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As a cheap trick, I composited this over a NASA photo of near Earth orbit. I tried the texture map and bump map on the habitat sphere, the result was so ugly that I didn't even bother saving a copy. So I resorted to the Discombobulator to put instant nurnies on the sphere and the system-ship. To remain consistent, I made the long WarpShip propellant tanks gold as well. I'm not happy with them, but some trials with different bump maps just made them worse. I did make the warp pylons gold as well to be a unifying influence. I emphasize that using the Earth backdrop is a cheap trick. Without it the shortcomings of the model become glaringly obvious. This thing needs a lot of work, I've barely started. And to top it off, the lighting on the ship does not match the lighting on the planet. Again. I can see Rachel shaking her finger at me already. She smiles so gently, like a latter-day Freida Harris with a vanadium-steel yardstick. |
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I tried re-applying Psionic's hull texture map over the discombobulated surface, and it wasn't half bad. After telling Blender to repeat the map in a 3x3 pattern (to shrink the size of the detail) it looked pretty good. Especially when applied as a bump map as well. I tried adding a dim blue spotlight from below, to simulate Earthshine. On the plus size it did make the ship seem more dimensional. On the minus side it did make the ship look like a tiny plastic model. |
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Here's how the last two images would look like if they were in a graphic novel. This was not done in Blender, the Blender images above were taken into Adobe Photoshop for some post-production work. |
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Another thing I like about Blender is the way it can accept scripts. I found a nifty script called Solid Wire. Using it, I made the antenna you see in this picture in about half a minute. One makes a simple mesh, in this case a slice off a sphere, and a stretched cube. You run the Solid Wire script, it takes all the edges in the mesh and replaces them with square wires. Yes, I know I forgot the central antenna for the dish. As you can see, this script could come in handy if you need to make lots of NASA-esqe framework spacecraft. |