StarDestroyer.Net BBS

On another board, a user named Lord of the Spam made a thread for Whimsical Spaceships and posted this drawing. Realizing it looked bad ass, I decided to try to make it in Blender.

Here is what I have so far:

A bit of reinterpretation there, but if anything it's an improvement. Tail detail looks good.

Introducing the Marlin-class personal transport. This little beaut can reach nearly 60 knots when traveling the Milky Way--UPSTREAM! Just the thing for a day trip through the aether.



Coming soon to a solar system near you!


Thank you, Alan Bolte, for replying.

It needs to be more practical. I recommend laser beam eyes.

I like it Cosmic. It's very shiny and the tail is quite nicely done.

It looks like a ship from Spelljammer (fantasy/steampunk space travel RPG setting). Almost exactly like one of the ships from the 'ships of known space' expansion in fact.

That actually looks really good. Most people are terrible at 3D, I can tell you know what you're doing. I really like the smoothness when combined with the shine and soft lighting. Not photoreal, but it's very... Spore-like, is what I'd say. It's a very cheerful aesthetic.

I like it, too. Only thing, the pilot capsule sticking out of the general shape in the front like on the drawing would be better.

Covenant wrote:That actually looks really good. Most people are terrible at 3D, I can tell you know what you're doing. I really like the smoothness when combined with the shine and soft lighting. Not photoreal, but it's very... Spore-like, is what I'd say. It's a very cheerful aesthetic.

That's one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me.

Seriously, though, I have no idea what I'm doing. The soft lighting is just a few lights with the Approximate Ambient Occlusion render-setting on.

Pirate-Squid, work in progress:

Now with guns:

That is very very cool Cosmic. And also a good reason for me to use more detail in my next creations.

Darkevilme wrote:That is very very cool Cosmic. And also a good reason for me to use more detail in my next creations.

Thanks for responding. Your stuff looks fairly well detailed.. And you've applied textures to yours, something that I'm quite horrible at.

I'm not done with mine yet.. I'm going to probably change the 'guns' to engines so that The Pirate-Squid will fly tentacles first.

Until then, giant-sized render.

Looking good. Are you going to rig the tentacles and animate them?

salm wrote:Looking good. Are you going to rig the tentacles and animate them?

Sadly, I already tried that and met with little success. They didn't deform properly or follow the rig very well.

Tentacles first! *NOM NOM NOM*

For robotic components you just set the amount the vertexes follow each bone to maximum and make sure they arent associated with any other bones. That's how i rigged my robot. This will lead to the individual segments not deforming at all, which is bad for living things but good for machines.

Yeah, you´ll need to set absolute vertex weights.

3ds Max has a thing called spline IK which is perfect for snakes, tentacles and things like that. Perhaps Blender has something similar.