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

Big Spaceships 004 - Columbia Class Carrier - Part 2 (of 2)

Pew Pew Die Lenin class carrier!

OK, lets get this one finished in short order!

The reverse of the last shot in the previous article, superstructures are busy as always.

I'm sure this ship, like many of my others generated tons of criticism, debate and arguments years ago at Scifi-meshes.com. Those looking at the first pic in this article, showing opposing carrier fleets might be wondering why in sci-fi the big ships get so close its like they need to use cannon balls, like its 1750 and the spacecraft are made of wood.  Well, its perhaps not realistic as we might imagine space combat today but that kind of thing makes for far more exciting looking effects - its always just more fun to put opposing spacecraft within spitting distance so sometimes you have to let it go and enjoy the film.

Note the baffles/sheilds and the recovery crane for larger vehicles.

  The Allies employ a much cleaner type of propulsion than the Soviets, and pilots might be expected to land by passing directly through the engine plume - or possibly the engines are turned off for spacecraft recovery, after all this is space and not the sea; hey, lets mix and match our realities as much as possible, its Sci-Fi, baby.... If we assume more realism, to offer some kind of protection from off-but-still-hot nuclear engines an array of baffles and shields are built between engine modules and flightpath/landing bay.

Getting much closer to completion, surfaces looking a little bland.

Totally ripping off Joe Haldeman here, sorry Joe.

A splash of colour lifts it a bit, bit of a 'Republic' scheme.

Makes you want to rotate your head or something.

All too obvious themes from nature here.

250! I don't know... seriously i've forgotten, meters?

Test firing the heating and cutting beams, it heats with some kind of focussed EM beam and cuts with a particle beam, nasty.

Now you know how big this big ship is, its pretty big.

 

Another space battle test render, similar to the one at the top of the article...

 I started making some images with these models but they rarely amounted to much - my compulsion was generally to start another project, the renders, animations to come later as all these models did have a purpose to tell a story, as yet untold! nnnnn

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed the images, even if its all a bit old.  More, better, exciting, thrilling action to come folks, if you liked it, or even if you didn't but are feeling generous please hit the share buttons, and feel free to leave a comment!

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! 

Big Spaceships 002 - Sol - October Class Frigate

It's been just over 10 years since I began showing my work publicly, and really working at improving it.  I have made 3D models since 1993 and grew up drawing pictures of aviation, birds, cars, people... Sometimes even spaceships.

But there never seemed much point to it, no one bar a few mostly disinterested friends ever saw my work but I suddenly found an outlet with internet forums.

I had wanted to show my first ever big spaceship, as it would have been just over 10 years old this month, but having gone through all my backup disks I can find no trace of it.  So I thought I'd show the first capital ship built for my Sol project.   Sol is a cold war type scenario between planetary forces, constrained mostly to our solar system, broken down into two factions, essentially a Soviet type regime on a partly terraformed Mars and everyone else who stayed on Earth after the cataclysm.

I had already produced the Foxhound fighter/bomber (anti-capital(ist) ship warfare) as shown elsewhere in the blog.  But I needed to find a way into a larger ship design so I chose the 'boat in space' style as used in shows like Starship Troopers.  Working it entirely in 3D (not a concept sketch in sight) I refined a shape down to the finished model as depicted below, please click for a marginally larger resolution.

A rendering from 2003, hence the hon-HDness of it. I clearly had a thing for pink dust clouds - which were perhaps pollution from mining operations, obviously there are no pink nebula around our solar system so I had to come up with some explanation. 

To get there I used a Pentium 3, something or other with a tiny amount of ram compared to today and probably a very early nvidia card.  So it's not like a model I'd build today in that its very simplistic but on a par with the types of models that my peers were building at the time. The simplicity means its probably a nice one to study the method with.  

Roughing out and refining the base hull and superstructure shapes, if you don't get this right then whats the point in detailing? 

Adding and refining secondary shapes to the design, the turrets are designed for around 100 degrees of elevation change, meaning they can shoot straight up and attack the weak point for massive damage.  Note the horribly overexposed lighting here, this was always trial and error for me before i began to understand these things. 

Ah, much better lighting Coolhand, maybe a bit gloomy... 

Increased the fill lighting to get more clarity in the shadow side - nearly looks like a spacecraft, or something. 

Panelling and detailing the superstructure, the little indent on the side of the bridge is probably an airlock, in the heat of battle the crew would be located further inside the ship, this tall bridge being used for navigation - akin to the sail of a submarine, while it may have some windows the control centre is usually somewhere in the middle of the ship instead. 

Since I seem to be missing a few WIP pics (if anyone has copies please let me have some copies back!) We'll skip ahead somewhat, getting very close to the finished model here, topside is nearly done. The dome on the front is probably the main fire-control and radar. 

A closeup on the upper foredeck, some exposed structural elements imply a layered structure and depth.  My main turret designs are sometimes compared to BSG's but this project pre-dates it by about a year, it's counterpart on the opposing faction even has a similar ribbed appearance to the nu-BSG Galactica but was also shown online before the new Galactica model... Jus' sayin'. 

Enlivening the sides of the ship, still not quite interesting enough, note the same airlock structure as shown on the bridge earlier.  Look near the three large windows on the right, human scale features like windows and airlocks are essential for creating a sense that we're looking at a large structure of some sort..

Ah, thats better, what could be more appropriate for a futuristic spaceship than a set of fixed, sideways firing cannons - perfect for delivering an 18th century style broadside.

finished pic showing the stern detailing. Stern, stern but fair.  

