My Blender Render! (Kororra Class)

[Graham Kennedy]

Made the rifter so it can rotate with the barrels. This is my favourite shot so far... having it firing up just makes it seem more functional somehow. Stuck an airlock on the side too. Emergency access/escape kind of deal. Not sure what other greebles might go on the surface.

[Teaos]

How long do you think it would take you to render one of your Battleships from the Kennedyverse?

[Graham Kennedy]

I've been thinking about that. I actually started to knock up another couple of bits, just as an experiment. A sensor...





And a gun director...





Both of those proved to be pretty easy to make, took about half an hour each. A full on battleship is an awful big thing (three miles plus long), but I'm starting to think it might be doable in a reasonable time. Watch this space...

[Teaos]

One of your latter models one would be a mission, but a slightly earlier one, when they had just merged to single hulls would be quicker. But then again, the latter ones are the coolest 8)

[Graham Kennedy]

I'm working on the Kororra class... spent about an hour on it, got some of the basic hull done. We will see how it progresses!

[Teaos]

This one? Thats a hell of a lot of detail, although a lot of it would be copy and paste. Worked out how to do scale yet?

[Graham Kennedy]

That's the one.

I'm not worried about scale, because you can scale elements really easily. It's just a case of grabbing a turret and saying "scale this to 0.2" or whatever.

Basic hull so far :

[Graham Kennedy]

Chunks of underside hull added... these are all grainy because I'm doing fast and dirty renders rather than waiting 10 mins per shot.

Aft hull :




Forward hull :

[Graham Kennedy]

Upper hull :

[Graham Kennedy]

With the bow added. The bow was one of the hardest things I've done so far - the original plan was to make a sphere and squash/stretch it to match the curved hull. But they wouldn't match perfectly no matter what I did! So I deleted the curved hull completely, then deleted three quarters of the sphere and stretched it into the proper shape for the box. Then I extruded a surface from the back of the sphere to replace the deleted hull, and voila. The hardest part was chopping the sphere down, as it was composed of hundreds of faces - very hard selecting the ones you want to delete!

Also added little housings for the rifters (they're the red glowing things peppered around the hull). The one you see on the dorsal surface was incredibly hard to do, even though it looks like a simple shape. It should have been easy, there's a simple way of chopping out a piece of one object using another - but I just could not get it to work, no matter what. So I ended up just having to make the shape bit by bit.

You may notice I'm only making half the hull. That's actually a trick I learned from Star Trek - apparently when designing a ship they routinely draw one half of the hull, and when it's done they just copy and mirror it to make the other half. Makes the workload much smaller and makes sure the ship is symmetrical.

I think this is looking pretty good!

[Graham Kennedy]

Tried doubling up the hull to see how it looked...

[Captain Seafort]

Out of curiosity, is the resemblance to the Typhoon intentional or coincidental?

[Graham Kennedy]

Coincidental. Hadn't really thought about it before you just said it.

[Teaos]

Wow the basic shape came through a hell of a lot faster than I though it would.

[Graham Kennedy]

Me too. Most of it is just cubes distorted - you can drop a cube in and then grab the upper edge and drag it out to make a sloping face. Almost all the underside hull parts are just cubes with one or two sloping faces.