Ballzy247's SAE Blog: 3D Ship Asset

by James Ball

And we are back to it again sorry it been a few weeks but I promise, it HAS BEEN WORTH IT!

For our next assessment in our 3D media class we had to create one of the following things.

1. A Mech

2. A Tank, and . . .

3. A Spaceship

If you haven’t already guessed it by the title, I’m making a 3D game asset of a spaceship.

So to begin this endeavour how did I start? Well from the beginning of course! No I’m sorry that was a lame joke. Ok let’s get to it.

To Begin with I spent about an hour with pen on paper and drew silhouettes of various shaped spaceships.

After that was done with, I left it for the rest of the week and got on with other assessments. But then came my next 3D Class and for the whole 3 hour session all I done was just surf the net and look at many, many different designs of space ships great and small. Another week had passed with other assessments and for another hour of the next 3D Media session I kept looking at more reference images. So after a couple of weeks of research and brooding something in my head clicked and in the space of about an hour I managed to crank out these 3 pages of pages of concept sketches.

I day before my next lesson I decided to try and combine the 2 images from the last page together to create something else. The first thing I saw after drawing the pencil doodle at the bottom of the page was a Manta Ray

Manta Ray Feeding - Mantatrust.org (2011/12)

This is the main that ended up giving me the mort inspiration the following page is what happened when I played with the idea and eventually leading me to a final workable design.

The image below is almost what the final design was going to look like but was enough to get me started with the modelling.

Before I started to model, I took the model sheet I had created into Photoshop and set it out neatly in 3Ds Max ready for modelling. To save time, I only modeled half of the spaceship. I started with a rectangle and extruded it out to form a box. I next added enough pollies onto the surface for me to work freely with. The following is where I got up to after 14 hours of modeling.