Attached Link: Lyzrd's Stomp - Scratchbuilding Sci-Fi Models, Part 4

I first saw this piece when it was at step 1. Now it's at step 4 and has gotten pretty "deep." It started off describing how to construct a futuristic-looking weapon, but has now moved on to spacecraft hull and engine detailing.

It has nothing to do with computer-based 3-D modeling. The tutorials are all about building real models from scraps of consumer plastic (aspirin bottles, spray bottles, etc.) and cut styrene. But the series goes well into the concept of how to make things visually interesting, with just enough theory and philosophy to help you get the big picture.

I'm posting it here because it's not too tough to conclude that nearly anything you can build in reality with plastic and styrene you can also build virtually by combining 3-D primitives. So it's a terrific resource if you're looking to give your models that extra level of detail and realism we all admire (if the term "realism" can be applied to something which doesn't really exist and probably won't exist for centuries to come, if ever! )

Enjoy!

For spaceship hulls, etc a good thing to use if you have a digital camera is photos of dirty concrete, here is a picture of dirty concrete that would be good for a grimy spaceship hull.

Very interesting
Thanks

Great link - thanks!

I wonder if we'll see less and less of people making this sort of fun stuff in the real world as CGI gets further into the home filmmaker's toolset - or more, because they'll need to hold something cool while standing against their greenscreened CGI backgrounds...

 

a lot of Sci-fi models in studios were made out of car model kits..;)

The top front part of the millenium falcon is the base of a car model kit.

Thanks, JimDoria for mentioning my scratchbuilding/kitbashing tutorials. You're right-they ARE aimed at the traditional model builder (non-CGI), but the techniques do lend themselves to shipmaking/detailing in 3D somewhat (I'm a 3D fan as well-been using Lightwave (and now blender) for a few years now).
Cheers!

i always get a kick out of traditional sci-fi stuff.
for example where he talks about balance in the tiles on a spaceship hull.
there are entire star destroyers with square miles of hull covered with this type of stuff, and i always wanted to know just WTF it is supposed to be anyway....
its like someone, at some point in time, decided that spaceship hulls had to have random extruded squares and cylinders all over them -- and then every single sci-fi film (with the exception of the giger-inspired ones, in which the extruded rectangles are replaced by biomechanical tubes, tumors and phallus-like objects) followed suit... to the point where if a spaceship doesnt have all these little extruded primitives pimpling its surface it is 'unrealistic looking' :)
sure it breaks up a simple primitive like a star destroyer into something more interesting, but it makes no sense.... not to mention it cant be very aerodynamic.

anyways, neat tutorial :)

Heh. You and me both. I'm loving this tutorial and am looking forward to trying some of his ideas (I do wish he had spent more time in philosophy and less in "next cut some more rectangles" stuff). That said, I agree with the "what is this stuff?" comment. Gives me endless trouble when I try to model or draw tech. I guess I hang around machines that actually work too much. So where I should be slapping on random detail instead I'm thinking "that's an access panel for this, these condoits are running from a switch box here to the subsystem here, this is a grab handle..."

in case anyone's interested in methods to texture sf stuff, stonemason has posted a tutorial to cgsociety.  it contains some interesting techniques.

2001 is where it pretty much started..since in space, there's no need for streamlining..;) I think Silent Running built on that, and it just went nuts from there (Star Wars had a lot to do with it too..;)

At least Star Wars introduced the "lived in" look. Although that too can go overboard, as evidenced by Alien. (Aliens reigned it in somewhat). And, yah, Douglas Trumbull was the SFX supervisor on 2001 -- I recall at the time Silent Running was considered "Now the guy who made the ships for that makes his own movie." So it was unsurprising that it expanded on the style. What I think starts to go wrong with all these doo-dads is that it becomes increasingly obvious these movie spaceships are just too massive to begin with. You have a hard time imagining a shipyard building all that, and even more trouble imaging a crew actually pulling maintenance on it. Whereas on something like, I dunno, The Hornet (I have a WWII aircraft carrier in the neighborhood so that's my point of reference for giant vehicles), much of the surface/detail is not human scale. It's stuff like hull plating that humans rarely have to interact with directly. Where the human-scale fittings are -- hatches, access covers, ladders, railings, valves, labels -- they tend to cluster together. And they increase in number around where humans generally are. There's a ton of widgets all around the flight operations tower...and practically nothing along the hull down by the waterline. Real human stuff has flow, has organization, and has concentration. Besides, much of what is happening in real technology involves getting This from Here to There, perhaps with transformations. So 20KV lines come down to a substation, then the high voltage lines spread out from there in dendritic fashion to local transformers... Or fuel exits tank, is passed through pumps, compressors, injectors... I'd say the hardest details to fake convincingly are those forced by functional considerations. Look at the segmentation on a Shirow mech, for instance; how he has figured out (with undoubtadly drawing after drawing) how to open the shell and get a human pilot in and out smoothly. Look at the way a van door slides or an anvil case unlatches; elegant and non-trivial solutions to necessary movements. Those are the sorts of details I'd love to see in a made-up item of future tech. (Heh...of all the families of greeble, I could easily dislike Star Trek Next-Gen most -- random plexi shapes and when in doubt, add more blinking LED's)

