Ready! Aim! Oh yea.. we haven't built that yet.

So the ship realistically (or atleast being as realistic as you can when talking about spaceships) can now fly and look.. somewhat like a ship (if we're willing to call that a defining attribute) however, anyone you knows anything about sci fi can tell you, every time a ship goes into space, there is usually some sort of space battle (See; 'Lost in Space', 'Star Wars', 'Star Trek', 'Serenity', 'Stargate', for details.), now everyone loves a good space battle, however the length of a space battle is usually determined on how big/powerful your weapons are in comparison to the other guys(or girls for sexual equalities-sake) So as in our case we have none, and robotwars style ramming is out of the question we're gonna need some, and as weaponry is my favourite.. let's make them big.

Unfortunately I've only yet designed one sort of turret, influenced by the ones seen during the Deathstar trench scene during Episode 4.



And, as you can see, the base of the turret follows the same style as the engines on the back. This I believe is the kind of thing which will make it look rather good after everything is finished.

More coming soon.

We're entering.. Lightspeed?

Or atleast we would be if we had any sort of propulsion. So I had finished tinkering with the hull design, for now atleast, and it was time to make the damn thing move. Or atleast make the idea of it moving slightly more feasible and realistic than a float hunk of metal in space with no visible engines.

First I designed a possible engine. Now I agree it could possibly pass as a mere pipe. However let us use our imaginations, and pretend there's s a blue glowing light emitting from the back. See it? Good. Engine, not pipe.


Now with a clever bit of cloning and scaling, we can actually some sort of propulsion going on, atleast the means to!


I quite liked the look of this, however the spacing is a little off. More tinkering will take place before we're able to launch!

I had another concept for possible engines, this next one is influenced by the ship Destiny, as seen in Stargate Universe. As you will see on my design, the engines aren't the same but I liked the concept of long engines that filled the rear of the ship.


Destiny, as seen on SG:U


To create a similar sort of effect that Destiny has for my ship I would need to remodel the backend of my ship, I may look into this more later but as I said, I've been taking ideas from other ships, not just stealing them.

The skys the limit. Unless you have autodesk.

So a friend of mine is looking at producing his own sci fi films and asked that if one day I'd be able to produce him something realistic enough looking to actually be used in such a film.

Now I didn't want to make a promise I may not have been able to keep, but brushing up on autodesk and trying some different techniques couldn't hurt!

Below are some of the models I've produced over the last few weeks in order to give myself a better feel for the software, and for modelling objects based on already existing ones.


Using the plane primitive I textured a complete image onto it of the rough look I was going for to help during the shaping process.


For a better insight of what it might eventually look like I started playing round with a few textures.


This is one of the final shapes of the ship before additional modification began, unlike the one below, this is the ship in it's standard form.


This ship is the same as the one above, however, out of curiosity I decided to see what effect the TurboSmooth modifier would have on it. I think it looks rather good, however given that I'm aiming for it to look more like the initial picture, I will stick to not using that specific modifier for now.

Snake Tank

So this is probably the first thing I've done with almost-customer specification. My housemate had asked if it were possible for me to design him a new snake tank using autodesk. Having given me all measurements I started working on it.

It was quite fun modelling something for an actual purpose rather than just because I can.

The model is to scale, meaning if he specified something was 'X' amount of millimeters long physically, then the model represented this on a 1:1 ratio.

Below is the finished tank whilst empty, and the finished tank with a few makeshift items in there to hopefully please it's new owner.

Autodesk, helping construct the ridiculous.

So after running through some tutorials I got a little bored and strayed from the target. Constructing a blockstone walk way, for what seemed to be some sort of Aztec culture, wasn't nearly as exciting as modelling weaponry.

Stonepath, or Minigun? You decide.



Now, Miniguns are definitely up there on the list of 'Cool Weaponry' and very few things can top that. Unless! You take a page from the Gears of War book where, in short, anything with a chainsaw on it, is ultimately more cool than anything without said attachment.



Some projects never really getting moving, especially when they're just a pair of wheels with no form of power behind them. Modelled some tanktracks with the intention of finishing it off, and hopefully I will! At some point.

Summer Tinkering

So for the Summer, Andy tasked me with buying a book on Autodesk and working through the tutorials ready to start in October.

Learning Autodesk 3ds Max 2010 Foundation for Games

A lot of it was basic techniques covered in the seminars last year, however it did go into a little more detail when it came to textures and some techniques for building more complex primitives from simple ones.

Below is the screenshot of my finished piece for one of the tutorials I followed.



The book was a bit misleading in places but I think that may just be possible discrepancies between the book and the current copy of 3ds max I was using.