UES Longbow render
Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 6:34 pm
So I thought I'd take a break from the Kororra class and have a go at one of the earlier ships. I chose the UES Longbow :
I chose this because ships from this era are really hard to do well in Photoshop. Ther eason being they use rotational hulls, which means there are lots of cylinders and sections of cylinders. And they have spherical fuel tanks. And one thing Photoshop cannot do is draw good circles. Seriously, it is next to impossible to draw a circle that is exactly one pixel thick, exactly the size you want it, and exactly symmetrical in the x/y planes. And this is doubly a pain when you're doing multiple views and trying to get everything pixel-perfect.
Well spheres and curved sections are WAAAY easier to do in blender - though I'm still avoiding going to super high numbers of faces for spheres and cylinders, partly to save rendering time and partly because I figure building real ships is probably easier when you can use flat planes rather than actual curves. It's interesting what it would do to the ship too, because it would mean that corridors and floors would be flat panels rather than gradual curves, which would mean as you walked across the panel the gravity would slowly drift out of alignment with the floor, so it would be like you were walking up a shallow hill. It's only a few degrees, but it would mean spacers would be so used to that that when they got onto a planet the gravity would feel all weird to them because it wouldn't be constantly wavering about.
Anyway. This is a much older design than the Kororra, obviously - they'd look on a ship like this much as we look on something from the age of sail - which was the inspiration for making the FTL drive a great big sail at the front. I wanted different forms of FTL drive to look as different from one another as oars, sails, paddle wheels, and propellers do in the real world. There's also attention paid to having cooling fins on the hull, and much more of a feel that the ship is a bunch of machines attached to one another.
This is also the first model I've done in blender where i finally managed to texture an image over a surface rather than relying on simple colouration. Never would have got the sails looking right otherwise. The reactors and repellor STL drive at the rear are textured too, though it hasn't worked out as well as I'd have liked in that case.
Another nice thing about ships of this time is that they're not ridiculously large. With the sail in docked configuration he Longbow is 277.15 m, or 909 feet 3.28 inches, long. I put a little guy on there for scale in one shot - not mine, a freebie mesh I found online. Alas, I can't work out how to bend his arms.
So here's my attempt, which has taken about three or four days probably totaling 25-30 hours.
I chose this because ships from this era are really hard to do well in Photoshop. Ther eason being they use rotational hulls, which means there are lots of cylinders and sections of cylinders. And they have spherical fuel tanks. And one thing Photoshop cannot do is draw good circles. Seriously, it is next to impossible to draw a circle that is exactly one pixel thick, exactly the size you want it, and exactly symmetrical in the x/y planes. And this is doubly a pain when you're doing multiple views and trying to get everything pixel-perfect.
Well spheres and curved sections are WAAAY easier to do in blender - though I'm still avoiding going to super high numbers of faces for spheres and cylinders, partly to save rendering time and partly because I figure building real ships is probably easier when you can use flat planes rather than actual curves. It's interesting what it would do to the ship too, because it would mean that corridors and floors would be flat panels rather than gradual curves, which would mean as you walked across the panel the gravity would slowly drift out of alignment with the floor, so it would be like you were walking up a shallow hill. It's only a few degrees, but it would mean spacers would be so used to that that when they got onto a planet the gravity would feel all weird to them because it wouldn't be constantly wavering about.
Anyway. This is a much older design than the Kororra, obviously - they'd look on a ship like this much as we look on something from the age of sail - which was the inspiration for making the FTL drive a great big sail at the front. I wanted different forms of FTL drive to look as different from one another as oars, sails, paddle wheels, and propellers do in the real world. There's also attention paid to having cooling fins on the hull, and much more of a feel that the ship is a bunch of machines attached to one another.
This is also the first model I've done in blender where i finally managed to texture an image over a surface rather than relying on simple colouration. Never would have got the sails looking right otherwise. The reactors and repellor STL drive at the rear are textured too, though it hasn't worked out as well as I'd have liked in that case.
Another nice thing about ships of this time is that they're not ridiculously large. With the sail in docked configuration he Longbow is 277.15 m, or 909 feet 3.28 inches, long. I put a little guy on there for scale in one shot - not mine, a freebie mesh I found online. Alas, I can't work out how to bend his arms.
So here's my attempt, which has taken about three or four days probably totaling 25-30 hours.
