A few years ago, I started playing around with redesigns of ships from the BBC Classic sci-fi series,
Blake's 7. This was inspired not a little bit by the
audio re-imagining first broadcast in 2006.
The main subject of this was the 'hero ship', the Liberator, well known for resembling a microphone flying backwards (this actually was the basis for the design...). And while I have a big soft spot for the original design - it is wonderfully unique - I wanted to have a go at producing something more modern-looking. Something a little more *dangerous* looking. In the audio plays, the ship is depicted as being both alive and predatory, barely under the rag-tag crew's control. I tried to reflect that in the external appearance, as well as mapping the hexagon motif from the interior on to the exterior.
Recently, I've started rebuilding my take on the Liberator in Blender, taking the lessons I learned building it the first time and using them to refine the design. This has also allowed me to begin creating an interior for the ship as well.
Below are some early WIP images. Bear in mind that the entire drive section is missing at the moment. I've built a shuttle to give you some idea of scale - going with the audio plays' depiction, I'm building the ship to be a little over 2km long. Oh, and sorry if these aren't the best quality. I rendered them this morning before work and had to hurry out without checking them until lunchtime.
Hopefully they'll give enough of an idea of what I'm going for thought!
Posts
More, brighter pics!
The interior, by the way, is arranged so that down is towards the powercore, up towards the nose, like a skyscraper.
Which I have started adding...
Me too!
http://www.rogersrocketships.com/product_view.cfm?pid=67
http://www.modelermagic.com/?p=40480
It's design fits with the race that built the original liberator. It looks like something a machine intelligence might make.
BTW, love it even more now that I see you're doing it in blender!
publiusr - you know, I've seen that rocketship before but never put it together with the Liberator in my head. I wonder if it was a design influence...
Judge Death - cheers! Blender's great isn't it? And neutron cannons on the back of the weapons pods are part of my original version of this design and will definitely be carried over to this model. I'll probably add them next.
Sorry for the lack of updates, by the way. I've been distracted building Daleks and taking a weeks holiday away from my powerful PC, but I hope to do some work on the Liberator soon.
BTW, the creators of the liberator had those interceptors or gunboats that were just the liberator's nacelle with an engine at the end. Maybe you could do a spinoff of one with this.
|I wanted to ask you how you got the sharp edges. I assume you're subsuring to at least one level,and was wondering if you got the sharp line edges by edge looping or edge creasing. Or did you use bumpmaps?
The sharp edges are done using an Edge Split modifier - that's how I get all sharp edges in my models. It's set to 5 degrees, since there are no curved surfaces on the majority of the ship.
Some more WIP shots below: I've built up the engine section a bit and added the rear-mounted neutron cannons to the weapons pods.
Also, I've got a design for the System Interceptor as well, so yes, I will build that too!
Coolhand - there will be greebles! I've already started adding them to the nose - some sort of sensors, I'm thinking - but it'll take a long time to build them all in. Still, hopefully I will be able to convey the size once I start layering them on the rest of the ship.
Judge Death - it's all done by extruding. Everything you see so far is part of the mesh.
It struck me after I posted the previous pictures how gloomy they were. So here are some brighter shots, with some more progress.
One thing I remember was that the ship supposedly had missile weapons, not really seen on the show but referred to, like when orac sabotaged the missile systems on DSV1 to fulfill his prophecy.
Also included in the side-on view is the rough outline of a Federation Pursuit Ship, giving their relevant scales...
Judge Death: - re the missiles, I've wavering on whether and where to put on the missile tubes. The hatches in the weapons nacelles are there to release swarms of seeker missiles, rather like the Nerada's homing rockets/torpedo things from Star Trek, so I don't know if it's necessary to add tubes to the hull as well. I suspect I probably will though, just to give some more surface detail.
Here are a few more WIPs, including the shuttle I'm building to accompany the Liberator. Very early stages with it, but I like the shape. Oh, and the bare bones of a Federation Pursuit Ship, together with accompanying scale shots.
The Liberator is, incidentally, 2300m long from tip to tip. This is based on the 2000m figure given in the audio remake from a few years ago. The original was scaled a bit smaller I believe, though the model shots make it impossible to be sure. The Pursuit Ship is a much more modest 219m long, a totally arbitrary figure designed to make the Liberator look even more imposing.
I might not color them, though. The liberator's builders were rather unemotional and I doubt they'd bother with ornamentation, color, etc.
one suggestion: even though they were never shown in the series it was made clear that the liberator carrier missile weapons. I might consider replacing the side guns with missile pods. Give you an excuse to do up some cool missiles too.
Judge Death: I will be making the System Interceptors, yes, but (and forgive me if I'm getting the wrong end of the stick with what you wrote in your last post) the red ship is a Federation ship, one of the pursuit ships sent to hunt down the Liberator on Servalan's orders. Specifically, this is the 'Starburst' class pursuit ship, one of the most advanced Federation ships (according to the word of the original series). I'm planning to model another version closer to the original style of pursuit ship which, ala BSG, will act as a previous generation of Federation ship.
When I get round to the System Interceptors themselves they will still resemble the Liberator's weapons pods, since I rather like the fact that they reflect a shared design lineage so closely - again, it fits with the System's approach: simply exporting working design elements to another ship.