A study in ships

I "sketched" out a few ships in 3d, some using some reference material from conceptships.org, and one from a vague mental image I had of the ship in the early sequences in the movie "The Fifth Element". The latter is what I started to flesh out first (in Houdini):

From 3D 2009-2010

From 3D 2009-2010

From 3D 2009-2010

More details:

From

From 3D 2009-2010

From 3D 2009-2010

And more details!

From 3D 2009-2010

From 3D 2009-2010

From 3D 2009-2010

Command tower:

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Engines:

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Quickie experiment for adding thrust:

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Foo fighter finished

Say that three times, fast!

OK, here's the basic model that I'm hoping to base a tutorial off of:

From 3D 2009-2010

From 3D 2009-2010

From 3D 2009-2010

From 3D 2009-2010

Earth, from Houdini

Here's an Earth (and the Moon peeking out to the side) scene built from scratch with Houdini and several custom shaders. This was built based on techniques from 3DBuzz's "Maya Fundamentals" tutorials, and adapted to Houdini. I'd strongly recommend these to anyone getting started in 3D, really worth the money!

First initial cut (youtube video), using low resolution texture maps:


After looking around a bit, this is a render with much higher resolution texture maps, and the result is pretty dramatic, in my opinion:

From 3D 2009-2010

A few changes to the settings, and using even better imagery for the texture maps, I got this. The images can be found at Tor Oera's site.

From 3D 2009-2010

From 3D 2009-2010

Same thing in video format:

Another cut of the foofighter

Here's version two, which I think is what I'm going to stick with:

Clay shot

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Wires

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From 3D 2009-2010

From 3D 2009-2010

More clay shots:

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With materials:

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From 3D 2009-2010

Detail close up, near the power charging unit:

From 3D 2009-2010