Wintery photoshop expedition

This is the first (ever) image I've entirely done in photoshop. Due to the "severe" weather conditions over here in England, my fiance kept badgering me for a starship in the snow - so here we are...She also named it after a boat she used to have as a child, the U.S.S. Kirrin.

Insignia/Ascension class size comparison

To answer a question that is frequently asked about these two ships, I've done a scaled sized comparison chart to show the relative sizes - the Insignia Class is 560 meters in length and
the Ascension Class is 1400 meters in length...

New Year, New ship

Here are some preliminary renders of a ship I've been working on in between cooking too much Turkey and singing Old Lang Syne: A ship provisionally billed as the Hawkings Class because, well, that's just what came to mind.

A little reminiscent of the Sovereign and Interpid classes, I am more using the design to test the faster creation of models and to keep the poly count down. Currently I'm not too happy with the panels and the stardrive section needs windows along with lots of other detail, but from these pics you can get an early impression:

Sulaco type ship mock up

I mocked this up the other day as an Aliens Sulaco-type vessel. Thanks to it's angular nature it didn't take long, so I'm going to just do a little modelling tidy up and then move on to texturing it.

Encouraging results with Blender

I downloaded the latest alpha release of Blender 3D the other day, mainly down to it's use of volumetrics. I've been agnosing over the last few weeks about how to create a realistic 3D nebula effect much like the Mutara Nebula from Star Trek II:


The 3D Sphere at the top of this post was created by me in Blender where volumetrics were used to create that of a 3D cloud, an effect I've struggled to create in other 3D apps. It actually didn't take me as long as I thought, do I'll see if I can start making future images with it.

I mainly used this page as a guide to creating it; Blender's UI is still taking some getting used to, but seems well worth the effort.

I'd animate the sphere, when I can manage to work out how... ;)

Insignia Class U.S.S. Challenger

Some highish res images of the old Insignia Class for a Star Trek sim.

Something blue

It seemed I'd done a fair few orange things lately, so I thought I'd try something blue.

Done for www.stphoenix.com.