rofl

i really liked the matrix.
have you seen the high-res photos of the neb interior? greasy steel like a machine shop, and about 5 tonnes of misc cabling (most looked like ethernet).
i toyed with the idea of modeling something like that for poser, but the average PC would crap itself trying to load the mesh, even if i kept the wiring really simple. besides, temples seem to sell better anyway.

im also a huge fan of  the alien movies... although most of giger's other stuff gives me the willies, with all the hidden penii and pervo stuff. that guy needs to get out of the house more :)

i really dont like superclean space stuff.. star trek generally comes to mind. even the klingon ships looked squeaky clean.... you could smell the pine-sol.

I dunno. It actually made a nice change...I kinda like the "California Split-level" bridge in Next Generation. But, yeah, as far as spending a lot of your time living and working there...I'd trade the intentionally sterile and dehumanizing enviro's of 2001, and the way-too-cluttered tech of Alien, or the seemingly Barbarella-influenced tech of Star Trek, for that comfortable lived-in interior of, say, the Millennium Falcon. Now THERE was a spacecraft that felt like an oft-driven vintage muscle car -- a Mustang I in space. Is this the time to go on a texturing rant? I get soooo bloody tired of really rich textures (rusty metal, et al) that are just flood-filled over some tech mesh. Its rather the worst of both worlds. You get a confusing and cluttered look, but there is no overriding sense of it; no shading, no bleaching, no oil runs or any of the visual cues that in a real object would tell you about its shape. Oh, I guess I wasn't clear in my last post. Think Death Star. A lot of that stuff looks like access panels. So.....that crew is really crawling out on the surface, unscrewing panels to replace fuses in one of those boxes? All over the ship? What would that be....one maintenance tech for every ten square meters of surface, in constant rotation? Can you really imagine that thing plowing through space with ten thousand guys clinging to the outside?

Last guy who asked that question got his throat Force-Crushed...

 

Other way around, I do believe. "Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of The Force."

Detailing provides some "wow" factor of course, and it helps to sell the idea of scale, especially on a small TV screen. "Look at all that detail - that thing must be HUGE!"

At some point though it just gets silly. Star Wars is a prime example. Star Destroyers were massive, but in the second movie, they added Darth Vader's command ship, which dwarfed the star destoyers. You start to wonder if they had to de-populate entire star systems just to get the crew to run these things. (Of course, they did have a lot of robots - oops, droids - to help out.)

Star Wars is just pure fantasy, though, and never pretended to be anything but. There's an argument to be made that it's not even properly science fiction, since the science is mostly absent and totally god-awful and wacky when it appears. (The Force is everywhere - surrounds us, penetrates us, moves mountains, yadda yadda... but, um, it's really caused by - uh - something like... hemoglobin!)

But there is some justification. Real space craft often seem to have that "hatches and panels everywhere" look, as aesthetics are rarely a concern, and artifacts left over from construction are not always hidden in the final product. Plus, if you look at an aerial view of any city, you get a very similar impression of complexity.

Actually, the Death Star looks pretty much like what I would expect, considering it was probably designed by no fewer than six dozen committees, all working for different branches of the Empire and and only vaguely aware of each others' existence, each one trying to defend their turf, get their own favorite features implemented, move up the corporate ladder, and avoid having their throats crushed by the CEO! :biggrin:

Great link, thanks. Great inspirational ideas.

