Mike King

SW: Revelations update. Cargo ship model.

May 18, 2004 on 11:19 pm | In Artwork, Fandom | Comments Off

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Spent my scheduled time yesterday and today working on the fan film shots. I updated animation on the first two shots and am now letting them render over night. I also built a cargo ship to use in the shots because the original cargo ship I found had too much geometry. It barely loaded into my animation program and it still tended to crash a lot.

So I built my own original cargo ship. It turned out a little more detailed than I’d planned, but that’s okay because now I can get close up and the model will still look fine. (I haven’t textured the thing yet, it’s just geometry with a temporary texture map.) I sent this image to the director, hopefully he’ll approve the design. I just kind of slapped it together in 3ds max without doing any preliminary sketches. I looked at some pictures of Star Wars ships like the medical frigate, rebel cargo ship, and star destroyer and tried to keep my ship in that style.

The back end is still a little plain, but for what I need it should be fine.

This is the first spaceship model I’ve built from scratch and I’m pretty happy with it, especially considering how little time (relatively speaking) I’ve spent on it.

I’m also very happy with the lighting rig I came up with for these renders. It looks kind of similar to global illumination, but only required 4 lights (1 key, 2 fill, and 1 bounce). No raytracing, just a couple of shadow maps. It renders at 1k resolution in less than 10 seconds. Global illumination would look better, of course, but I thought I got a neat look with a simple set up.

If you look really closely at the renders, you might spot a little greenish-blue speck. That’s actually a 2 meter tall box I put in there for myself as scale reference — it’s about the height of a really tall person.