Sunday Space Flight
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Curiously, my first YouTube video was 7 seconds long. The second was 6 seconds. And the third is 5 seconds. At this rate, pretty soon I’ll just be posting single frames…
Anyway, so today (and yesterday) I worked on a new space ship design. Picked up some tips from another modeler on my last design, so figured I’d start from scratch and see what I could do.
As well as modeling the ship (which is fairly basic, except for the addition of a Docking Bay door, which none of my previous models have had), I also did the textures (what 3D modelers call what you would normally identify as the “paint job”) and the displacement map, which gives the tiled appearance on the ship. Mind you, I spent more time on the texture map than on the displacement map. I hope to do better tiling in the future.
I think I am finally getting the hang of 3D modeling. Not quite ready to take on anything too elaborate just yet, but I feel that I am finally getting into the swing of creating things. Still a lot to learn, but I feel that I am making some progress.
Oh, the video? Here:
I still need to learn the best format to submit to YouTube to get a good quality image. If I render as a QuickTime movie with no compression, I get a high quality movie that YouTube rejects. If I render with MPEG-4 compression (tried 90 KBytes/sec and 192 KBytes/sec) and I get a low quality image (like you see) that YouTube takes, but it looks bad. Video encoding will be another day’s lesson.
The flight path did not turn out as I had hoped. While I did focus the camera on the ship, in the hopes of creating an effect where you stick with the ship but you can tell that it’s flying through space, the flight path was supposed to appear as though it was going straight ahead, with some banking. But, it just appears to wobble in space.
And, the flame exhaust isn’t really animated either. It moves, but the flames don’t have any real motion. That’ll be a future learning experience too.
I am most proud of the Docking Bay door on this one. It could still do with more detail, but it is more detail than I have had on my previous models. This was relatively easy. Since I was creating a model from scratch, I could simply add the door where ever it was easy to do. I also chose a place that was a reasonable place to have one. But, if I were trying to recreate a specific ship design, it would be more difficult, as determining a precision location is going to be harder than just sticking it where it is convenient. You know?
I also think the bridge (the “glass” bubble on top) turned out fairly well. That was more due to the lighting than the ship design.
Enough play for now. I’ve got to get some work things done now…
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Alright Dan! I tried to get into some digital animation but didn’t get anywhere. It takes time and much experience, but is worth the effort. What program are you using? The one I used was blender, which I operated on a linux pc because it ran much faster than on windows:)
I downloaded Blender, but really didn’t like the interface. Seemed clumsily designed, although I admit I really didn’t get into it much. I gave up after trying to open an existing file with its clunky file management opening system.
I used Silo 2 for modeling, Photoshop for textures, and then I rendered and animated in Carrara 5 Pro.
Dan- please don’t kill me because your animations are super cool-
but the flames kind of looked like a tongue wagging in and out of
an alien mouth to me…
like going “nah nah nah nah NAH…”
I know. I think I need a plug-in or something to create realistic flames. I just figured some amount of animation was better than none at all.
[…] attempt. It’s a whole two seconds long, which is good for those with short attention spans. My last animation weighed in at 5 seconds long, so this new one will be even quicker to […]