Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Arting some spaceships





I've had my coding hat on for so long, I was afraid I'd forgotten how to art. However, we're working on a promo video for ExoMiner this week which the coding tasks can take a back seat for a little bit whilst I get the video together.
  This has also provided a good reason to get on and turn some of last year's concept art in to models,
Here's a sequence showing the process from concept art to the finished model of one of our scout class ships in the game.
  In the game, craft like these are fast, efficient and good for quickly exploring an area but have weak hulls and aren't able to carry much cargo.
  I'm fond of bold colours and shapes in science fiction design but grounded in some sort of reality where some thought is given to what all these gribblies and technododads actually do as well as trying to create a worn, lived in universe where appropriate.
  Whilst working on ExoMiner, I've figured out a pretty speedy pipeline for modelling and texturing assets, all using tools I've written myself or open source tools such as gimp and blender.


Scout ship concept from last year. This was drawn in marker, scanned in and digitally coloured.  I've done a bunch of these and they're not very finished but help me keep on track when modelling.

Took about a day modelling and texturing in Clayworks, Gimp and Blender. I used box modelling and sub-d surfaces but no sculpting for this model as the texture maps handle the subtle paneling just fine.


And then rendered in Blender's Cycles. Note the triangular 'hard points'. All smaller ship have a number of these for attaching components.


And an action shot with the modular space station for good measure