GRSS Harpoon - Make It Fly Challange

The GRSS (Golden Republic Space Ship) Harpoon is an interstellar spaceship powered by its nuclear engine to travel into deep space ventured by no other humans in this near future scene.

My name is Michael Frankel, an avid high school 3d hobbyist. Come with me as we both learn how to Concept design models animate and render in Blender while making mistakes along the way.

1. Blender
2. Autodesk Sketchbook
3. Adional addons (at your discretion)
4. Engine plume image GIF
5. Decent computer (ex. im using a Lenovo Legion laptop with a 1660 ti)

I drew inspiration from Felix Barthel's "Interstellar Spaceship" on Art Station. He is an environmental artist. I recommend checking him out because he does some pretty neat stuff.

I then took my ideas and sketched it out in Autodesk Sketchbook which I personally enjoy for doing some 2d art in my downtime away from my computer.

For modeling I jumped straight into the deep end. I've never done any modeling before for digital art and decided it wouldn't be too hard. I was in for a world of pain though I persevered. Now the topology may not be the best but it got the job done. The Uvs were equal in difficulty.

Things to learn from my mistakes:

preplan your topology and look out for accidents often

remember you can separate different items it doesn't have to be all in one object

IMPORTANT CHECK YOU NORMALS! They are a pain to fix so make sure you're not messing them up.

By far the most fun step is texturing. Now the amount of options you get can be daunting but with some tutorials it gets easier.

Important tips:

Make sure there is not a duplicated object on top of the one you are trying to texture.

When adding an animated texture make sure to give it frames.

Not much to say about this step just make sure you dont acidently move the object then move the timeline.

When rendering you can use Composing to make your renders more efficient. You first want to create 4 different scenes; one for the earth, one for the atmosphere, one for objects and one for composing it all together.

Tips:

Make sure to copy over your cameras and lights or it will look off.

Make sure to select "Use Nodes" in the upper right hand corner so you can add new nodes.

I personally fiddled with the alpha over to get the image overlay just right.

And there you have it, a completed ship. I hope you like it.

I'd like to give a huge thanks to Cryptic Visionary who streams Maya content on Youtube Instagram and Twitch and to his community of artists for helping me with any questions I asked.

Cryptic Twitch

Cryptic Youtube