice as a high-tech background to a 3d image. The spaceship sketch cut out and made 3d by laying it on a mesh in Blender was already starting to look more effective – but I wanted it to look even more 3d illustration like.

I spent a few hours messing with the placement and intensity of the lights and sculpting the mesh that was supporting The corridor already look futuristic, doesn't it? the spaceship sketch. I think the image is going in the right direction, but it’s far from complete yet.

I need to add a lot more 3d detail to the corridor that the spaceship is flying through and to the spaceship itself. Then the final touch will be using Photoshop to add some motion blur to the action in the background of the illustration. The whole thing has already come a long way from it’s individual elements though.

Spaceship artist out…

I always like these behind the scenes shots

3d editorial illustration for article on internet piracy and copyright article

By The Illustrator  |  2009/10/20 10:49 Posted in 3D, Blender, Editorial, Illustration, Technique  |  Comments (0)

Lord of the files This is my latest editorial illustration for Dragonbat (my illustrator/Guardian reader rants and sketches blog). I’m writing an article about copyright on the internet, and as usual I wanted a cool illustration to accompany it. The article itself isn’t finished yet – pressures of actual work that brings me real cash money, rather than the dribbles of virtual money these internet shenanigans bring, so I guess I got to prioritize it – but the article is shaping up to be about my half-baked theories on files sharing and other internet copyright issues.

original pirate laptop sketch, coolThis is the original sketch I did, well not quite in it’s original form, it has been scanned into a computer and I used Photoshop to colour it and turn it into a png 24. I wanted the sketch to have a really raw hand-drawn feel because I knew it was going to be part of a 3d illustration produced with the Blender 3d suite and that would add a nice counterpoint of glossy mechanical accuracy.

I think this comes across very nicely in the completed illustration, it looks like the sketches jumped right off the page of the sketch book and started hopping about in an empty studio as a photographer tried to capture the action on a really fast camera setting.

Looks a lot duller before it's rendered doesn't it? This idea of action really fits the feel of the image, which is to do with all those tempting files out there almost downloading themselves onto your computer. I mean even if you watch an episode of your favorite show on YouTube, in theory, your computer has to download the file – and some people even capture these files and keep them.

This one is about half done.

I don’t think this is particularly the type of  file sharing that is always making the news as the industry futilely tries to stop it, but it’s probably just as illegal, and I think this dangerous tempting territory is what is invoked by the illustration. I wonder how many of us can claim that there are no pirated files of any type on their computer?

The illustration was quite quick and easy to make, with the usual png on a mesh plane technique, but I really like the results. Now I’ve just got to finish writing the article.

New 3d Dragonbat illustration for my comment and analysis blog

By The Illustrator  |  2009/10/18 16:35 Posted in 3D, Illustration  |  Comments (0)

2d or 3d, you decide  Dragonbat is one of my many other blogs, just take a look at the blogroll in the sidebar to see how many there are, and from time to time it needs illustrations. It is a comment and analysis blog, mostly I just read the Guardian and give my 2 cents worth, so it needs illustrations that suit that style.

And this is another instance where traditional 3d images made up of shiny meshes with bright lights pointed at them is going to look out of place. So once again I’ve produced some 2d art – this time a simple pencil sketch with colours added in Photoshop – and saved it as a png with an invisible border so it can be imported into my 3d application.

When this is added to a plane in the 3d imaging suite Blender it can then be shaped into a 3d object with the sculpt tools and placed in a 3d environment. In the finished image the 3d environment is a simple white studio made from a single plane which is set to receive shadows.

The newspaper story Dragonbat is reading is related to the current economic crisis and so he has a nice look of distaste and anger on his face. This was best achievedthe original sketch in the original sketch and would be very difficult and time consuming to produce by manipulating the faces of a mesh in 3d. The 3d suite does however create very nice looking shading very quickly and so combining the two techniques seems to be a good solution for the editorial look I want for the illustrations on Dragonbat.

I just love how much the original sketch can be improved with Blender and Photoshop while still keeping its character.

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)

manta_delta_spaceship20 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 nonebula1w.

 

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 starbright_illustrations_new_improved_version 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)

manta_delta_spaceship16  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 manta_delta_spaceship18 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.

3D spaceship, step 2 of the Blender tutorial

By The Illustrator  |  2009/07/29 22:21 Posted in 3D, 3D, Illustration, Spaceships, Tutorials, spaceship  |  Comments (0)

manta_delta_spaceship5 Step two is just to add lots and lots more detail to the 3D Blender spaceship mesh I started in last post’s first installment of this tutorial.

This is one of my favorite stages of the spaceship illustration process using Blender, the free 3D app. As I’m extending faces to form new shapes I try to imagine what use a crew of player characters might put the new feature to when playing the latest installment of a science fiction role-playing game.I might extend a wall to form a radiation or laser shield, I might push an area in to form a nice big air intake for use in atmospheric maneuvers. That’s the fun bit after all when you land on a planet and impress the non player manta_delta_spaceship9characters with your painstakingly designed spaceship.

I thought the spaceship was looking fat so I squished it in the z direction to make it lower and slimmer.

