December 2016 Challenge: Tannhauser Gate

[Falconius]

Been trying to figure out clouds and how to make it work in Blender and I'm making slow progress but progress nonetheless. Part of the problem is that I have to render it using the CPU because it times out on the GPU doing all this volume scatter stuff, even for this incomplete simple render it took 45 min.
### Latest WIP ###
progress.png

[Falconius]

### Latest WIP ###
StarfeildStars.png

Obviously got a hell of a lot of tweaking to do. But its sort of in the spirit of what I'm looking for now, and it's the right composition roughly. I'm going to experiment with the clouds not being volume scatter objects but rather maybe look at how they look as more fluid materials without the surface glare. Also a possibility is putting misty tendrils on the surfaces of the clouds so they actually look somewhat cloudy as opposed to blobs in space. There is one in the top left corner but it's not very visible. I've also got a list of ship types and space objects for the siege of the gate (including the gate).
I'm thinking:
Attack Ships (basically heavy artillery with one giant central weapon)
Weapons Platform Ships (ships carrying inter ship attack and defence weapon systems)
Assault Ships (Ships that burst forwards carrying marines to board and take enemy facilities)
Supply Ships for both inter ship supply (ammo and stuff) and larger bulk freighters from which they work
Jump Beacons (which gives the gates a point in space at which to reliably aim)
Jump Gates/Tannhauser Gate

And also possibly others such as a Command Coordinator ship, Battle Recon ships, I remember playing EVE they had "logistical ships" which would basically send extra shields and power to other ships during a fight and while the idea is tempting I think I'll skip that sort of thing. Seems too clean and pretty for that setting. Same thing with energy shields, perhaps something else though.. If I get to it, that actually looks like a long list....

[timallen]

I like it so far!

[Meshon]

This is a great idea! Don't forget, those C-beams need to glitter!

cheers,
Meshon

[Ilanthar]

Being a Blade Runner fan, I'm watching this with interest .

[Falconius]

OK so I was starting to do all the set pieces for the map, and they were supposed to be very simple low poly things because they'd be viewed so far away. Unfortunately I got TOTALLY carried away with it after I started the attack ship and spent all my time working on that instead of the map.
AttS1.png
That's all shields closed. I haven't been able to figure out how to rig the armatures and tie them to objects yet because there is some issue with parenting them that isn't working out right for me, but essentially that trapezoid arrangement of shields expands to open the side maneuvering thrusters. And the forward shields arranged in a pentagon hinge and flower out when the gun is preparing to fire.
Shot of the aft section:
AttS2.png
The reason for the long arm sticking out the back of the ship is to counter weight the gun at the front and center the mass of the ship. It also happens to make a nice place to put defence turrets and communications arrays (I'm not happy with the array's I may change them). You can sort of see the two landing airlocks there in the darkness just above and below where the counterweight arm comes out of the main section.
And finally the ship with all the shielding removed:
AttS3.png
I put giant gyroscopes which you can kind of see, there is a round section for each primary axis. I figure they'd help with maneuvering and maintaining a constant position reading.

[Mouse]

Oh WOW! This is going to be an epic production. Excellent work so far

[Straf]

Haha! I love it, the urge to draw spaceships is just something that we can never shake off.

I'm looking at those and at the stellar background and really looking forward to the finished article.

[Ilanthar]

And I thought I lost time with unnecessary details about trebuchets & ballistas...
Your spaceship is amazing! Worth the time, but now, go on mapping again !

[Falconius]

Thanks for the encouragement and comments everyone
I broke down and started doing the low poly models for the map. Not included here is the Jump Balancer Array, it was too busy to include.
### Latest WIP ###
LabeledSetPeices1.jpg
I did make a human size comparison object but it's only a couple pixels big in relation to everything there. It's space, go BIG or go home. Right?


As an aside: I did the labels in Inkscape and Holy God it is frustrating when all the short cuts you've learned for a program are replaced by new shortcuts in a different program. I could barely figure out how to move the canvas since in my infinite wisdom I removed the scroll bars as I found them too cluttered before. Not quite like riding a bicycle.