<strong>bandolin</strong><br />
[Former 3DS Max forum coordinator]<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.renderosity.com/homepage.php">Homepage</a> ||
<a href="http://www.renderosity.com/mod/sitemail/">SiteMail</a> ||
<a href="http://excalibur.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/browse.php?user_id=70375">
Gallery</a> || <a href="http://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/index.php?username=bandolin">
Freestuff</a>
<p><em>Caution: just a hobbyist</em></p>

I just saw the first movie again. (To those of us who were alive at the premier, "The" Star Wars.) Actually, a lot of the detailing sells pretty well. There are only a few shots -- mostly Death Star surface, although the top of the Millennium Falcon also falls prey to this -- where the generic greeblies TM are a little too obvious. Compare with, say, the detailings on R2D2 -- most of them have a convincingly functional feel about them. (I was also more distracted than I should have been by recognizing a few props here and there. My fault for reading "making of" trivia. Particularly distracted when they fire the planet buster by sitting down a bunch of Imperials at an old video switcher......)

Quote - My fault for reading "making of" trivia. Particularly distracted when they fire the planet buster by sitting down a bunch of Imperials at an old video switcher......)

...or the small sections of translucent garden hose (showing the cross-hatched webbing) afixed to Vader's belt.  I don't know if the belt was "upgraded" for the "...Sith" production, but I read that the "classic" armor suit had them.  Sure enough, when I examined a life-sized promo standing cut-out at the local Wal-Mart, I could clearly see the garden hose.

Sincerely,

Bill

The first star wars film had a low budget, so all the effects couldn`t be expensive.

Quote - The first star wars film had a low budget, so all the effects couldn`t be expensive.

Please, don't misunderstand me.  My observation wasn't a complaint, merely a humorously nostalgic anecdote.  If the numbers are to be believed, Kubrick's "2001" cost 10 million in 1968 dollars, whereas "Star Wars" cost 9.5 mil in 1977 dollars.  Inflation during that would have "SW" even less expensive than it already was.

Considering it was a 20th Century Fox production, I'm kinda' surprised they didn't toss in the "Lost in Space" B9 Robot as filler for the interior SandCrawler shots.  Being damaged as it was in real life would have merely added to the "lived in" look to the rest of the film.

Sincerely,

Bill

I love this tutorial. Thank you. I don't know if this would be welcome in this thread but I feel I have a problem with relying too much on nurnies to get a futuristic look. I am hoping to do it more with design but I need guidance. I just don't imagine a futuristic hair dryer having an excess of tubbing and hoses coming off it ; ) That is a joke. I am not wanting to do hair dryers, I have been trying cyborg parts, robots, and control consoles. I am probably most concerned with what the bridge of a ship and what the keypads on things like storage and airlock doors would look like. I can't get out to rent movies but I have been trying to study incidental close ups on the ones of which I do get a hold. I got some good advise in a separate thread but I am hoping for direction to more in depth resources. "Specyualative design"? "Trends in interface design"? I even wrote to the designer of the starship interiors for the movie Alien but I have not heard back yet.

Quote - I am hoping to do it more with design but I need guidance. I just don't imagine a futuristic hair dryer having an excess of tubbing and hoses coming off it ; ) That is a joke. I am not wanting to do hair dryers, I have been trying cyborg parts, robots, and control consoles.

You joke, but the same principle applies: if something simple works, why should there be something different in the future that does the exact same thing?  The basic shape of a axe has been around for several hundred thousand years because it works and there's no need to upgrade it.

"Space: 1999" has a good example of how to do it wrong.  You'd see characters whip out this big, bulky thing that opened doors like a remote control.  Well if all it did was open locks, why not simply use a key?  And if was just opening unlocked doors, why not simply have a button on the wall that you pushed?

A good example of what the design of a spaceship bridge might look like are supertankers. They are much more low-tech looking than one would expect.

Also, submarines might give a good idea of what a spaceship interior might look like.

If you have the chance, I strongly recommend getting inside a ship yourself. Any ship will do...car ferry, large sailing boat. But the stuff that so obviously inspired so much of the accepted "look" of SF movies would be warships (and to a lesser extent, warbirds). If you have a large port around you chances are there is something like "Fleet Week," when the Navy comes to town and has open house on several ships. My town is lucky enough to have several major pieces of WWII hardware floating around -- the Hornet, a small aircraft carrier that saw service up into the 60's (it was a recovery ship for Apollo 11!), the Jeremiah O'Brien, the last remaining Liberty Ship in original condition (go down to the engine room sometime when they are firing up the boilers!), and the Pampenito, and small and interestingly cramped WWII submarine. Or, if you are inland, chances are big there's an airshow somewhere. Especially fun to poke your head into something like a C-141 Starlifter or goggle at the C-5a Galaxy. Actually, honestly, much of my SF scenery (which only exists as sketches and diagrams for plastic model dioramas) came more than anything out of large modern airport interiors.