Big Spaceships 001 - Irrealis "ISS Mjollnir" Part 1

Its three, years ago and I'm looking for a new place to live; the charm of the lovely water features that would be produced from the ceiling of my inner city attic flat every time it clouds over wearing thin.  After cancelling a tenancy agreement I have about two weeks to sort other accommodation out and pack up and move.

Perfect timing for a big project with a tight schedule then.

Cue Joseph Ksander: "Steve, I'm making a movie and need a big spaceship."

Me: "Sweet!"

The fool even offered me money, anyway... Joe is really nice guy with a great vision and now rightfully a very successful person in Hollywood, this spaceship was for his low budget short then called "Rocketman," now called "Irrealis."  The design had already been worked out and painted mockups filmed during principle photography so it had to closely resemble those images, here's one of them:

I began with the central centrifuge section based around a proxy model used for working out FX sequences, Mjollnir is a big ship and the centrifuge contains four decks.

 A finished Centrifuge section erm, section. 

The ISS Mjolnir is in trouble having been struck by an Asteroid, so as well as building the ship I also had to partly destroy it, as this was the last ship I built on a 32 bit system (with the 1gb memory limit for applications) I had to work in several different files.

Working out some of the damage on the outside, considering the path of the asteroid through the ship, and that the centrifuge is still spinning I gave everything a downward/out sag, as if holding on by only a thread.

Adding more layers to represent outer and inner panels and so on, and lots of junk, pipework, wiring, big storage tanks, cargo pods and machinery.

This is about where I had to move house and to illustrate my own frustration at having to break off and deal with other things i have decided to split this into two parts and make you all wait, hah! 

If you forgive and bear with me, more to come including the rest of the ship in part 2!