Just Another Spaceship

This is just another spaceship, the point of which was mostly to try out some features of Blender.

I’ve been practicing with Blender a lot lately. I’m almost turning from old school/old fart 100% 2D Concept Artist into one of those 2D Concept Artists who also happen to use 3D.
This seems to be the standard at the moment, so here I am. I’ve been messing around with 3D for ages, but I’ve included it in my regular workflow only recently. I should have done it sooner, really.

I have to confess I’m falling in love with Blender, especially for environment design.
As a tool, 3D allows you to design complex scenery in a 100th of the time it would take to do the same thing just drawing. I mean, I shudder at how long it would have taken me to do this with just 2D tools.
I’m even getting half competent at making not-so-shit topologies!

Anyway, this was just another spaceship without pretense. I was trying out the main features of Box Cutter and Hard Ops, the two mandatory Blender add-ons to work on hard surfaces.

I won’t go into the features themselves, as there are tons of tutorials about them on Youtube and a very well written documentation. I’ll just say that they speed up the work immensely, especially for someone who wants to focus mostly on the design aspect of things and skip some of the technical steps.

As far as the design go, I REALLY have to put more thought on it going forward.
3D tools in general are a big trap. Adding details in 3D is really easy, which means it’s common to fall into the temptation of scattering them everywhere.
In hindsight, I could have done a better job at grouping them in a better way, leaving more resting space for the eye and all that.
I obviously focused more on how to do things rather than why.

I’ll be more careful on my next work.
Yes, it will probably be another spaceship.

Freak Show – Transport N945

Despite various delays due to other pressing work, the development of Freak Show is proceeding steadily, and after months of preparation and concept art I’ve finally started working on the actual panels.

I’m not sure we’ll share the whole panels before the comic has evolved into a more final form (or maybe yes? Note to self: talk to John).
In the meantime, in order to remain immersed in its universe, I’m also devoting my lunchbreak doodling sessions to Freak Show related subjects.

Since I had already designed one of the main ships in Zbrush as a reference for the comic, I used the mesh as a base for a quick mood study.
By quick I mean that I really really meant it to be quick, and then it turned out being a couple of weeks worth of luch breaks.

Anyway, here it is, N945 in all its glory.

I’m not spoiling the very first page by describing what this ship stands for or what it does, obviously.
I’ll just say that I spent quite some time figuring out what most of the various bits and pieces on its hull were for. So, what looks like random “tech stuff” visual noise should actually have a place in the Freak Show made-up technology.

I would have liked to post a turn-table animation of the 3D mesh, but for reasons I – and the several internet people I asked for help – couldn’t understand, the view in ZBrush was locked into some weird drawing angle setting, and the resulting animation would have looked very bad.

As an alternative, here are some occlusions renders made in Blender and Luxrender.
Good old Linux to the rescue.

As you might have noticed, the last one is the shot I painted over for the illustration, which as always was made with Krita.

Over the past few weeks I’ll be able to dedicate a lot more time to Freak Show, so I’ll be posting more of these soon.

by Paolo Puggioni

Orion Mining Spaceship

Aaand back to spaceships.

Honestly, browsing my gallery the other day I realized that the number of spaceships in my portfolio is shamefully close to “no spaceships”, so I tried to put a remedy to that.

After a looong hiatus from ZBrush I eventually managed to clumsily put together a mesh to render and eventually paint over.

The endeavor was a confirmation of how terrible my memory is.
I hadn’t touched ZBrush in about a year, and all my recollections of shortcuts, menus and commands were gone.

Muscle memory, gone.

Tricks and slightly more uncommon procedures, gone.

Sure, I kind of knew what I had to do, fortunately that was well settled.
I just couldn’t remember how to do it.

So, well, the sculpting phase took about a dozen lunch breaks or so, as I had to re-learn a whole bunch of things.
Hopefully next time it won’t be as hard. I’ll just have to make sure I can do it again in less than a year.

As an exercise, I tried to stick with a very simple shape – pretty much a box – and see if I could make it interesting anyway.

As always, all my digital painting now happens with the help of Krita.
For this illustration I had to make a whole bunch of brush presets (lasers, scattered stars, noise etc), which I’ll make available for download shortly.

Sure, the most of this drawing comes from the occlusion shadows exported from ZBrush, but still, I’m quite happy with the confidence I’m gaining with the new tools.

Mostly though, regardless of the result, I’m content I managed to get something done with ZBrush.
So much saw that I rendered the turntable animation.

Look at her spin!

AH! The beauty of a spaceship spinning over and over again.
It reminds me of EVE Online.
Good times.

by Paolo Puggioni