This is my first attempt at making a spaceship. It's not done yet, so don't nitpick too much. I've been noodling with 3d software for about four years now (Started with some Maya classes in college, though these days...

This is my first attempt at making a spaceship. It's not done yet, so don't nitpick too much.

I've been noodling with 3d software for about four years now (Started with some Maya classes in college, though these days I use Silo for the modeling stage) so it's sort of a wonder why I didn't try making one sooner; I am going to go ahead and blame my buddy Matt for putting me off taking a crack at it earlier: Spaceships, he says, are cheap. Without even addressing the question of cliche, there's really no right or wrong way to make a spaceship so as far as a test of your abilities it's a very poor metric. People, on the other hand, are much more challenging, because everyone knows what a person looks like, and even someone without any kind of technical skill can tell if something looks 'off'. (and will usually tell you, believing themselves to be offering 'constructive criticism', when in reality their comments are about as helpful as somebody humming a tune you might be trying to play on the piano, without having any knowledge themselves of how to make the notes with the keys. but that's a complaint for another day.)

So maybe as a result of Matt's comments I've studiously avoided modeling anything that might be 'cheap' and I've probably done myself a disservice in the process, because now I have a hard drive full of half-finished projects that I started in the interest of doing only Very Original and Challenging Work that was probably all way beyond my early skill level to attempt in the first place. Heaven forbid I should try something simple like a sword or a screwdriver or a cellphone! If my first attempt isn't worthy of the cgtalk frontpage, I'm obviously going about this whole 3d caper the totally wrong way! And so on.

But, I mean, hey. I can do people now. So now it's time for some self-indulgent spaceships, motherfuckers.

One of the spaceship designs I liked best from film was from a movie most people have forgotten by now, the late-90s adaptation of Lost in Space. Briefly, toward the start of the film, there was a fighter craft that featured a spherical glass cockpit, around which the rest of the ship would rotate freely. I thought that made a lot of sense in a zero-gravity environment, where visibility in all directions would be critical, and so I sort of stole that idea for this ship. I've also been totally into Battlestar Galactica lately, and something I really dig about that show is the unusual extent that real science informs their spacecraft. The fighters use jet propulsion to maneuver, and you can see the air venting from the maneuvering thrusters whenever they change direction; and staying inside of that realm of believability is a goal I have with this design. (The forward-swept wings are similar to a cylon raider's, too, but that at least wasn't done intentionally.)

So, the questions I'm asking myself over and over as I put this thing together are 'how does this thing do x?' and 'how is basic function y being addressed?' And I'm not terribly sciency-smart so I'm trying to keep the made-up fictional bullshit to a minimum. This thing has no landing gear because it's intended to be a supplementary craft that docks in a larger zero-gravity hangar, it has no capacity for atmospheric operations. Its locomotive abilities are provided by jet propulsion and air vents. It's a short-range fighter craft, designed for perimeter defense of mining operations, and if it uses plain old gunpowder bullets (or even magnet-driven ones) there'll need to be retrothrusters to compensate, because firing them would push the ship back. And so on.

The problem, though, with becoming this imaginatively invested in something like this is as I work on it I find myself fleshing out the kind of world this thing would be a part of - pre-ftl colonial expansion to other planets in our solar system, with a mining boom providing raw materials and prefabricated components for enclosed climate-controlled settlements, like in that old DOS space expansion game, Millenium: Return to Earth. Telepresence robots do all of the actual labor, controlled remotely by VR jocks suspended safely inside settlements miles away, eliminating the need for dangerous spacewalks and keeping the hazards of large-scale construction in the hostile environment of space far away from the people who live in the finished structures.

And all this daydreaming, of course, makes me want to model bigassed donut-shaped space stations, austere domed settlements on martian landscapes, impersonal telepresence robots with their heads all packed with sensors, et cetera. It wouldn't be a problem, except I'm always tempted to drop what I'm working on half-finished and get started on the next project!

The application I use for pretty much all of my modeling, Silo 2, has got a point update on the way and they just posted a video of one of the new features they're adding, which is a surface tool...

The application I use for pretty much all of my modeling, Silo 2, has got a point update on the way and they just posted a video of one of the new features they're adding, which is a surface tool similar to the Topogun plugin for Max. This video demonstration of it is way cool. Silo already has a really awesome topology tool that lets you basically just draw your geometry on a high-res mesh, and this new tool in conjunction with their existing topology tools is just totally radical. They don't really show you in the video but you can use this tool with surface snapping, so if you've got some really fancy character that you sculpted with a tablet, you don't have to waste a lot of time getting a low-res mesh with proper edgeloops or anything.