3D World’s question of the month

Oh my! My inner – okay, I fess up – my outer geek could not believe this would ever be a question that I would be allowed to tackle as a Q&A. I mean, build a spaceship? Me? Oh, can I? The problem is, your imagination can run riot with fictional space flight: unlike a car or a duck, a spaceship has no definitive design.

The late Douglas Adams described the Heart of Gold in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as looking like a training shoe. The Sulaco from Aliens looks like the cross-product of a sexual encounter between a slug and a shotgun. There is no real right or wrong; so for something realistic, you need to look at what gives spaceships realism. Well, the most important thing is aerodynamics. It might fly up there in the vacuum of space, but down here, where you have climate, friction and gravity, things can get a little difficult if your ship is shaped like a half-peeled potato and weighs in at around one million tonnes. And, as you can tell from any Federation spaceship that went to Wolf 359 (Where? Is that near Toys ‘R’ Us?), real life is dirty, so you could do with some weathering and maybe a smattering of damage. And there is nothing more real than reality, so dropping your 3D design into a real image really brings things back down to Earth… so to speak.

So let’s get our idea into a picture. Most concept drawings are not drawn orthographically, and so creating our simple design directly in the picture we want to compose it into will help in making sure the concept is right. Once we’ve done that, we can then build and refine the model before beginning to add the fine detail that will scream ‘reality’ to a viewer. In reality, ships’ panels are not painted on: they exist. So we are going to build them as much as we can before adding flight graphics, again something based in real life, and applying some dirt. We are then going to render out multiple passes including occlusion, shadow, lighting and a surface pass so that we can build up our picture in stages to be sure it feels real. Right then. Time to boldly split polygons that no one has split before… Engage!

Click here to download the support files (8MB)