No Pixels Were Harmed In The Making of These Images

I Started With An Idea

In my career I have spent thousands of hours working mostly on architecture and environmental art. Doing concept art for spacecraft is not what I would consider to be my bread and butter. After a recent project I impressed the director of a project enough that he showed some of my work to other colleagues. I found that project to be kind of exciting because it was a new venture for me. It took me out of my comfort zone which can be a good thing for an artist.

So one of these people asked if I would concept something different for one of their projects and I spent about a week trying come up with an original take on a spaceship. Frankly I had no idea. But then I started to imagine what the pilot would see and I got the spark of a new concept. Most pilot positions are made from a mount that is fixed on the floor. I thought it might be cool to have one that was suspended from the ceiling that would pivot so the pilot could have a large field of view. I also thought that it might be cool to have this pilot position be self contained.

I played with various cockpit configurations. Originally as in the first image the pilot was going to sit in sort of a bubble of glass and structural metal. But somehow after that part was done I hit sort of a creative wall. Usually there are more people than just the pilot on a big ship and this was mean to be sort of a mid sized cruising vessel so it makes sense that it would have more of a command crew than just a lone pilot. So it was clear that I was going to need a bit more deck space. This is where the second image comes in. I laid out approximately the area that I thought the crew might need. In addition I thought that there should be a large front window or what would be the point in having a pivoting pilot position. Though the thought hit me that if the pilot also was able to operate a weapon mounted on a hard point that it might be easier to aim if he or she could pivot with the guns at least to a certain point.

Progress Is Slow

I have tried several designs now for the body of the craft and am not really thrilled about the progress that I have made to date. That is one of the challenges with concept stuff. To design and model at the same time can be kind of a bad idea. Usually it takes a lot of experimentation and that is definitely not the short path to getting concept work done.

To create what I have so far has taken me through several content creation systems. These are Modo, 3Ds Max, and Zbrush and along the way have been rendered in both Corona Renderer and Redshift. The latter package is a super fast renderer but I am not very familiar with creating textures for it.