A few years ago I tried to design a Millennium Falcon style ship that was a little smaller with the idea of it working as a mobile living space/base of operations (kind of a galactic RV
) without the need to carry freight or extra passengers to justify its size. I was pretty interested in the story options it would offer, but my design skills are appalling so the idea got filed in the back of my brain but never really went away.
So I found this place a couple months ago and I've been lurking for a while, soaking up inspiration and the awesomeness of the modelling that goes on here, and I finally decided to learn how to do this stuff myself. I went looking for ship designs that hadn't been done to death and found the YT series that produced the Falcon. The YT-1760 jumped right out at me as exactly what I had been looking for so I threw myself in the deep end and started trying to build it. Obviously it has a long way to go but it's at least reached a point where I'm comfortable showing it around for the first time.
My long term hope is for this to be the hero ship in a fan film I'm planning that grew from the RV idea, but in the meantime it'll hopefully still be a pretty cool thing to create in its own right.
This is my very first 3D model so I think I'm spending most of my time rebuilding my mistakes as I learn better workflow and techniques (which makes progress a little slow), but any thoughts, crits, comments or tips would be more than welcome.
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Wait to see what will be from this come! nice start
This model is looking really, really good, man. The level of detail is amazing. Can't wait to see it finished! :thumb:
@Wiz Guys like you and fractalsponge gotta take a lot of the credit for whatever quality I've managed to achieve. I very much use stuff like your work for O66 (and his EVERYTHING) as my quality control measure/inspiration.
Second, if this really is your first model you're off to a great start. The design is a good mix of existing elements (the docking hatch) and original variations (the engines). Keep it up! If you check my sig, I have a link to a set of very high-res shots of the ANH Falcon. You can really see all of the various greebles. Hopefully you can use those for inspiration.
Cheers!
--JL
For the interior of the large engines I took some inspiration from Han's reference in ANH to outrunning the Empire's "big Corellian ships". I read a suggestion once that he could have meant that Corellian Engineering Corp had been subcontracted by KDY to increase manufacturing rate on the Star Destroyers, so when I saw those giant engines on the back of the YT-1760 I imagined some CEC engineer getting his design brief and saying "they want bigger engines on this one? Well we DID just get some pretty big engine specs off those Imperial monsters they had us building...".
Wow, that makes it even more impressiv. Considering this is your first model ever, you can already be proud of. Makes it hard to give you some constructive advice, though. Just can't wait to see more.
R6 two leg.jpg R6 tri left.jpg R6 tri side.jpg
Now I need to say right off the bat that I did NOT create the original model for this. I used John Jongsma's very excellent mesh as a base but basically ended up rebuilding most of it face by face because I wanted to be able to subsurf it to round off the edges and beat up the geometry smoothly, and I also needed to reduce the face count wherever I could since the subsurfing would crank it way the hell back up again.
I know he's a little fresh-off-the-showroom-floor clean right now but I'll fix that eventually. I just need to figure out how to apply Neil Blevins' blended box map and cube projections techniques in Blender. Or get super proactive and partition off a windows install on my mac and use 3dsmax, but that seems more than a little daunting.
Anyway, back to the YT now I think, hopefully have some updates on that soon.
P.S. That 8 second animation at 720p took 60-something hours to render. I'm a little terrified by the reality of my plans, I feel that rented render farm time may end up figuring rather heavily into my future. Eeesh...
But I'm wondering, does your fan film idea take place after the Battle of Endor? The R6 astromech series was released soon after that http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/R6-series_astromech_droid
And btw, I use Cinema 4D on a Mac and it works perfectly, in case yo don't want to make the partition. I'm not sure how good the conversions from Blender are, though.
@Talon Yeah those are the joys of sampled motion blur. I suspect it'd be a lot more efficient if there was a function that adapted the number of samples rendered based on the amount of movement in the frame rather than having it render multiple versions of a frame that's standing still, and then having to go back in and re-render any section that was moving too fast with an even higher number of samples. But I'm not bitter or anything
@DarkSapiens I know I'm cheating on the timelines a bit. The story's set midway through the gap between eps 3 and 4 and I'm also planning on using the scimitar bomber. Basically I'll take cooler character design over strict adherence to the established timeline. Besides, the idea that a corporation would wait a quarter century to release the replacement for the epic clusterf$&k that was the R5 series seems silly. At least, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
And about the time inconsistencies… Hey, maybe this is actually an R5 astromech but heavily modified with R2 components because of the low reliability of R5's. Maybe the feats the heroes accomplish in the fan film makes them a bit famous and someone at Industrial Automaton learns about that droid and uses the idea to develop the R6. Also, I've seen in the Scimitar page (although without source) that before Thrawn's Trilogy era, "some imperial generals employed a bomber type very similar to the Scimitar". In games like TIE Fighter we've seen some admirals use lots of prototypes and experimental TIE versions, so maybe the ones in the fan film are close-but-not-quite the ones that will be deployed later. That way the inconsistencies are solved, and you get extra backstory for free!
*Edit* > Also animate the light textures, blinking, changing colours etc. (simple hue shifts):)
I went around in circles with that very thing, tried all sorts (phyiscally modelling the honeycomb effect etc.) and in the end went back to simple with a layered texture to get the desired effect and depth
540115_3546485471532_841091424_n.jpg
And then simply animated the hue settings to get the strobing light