Another view of it, the rear is particularly well covered by anti-aircraft type guns. The vents behind the turret became a recurring theme, in this case bad luck for the turret operator who's in the rear enclosure when the reactor is purged. 

Key lighting is nicely balanced on this one, but the blue fill is horribly inky and awful looking - probably a result of too much saturation in the fill lights.

For the Motherland! (umm, Mars) Another nasty inky looking rendering, but at least it has a rough propaganda poster look - or something, not sure if I was going for that look or not. 

Probably the best image I made with this model, has a sense of speed and emptiness, which is well, space travel in a nutshell if you're doing it right. The pink clouds actually looking fairly natural combined with the glow from the sun, backlighting a model against a pretty background is aaaaalways a good idea, imho.

I guess i just about got the blue looking akseptibull in the end. I must have switched to an area filter or something as this render looks so blurry compared to the rest.

And thats all folks, final analysis, I still think this design works pretty well, Its modelled and smoothed in a very simple way, detailing could be better and the textures are only procedural but I prefer it to some of my later ships... Which will be detailed in future blog articles, so join, ooh at least 10 other people and hit the subscribe button on the right tabs or add me to your reading list so you don't miss out!

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it.

-Steve.

Big Spaceships 001 - Irrealis "ISS Mjollnir" Part 3 (of 3)

If you missed it, heres a link to post one in this series detailing a highly detailed sci-fi spaceship model.

So where were we, oh yes so not long after finishing the model I upgraded my machine and software to 64 bit, a little later than most folks - this was due to the financial crisis, repeatedly moving accomodation and because the work I was generally doing didn't demand more than one gigabyte of memory but it was years after that, when I finally put the peices together and made some pics, one of which I'll relay here.

View of both wreckage sections, the centrifuge and bow, friends reunited after at least two years. 

But those pics aren't terribly pretty.  So here are some brand new ones made just for this posting, these are full standard HD 1920 x 1080 in a high quality PNG format so please click to see them at full size.

******

Hopefully one day we'll see the ISS Mjollnir in action in it's production, Irrealis, until then these will have to do!

I hope you enjoyed this series, if you have please tell people about this blog and leave a comment on the comment zone below. As the title implies, more to come as I have many projects to document, if you're interested in commissioning a model please feel free to contact me, my details are on my contact page. 

Big Spaceships 001 - Irrealis "ISS Mjollnir" Part 2 (of 3)

Because this is the internet and I'm sure I'm not the only person who reads things in reverse order,  lets recap...  The ship was built in 2008 for a short movie then called 'Rocket Man' now called 'Irrealis' to my knowledge it's never been released on the internet.   There's more detail in post one of course if you want more or feel the need to follow things sequentially in the correct order.

One of the important FX shots in the show is an integration of 3D/CGI graphics and live action, a composited tracking shot showing a slow pull away from a live action set which is embedded in the wreckage of the ring section.

The over-exposed booth in the middle of frame matches the on on screen set, the diagonal bars passing in front of the booth are infact matched to a part of the cockpit set that was in the live shot, and became part of the overall effects shot, here integrating with 3D modelled damage.

Once finished with the damaged section I decided it would be a good idea to jump to another section of the ship, the bow module.  This is often the most important section of a spaceship, but this time the bow is not shown in close-up, even so I still added a decent amount of detail for the time and resources I had available and tried to breakup some of the flowing lines into more interesting forms.  The textures and geometry hold up at close range.

It sorta looks like a head of some oddly proportioned robot, the round mouth opening is most likely a docking port - like a huge version of ILIDS (International Low Impact Docking System) as used presently in human space flight. The teeth would be part of the system that interlocks with another opposing dock, bringing and holding the structures together.  See if you can spot the bit of Apollo lander which was in there from the proxy model and eventually plastered over with other bits and pieces.

Once complete I designed some truss sections - perhaps more artistic that realistic, but that's the theme of the entire ship, we're not NASA - to tie the fore and aft modules to the centrifuge.  Beginning to feel the pressure of time constraints and the hardware limitations I had at that time meant these parts were made in a totally separate file, to be combined later for rendering on a powerful render farm.

The engine was probably a fusion reactor, perhaps something like a Polywell (hence the round shape) the bits sticking out from the engine module, perhaps some kind of radiation shielding for the centrifuge or to enhance cooling, or if neither of those will do then they do *something*;)  - I find if you can't back up things with numbers then its easy to avoid nerdy arguments with certain obsessive personality types by letting them work it out for themselves.
(much as I enjoy a nerdy argument, it generally makes all parties look like dorks and cuts into the modelling time immensely)

So at this point I had problems, running out of time, running out of memory, Joseph perhaps running out of patience but always a gent.  I now left the fore and aft modules, though the engine in particular could have done with some more poly-lovin it was never meant to be seen closely.   I returned to the centrifuge and completed some parts of it, but found I couldn't even render the parts without changing renderers, lighting and materials, and had no time for any of it. I sent what I had off, as a complete package but a large 'make it up as you go along' ship like this is never truly finished, only abandoned - I'm usually never happy but look back years later more objectively and think, hmm, that actually looked OK. 

In fact for numerous reasons I didn't see a complete render of this ship at all (and properly assess my work) or even load all parts into the same scene until earlier this year, a gap of three-and-a-half years.  So I will frustratingly leave you now without seeing the entire thing - until part 3. 

-Steve.

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!

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!