Zee Lightship

[David Kerin]

Hey all...

Playing around with Blender and decided to make a quick model of Dr. Zee's lightship from G1980. Only took a couple hours, so nothing too fancy, but wanted to go for the feel of the ship, and maybe try some animations. Model created with Blender 2.62.

Hope you like!

Dave

[martok2112]

Damn, Dave, that looks FINE!
Excellent lighting too. (Something I still need to work on in Blender...among other aspects of that app.) Yeah, I upgraded to 2.62 as well. Isn't it a great program?

[David Kerin]

Blender is an amazing program. I know a lot of people out there think because its free that it can't match up to the $$$ programs like Lightwave, MAX and others. But once you start looking through blender.org and blendernation.com (as a starting point) and see what people are doing with Blender, you'd be amazed. And its continually being developed. There's the new render engine called Cycles and it produces some beautiful images. Oh, and to top it all off, the program is completely free.

And also check out the 3d motion tracking samples around the web. Also a recently added feature and again... amazing. I hope people don't disregard this program because its free... they'd be doing themselves a great disservice.

Okay... so ends my Blender soap-box.

One other site to check out... blenderguru.com. Run by a fella named Andrew Price, and he has great examples and tutorials.

[David Kerin]

Hey there Martok... for the lights on the ship I simply gave the illuminated materials a emit setting. For the glows I went into the node editor for the scene, added 3 glare nodes. 2 of them were for the Fog Glow, and the other was set to Streaks. Actual lamps in the scene was a single point light. The base material of the saucer is a dark grey with a higher specularity for reflections.

All pretty simple setup, but the glows and streaks really help add something.

[martok2112]

There's a similar glow setting in iClone. There's a glare/flare setting in iClone also, but, I don't know if they've made glare/flare nodes in iClone 5, or if they're still sticking with an overal all source for glares/flares...like in iClone 4. (It would be nice if they did.)

Yes, Blender is an outstanding 3D program for free, and it seems to create models that are just as elegant as any seen in a full cost app like Lightwave or Truespace. The models I make are really basic compared to far more skilled builders/artists out there, but they serve my purposes. As you've always said, it's what you do with the tools to help tell the story.

I'm anxious to see more of your works in Blender, Dave.

[Thunderstruck]

that looks fantastic, I love it too.

[auditor]

Yeah sorry looks flippin' great.