StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Well, as a B-Movie lover and life-long MST3K fan I have watched a lot of movies with flying saucers in them. Last night it was the classic "Earth v Flying Saucers" and I was moved to spend an hour with Lightwave to make the iconic saucers from the film.



I then thought, why stop there? So i made a little animation to show it taking off...

Saucer Takeoff, 3.8Mb DivX

Since saucers are so damned cute and easy to model I thought, lets kick the arse right out of this and model another classic sci-fi saucer, hence the following...

Saucer Opens, 680kb DivX

I think I might make a few more classic movie saucers and post them as a pack on my website when I revamp it in the coming days. There's something so damned iconic about these things that just makes me smile when I see them. The old B-Movie monsters and plots were so much fun to watch. So much more interesting than all the damn zombie movies that people want to make right now. Boring slow dead people milling about slowly does not an exciting movie make! Anyway, i think next it will maybe have to be Cruiser C57-D or perhaps Exedors saucer from 'This Island Earth'. Or maybe the Venusian saucers, or the Plieadean saucers from Billy Meiers fevered imagination, or maybe the Sports model from Area 51, or maybe...

How did you do the little sunken bits on the lower half of the saucer? Boolean operands?

Sort of, yes. The spinning sections were made seperately and I then stencilled in the grooves and smooth-shifted them down slightly to inset them. I could have used a Boolean operation but stencilling leaves less artifacts to clean up.

Nitpick; IIRC, the top and bottom of the saucer in "Earth vs. the Flying Saucer" spin in opposite directions.

I wasn't able to confirm that despite watching several clips closely. All I could be sure of was that they were slightly out of line with each other, but that was all. I need to view the whole film again and see if there's any instance where we see both sides of the saucer in the same shot to confirm. I did use several still photos to create the shape of the saucer, it's quite unusual and rather odd to try and capture without directly tracing the outline around a background picture.

More nonsense, spot the saucer types...

I knew that river looked familiar, I just could just put a finger on it... *scrolls the image across* Aha! The Millennium Pickle! It make's sense now.

You've do some fantastic work Kenny, long may it continue

Cool stuff! I'd love to see more.

I'm sturggling to think of more saucers to make. I think I have the C57-D cruiser from Forbidden Planet somewhere, and I think I can make the saucer from This Island Earth if I put my mind to it, but after that I'll need to think hard.

The ID4 saucers kick ass also, remember. Not to mention Yuri's saucer from CnC.

The compositing looks a bit odd, but otherwise, pretty cool.

Probably because I cant composite for shit. I did it in direct in Lightwave, which is not the best way by the looks of it. Next one I'll do it in an actual art package.

Yuri's saucer? Never heard of it. I'll have to go hunt for pictures of that. the ID4 one is a bit immense, but If I can find some nice overall references I suppose I could do a quick version of it.

The second saucer looks very like Visitor Mothership from V onlu without the indentations in the bottom hull.

The big saucer over london is the V saucer, it does have the indentations underneath. I had to build two versions however, the one you see with the visible docking bays and another version that had no obvious bays. I think the one with the bays was the model that used to be seen over LA all the time in the series.