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Spaceship 3: blueprints

I've been working nightshift the last few weeks. I come home with NO energy to do anything other than stare into the middle distance. That's why this post comes almost a full month after the last one.

This is more or less the final design. I may tweak a few details as I go, but it will pretty much look like this. I'm going to print these out at 1:1 scale and use them to cut all the wood (or styrene if I can find any) to start off with.

Spaceship 3: Rough sketches

I've drawn out the initial rough sketches of Spaceship 3. It's going to be a Space island cruise ship. I'm going to light it with several short fiber optic strands that I have. I'll also incorporate LEDs wherever needed. 

Comicon Inspired project #1: Spaceship 3

So, we went to comicon and as with any convention I was all like "I'm totally going to change my life after this! Everything is art from now on!" Mostly, this is all bullshit. I get back home and I have to do dishes or something and all the inspiration disappears. HOWEVER, I did promise myself I would do three things after comicon. The first project was inspired by the above three photos. Every year at Comicon and Megacon, there's a booth that has a ton of beautiful models from various anime's I've never seen. These models are inspiring and amazing and I always say to myself "Someday I'll do that!" Well, this time I'm actually going to do that. I've made two model ships in my day, one of which still adorns my portfolio site: http://www.sculptwerks.com/spaceship1.htm

I called it 'spaceship1'. It lit up and was fun at the time. My second ship (called spaceship2) lit up and had rotating engines and a gun that came out of the front. It never got on my portfolio site as it was hideous. The third one was supposed to be a future police ship with lowering landing gears and lights. That one never got finished.... then over seven years passed.... nothing happened. Until I took the above photos at Comicon and promised myself I'd make spaceship 3. It probably wont be a police ship (only decided by the fact that I had a little chip that made a red and blue LED flash), but I want it to be as close to a masterpiece as I can get. I've been playing around with sketches and I have a nice fighter design. But I kind of want to do something bigger and more grandiose. 

If I can't come up with anything I like that's larger, I'm going to totally do this instead. 

ZBrush chapter 4. Dragon so far....

So here's my dragon at chapter 4. I've been very pleased so far with the book! I'm more comfortable with z-spheres and some of the sculpting tools. I can't wait to start texturing and adding dorsal spikes (and possibly wings.). It seems like the book starts to teach a whole bunch of chapters worth of other techniques that have nothing to do with the dragon from here on out, so I'm not sure how long it will take before I post another dragon update.

ZBrush: The end of chapter 3

Okay, so here's where I am with my dragon at the end of chapter 3. I like it much better than the last dragon I tried on Sculptris. The ability to separately sculpt a tooth, and then copy it into the mesh is nice, but the transpose tool is a nightmare....

Z-Brush Chapter 3...

So apparently z-brush has a movie feature! Yay! I no longer need to animate frame by frame manually anymore to get turnarounds! Here's a little look at the dragon head the book has me doing in chapter 3. I'm just about to get to the 'insert brushes' section to create eyes! This is basically where my self taught knowledge left me. From here on out, it will be completely new stuff!