My Trial by Comics entry - The Millennium Falcon

The sound of silence in that big black mantel called space...the majestically hovering of that spaceship getting bigger as it closes in to your screen and the sound of the engine rotors getting louder was just breathtaking... No walls in space so the sound would echo for infinity giving that "larger than life" feel to it and last but not least that electronic "BIP!" going off periodically into the vacuum like an ending tip of a complex technology running in the background of that big "machine", like a submarine signaling peaceful messages to infinity and beyond...

...That was by far the best part of those movies or the ones I enjoyed the most because it reflects Peace, stretching it out in an infinity space just like it would be in Paradise...infinite, just like God!

That's how I felt and still feel whenever I see the Millennium Falcon...

Initially inspired by this illustration...

...I thought this is a job for a computer and I started looking online for the spaceship textures so I can project it on the surface of my 3d model that I was going to make...

I found what I could at the moment and had to polish them out and correct their axis so everything would fit right in later on here are some of them...

Top and Bottom view

some lateral views

and of course the cockpit

Exported everything in Blender and started outlining the texture to finally extrude the shapes into solids and intersect them together, here is the overview of the workshop

Outlining

Shaping...

Drawing some details

And here is the whole idea behind the extrusion part, it is very simple, well at least it looks like ;P

Gave shape to other details like cockpit, dish, turret, the hatch and vents...

Final result

As was ready to render and doing last checks I bumped on a paper model cut and bend instructor that had I found it earlier I would have saved time polishing and adjusting those texture but I am glad I did as they were awesome!

These are some of sheets but you can see the details and accuracy already!

I trimmed out the excesses, scaled it down to my model and replaced every texture with its correspondent, luckily it was an automated process and I didn't have to do it manually one by one even though I had to change the axis and the origin point which is meticulous just the same but once you are done it pretty much quickly unveils itself to my satisfaction and relief so in a couple of hours I was able to flip the final result to this as you can see below

It is amazing how the textures can bring to life something... by first look one can say there is a lot of details on this drawing but don't realize it is mostly a picture ;)...Too bad it isn't the same on the inside

I guess it is a space inside an outer space, floating... buzzing...bipping ... (that's a word?)...to infinity and beyond...