Drop Pod Animation - Mockup Artwork

Hello again dear friends and readers! Sharing a mock-up image of a 3D rendered animation I'm working on for a client... I built the Drop Pod last year for Clear Horizon, and you can read more about it here... Stay tuned to this URL, l mean like constantly, keep refreshing, for the finished animation.

The Bauble of death, packed to the upper bulkhead with troops, guns, grenades and other things that go boom, plunges into its latest 'peacekeeping' mission

Cover Art - O.K. Simon!

 A recent commission for an up and coming musician - OK Simon!

Starting with the final image, why not?

A mid-way in development, the orange fluid was meant to be Brandy, but went wrong and orange... Like Brandy does in space, maybe. Note the Picard approach to hairstyling, we covered this up with a baseball cap which had local significance for the client.

Ending with the concept pic, based on a discussion with the client, who wanted to see a cyborg representation of himself in space, one specific thing required was an open Brandy bottle, and the contents emptying uselessly into the void, I thought it would be fun if the fluid formed the cover title.  On review, my client suggested that he'd like to see tank tracks rather than legs, to up the surrealism.  While working on the model I decided it was a combat cyborg accidentally ejected from its orbiting deployment platform...;)

Available for further commissions, Contact Artist to talk about your artwork, and please Check out OK Simon, and see the artwork in use here: https://soundcloud.com/ok-simon

Ninja Magic ships painted up.

Just stumbled on this video on Robbin Fitton's G+ page.  Takes me back a bit, I built the protos for these for one of my first clients, Ninja Magic.

Here's his painting guide with lots of great closeups of a couple of the Junila ships, I also worked on the Kikoku fleet and perhaps something else - It was so long ago the brain modules that stored that data have undoubtedly corroded or eaten by scraplets.

And they are quite beautifully fetching in this colour scheme I think, well done sir. 

The Designs were all by Todd Boyce, I translated his plans into 3d and made up the detailing as I went along. 

Here are a couple of renderings of the Drone Carrier (these are very old so not the nicest of renderings)

In fact these might even be WIP shots...

Perhaps I will dig out the 3d files and make some better renders one day... 

I have set of the final production castings that Todd sent me... Somewhere, maybe i'll find them one day and give them a paint up, not sure if they'd look as nice as the paint up in the video but stay tuned folks! 

Shapeways Figurine - Gangnam Style

This is the result of a commission from a few weeks ago to produce a dancing PSY caricature. Buy Me! You know you want to... Kinda hard translating a 2d caricature into a 3d shape, and trying to keep it looking consistent but I think we were all pleased with the results.

Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov

Whats that you cry: "Steve, why don't you post some artwork instead of these bull**** movie reviews?"

Well, since you asked so nicely, here's something I built for Admiralty Modelworks last year . Of course if you're reading this blog then you most likely already know this is from the show 2010: The year we make contact. a sequel of sorts to the seminal 2001: A Space Odyssey, which though it carries the surface narrative along nicely nev...

"I said stop reviewing movies, dammit!"

Ok, ok, here's some finished pics, if you put the blasters and warhammers away can I at least talk about the background of the design in a minute?

*sounds of guns, swords, spells, hexes and curses being holstered, slung, retracted and absorbed.*

In this exciting pic from Babylon 9 the next generation, Lt Colonel Boris Spry lines up to level another salvo of hot lead toward a Vorlon bird of prey. 

So, this vessel was originally designed by legendary futurist Syd Mead, who after a curing all known diseases in his youth, and winning every sporting award available, boldly threw his vaccine in the bin, opened a box of doughnuts and started drawing spaceships instead.

Fans of Babylon 5, officially the best scifi TV show ever as revealed in my exclusive opinion poll, will of course recognise it as being really rather similar to one of the main ships of the humans, the Garibaldi class corvette and tediously point that issue out to seem clever to strangers.

Babble on Five of course produced many years after 2010, in 1992. No, wait, 2010 was over Unger, and Unger was over 1984.

Adding more 'science' to the fiction, the large section in the middle rotates to produce artificial gravity (the kit is formed around a metal tube to allow the centre to rotate), has a deployable 'Ballute', like an inflatable heat shield (not pictured or depicted in the kit), and reverse thrust engines (depicted in normal, not retro mode in the kit).

Also the clamp at the bottom can move and attach the ship to other ships, so on the kit itself you can position the clamps and attach the model kit to the Discovery model kit (detailed elsewhere in the blog) as depicted in the movie.

For all sorts of reasons I won't even attempt to understand or explain, it becomes clear when the ships are docked together that Discovery is now much larger externally than in 2001. It has to be, because otherwise there's no way people, let alone landers and probes and other things could fit inside Leonov's sprawling and spindly hull, and still have Leonov as the smaller of the two. Unfortunately this is not reflected at all in the set design, so the pod bay of Discovery is much too small on the set and much too large on the miniature. In the case of Leonov, careful Anal-ysis reveals that the sets are way too large for the miniature exterior but who cares about that really? It's just a cool looking ship.

Anyway, here are some WIP pics made a year or two ago to show how we got here:

Closeup on the airlock, can you say 'chicken' in Russian? You may be able to after watching 2010 in 2012... but can you think it?

The entire centrifuge assembly rotates around the central tube - just a normal metal tube - and the other lateral tubes are for reinforcement.

WIP shot showing the parts breakdown for resin casting.

Wip pic taken while working on the bow details, trying to get it as close to the movie version as possible within the limits of producing a digital prototype.

WIP pic taken of the centrifuge detail.  All the pipes and details are solidly fused into the hull to make one continuous skin, rather than placed on top of and intersecting with other parts as usual in 3d modelling.  

Big thanks to my buddy 'Brickhead' (not his real name) for sharing his stash of reference material with me.

Do svidaniya Komrades!

John Bear Ross

I only started this blog today, inspired by a man I just call "The Bear." or to his face; "Sir."

He's a fantastic sculpter and easily the most experienced digital prototyper I know as well as being just supercool and supportive and a really nice person, a true professional also.  A vast number of miniatures out there today and enjoyed by so many started off life on his computers and machines.

Be sure to check out his blog for some more way cool designs.

http://johnbearross.blogspot.com/