I also turned one of my cubes a nice light emitting green – (the slider to make shapes emit light is hard to find but rewarding when you finally locate it by trial and error like me, or you could of course read the instructions) -To make windows for the 3D spaceship mesh I punched a row of holes in the hull with subdivide and extrude so that you can see my shiny green cube – extended into more of a sausage – shining behind.

I’m also already thinking about the final positioning of the lighting. My spaceship will be flying past, or orbiting, one of the nice shiny planets from the game universe so I’ve put a nice bright light underneath it and a dim light above. The windows I’ve put into the 3D spaceship hull are already looking nice in this configuration.

3D spaceship, stage by stage Blender tutorial

By The Illustrator  |  2009/07/28 19:27 Posted in 3D, 3D, Illustration, Spaceships, Tutorials, spaceship  |  Comments (0)

manta_delta_spaceship I was watching a TV show about the strange creatures that live on reefs and I was inspired to create a nice blue spaceship that has the shape of a manta ray. A workhorse spaceship of the kind that’s so useful in sci fi RPGs. The screen shot to the left is the first stage where I have added a mirror effect to a starting half cube and have started to extend and subdivide faces into a rough impression of the 3D spaceships basic shape. I’ve also added the two major colours of the spaceship while the design is still simple and this is still relatively easy – I only had to select about seven faces of this simple mesh to colour this huge are of manta_delta_spaceship2 the spaceship hull. I’m really enjoying doing this sort thing in Blender, I’m still amazed that this great professional-level 3D modeling software is open source and free.

For the next step I decided to add some basic cubes to the blend and simply move them to the 3D mesh of the spaceship. The spaceship is going to be for an illustration so I don’t think I’ll bother to integrate these details to the mesh. Then I just change the colour of the cube to match the hull of the spaceship mesh and deform it until it manta_delta_spaceship3 looks like a surface detail rather than a strange grey cube sticking out.

Here I’ve flattened the cube and turned it blue so that it looks like a kind of spaceship ramscoop or gas intake of some sort or other.

This is all just the first step of course, pretty soon this spaceship illustration will be done and there will be some generic details to make it easier to use in role-playing games.

3D Cat Model : an idle caramel cat illustration

By The Illustrator  |  2009/07/25 17:28 Posted in 3D, 3D, Cute character, Illustration, illustration  |  Comments (0)

3D_caramel_cat_final_render_image_blog_webCaramel Cat is my latest 3D mesh design, and of course it is available to buy as a t-shirt. I’ve being doing all my renders in the format needed by Red Bubble for their t-shirt designs lately. This is a render of how this cute character illustration is looking right now.

I was inspired to post this latest render by the art challenge site Illustration Friday. Illustration Friday’s word this week is “idle” and that seemed to sum up Caramel Cat’s character nicely.

At the moment it is obvious that Caramel Cat is just a slightly altered version of Dark Cat, the render from a Blender mesh that I included in my last post. I’m probably going to have to differentiate the two models a bit more and try to give them different personalities in the illustrations that I produce from the meshes.

I don’t want to differentiate the two cats two much however because I’m thinking of using them as characters in an occasional web strip. I am also itching to create more spaceships and other nice high-tech gear too, so perhaps I’ll have a series of web strips and illustrated fiction on my site.

3D_caramel_cat_subwindow_screenshot Role-playing games are also a nice excuse to create 3D illustrations of things like monsters, spaceships and robots. I’m going to be concentrating on more cute characters in the future but I won’t be neglecting my sci-fi stuff entirely. It’s just perfect for 3D.

3D is great for cute characters too of course but surprisingly even more work goes into imagining a cute character than a huge planet-crushing mega spaceship, at least for me as a child of the Star Wars generation. The 3D cute characters are hard work but they are enormously rewarding… and fun.

Dark Cat 3D Mesh

By The Illustrator  |  2009/07/18 18:31 Posted in 3D, 3D, Illustration, illustration  |  Comments (0)

dark_cat_screen_shot

I think this 3D model that I am currently working on in Blender (the free 3D software solution) is really going to be something special. In my last post I mentioned how I’m keen on putting some of my 3D images on the front of t-shirts and I think Dark Cat here will be perfect for this.

Here it is in the t-shirt widget.

I still need to come up with a logo though, I have a few ideas for a logo rattling about in my head but nothing concrete yet. I think I’ll have to wait till the end of the week before I have a coherent image or brand all tied together for my art and illustrations. It’s nice to be just getting on with creating 3D images again after all the problems I’ve been having with 3D animation. I’ll crack it eventually, but it sure is taking some time.

I was creating a robot to act as my t-shirt design, but the cat suddenly came out of nowhere and I like him much better. He represents a clean break between the 3D art I do for t-shirts and the 3D images I produce as illustrations for role-playing games.

RPGs do still occupy a lot of my creative time however and I took time to check out another fine site I found thanks to a comment being left here. There are some great pieces of ancient old school RPG box and book cover art here. The sort of thing that makes you shout, “My god, I had that supplement too!”, at least if you are an old nerd like me it does.

A character for every game