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.

Ongoing projects.

I continue to do animation work for Sonnet films for the time being, and unfortunately cannot show anything as of yet until their official release of The Incursion. Suffice to say it's something original and I will post the final effects and development art here when I can.

In the meantime, I also continue to do stills work for Star Trek: Phoenix, any images of which I'll post here (as above). The producer wanted to show the relative scales of the two ships in the production.

Apologies to all those that have contacted me where I am yet to reply; I am working to get round to you soon.

Planetary Explosion

I was asked to blow up a peaceful planet for Sonnet Realm Films a couple of weeks ago, and it seemed I had very little choice but to comply...



Done mainly in 3DS Max, where the use of glow effects really helped in the final render.