I recently finished my first ever starship model in Blender. I've tried blender several times over the past 18-ish years, including at least 3 real attempts to use the software on a permanent basis. I've built a few smaller prop models but I've never finished a starship before now because I always wound up going back to whatever software I was using previously (Truespace or Lightwave.) Well, I finally finished a starship, it's the Constitution class based entirely on Franz Joseph's blueprints from the 1970s, not on either of the studio models. I'm going to start another build soon, but I wanted to do some images with the Connie before I moved on. I'm off work today and tomorrow, so I found a wonderful tutorial on making planets in Blender using spheres and prodcedurals. Procedurals are considerably easier to deal with than textures, and you can change things on the fly as you decide what looks good and what doesn't, so I went with those over textures. Making planet textures would involve similar methods in GIMP, but it's just easier in Blender. I plan to experiment more with this method of making planets, but I started with a Class M (Goldilocks) planet. I was pretty pleased with the results, so I set up a scene with the ship in it.
If anyone is interested, here's the tutorial I used:
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EG, the old girl looks lovely. Terrific job.
Various Work: U.S.S. Constellation - Matt Jefferies Concept Shuttle
Yeah, that tutorial is pretty handy. The same guy also has one for doing planets with textures. That one wasn't what I wanted, but it was what I found first. It also has a bit at the beginning where he shows how to create starfields easily in Blender:
Thanks. Yeah, it's a lot of fun and it makes making planets really easy.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks a lot, Eric.