Blender Underground

Ok, I know I'm a rank amateur with blender even after the time I've sunk into it. But I did come up with a decent freestyle mesh I made based on a vague idea I had for a shuttle that could go from orbit to surface and back, landing on a variety of surfaces, even liquid ones.

Here's the pics:



















The ideas are that it's fusion powered and intakes atmosphere thru high powered turbofans in the front intakes, passes it thru a fusion core heating the gasses to plasma and venting it out the rear vents for thrust. It has fuel onboard inside the wings and fuselage for vacuum work.

The bumps on the underside hold the complex and strong multi role landing gear.

The pods on the wings contain avionics and communication gear. The rectangular recesses at the rear between the engine vents are hatches, the upper one being used when the swan in floating on a liquid environment. The engine vents allow for thrust vectoring.

The front is shaped the way it is for liquid landings. I hope people at least kind of like it. I tried to keep the mid section from looking too phallic.

There are lots of problems with the mesh I'm having. There are too many verts because I have to use edge split to get the edges and curves right. Also blender got the underside fairly smooth but the damn top part clearly shows lines. They're fairly identical except for scale and angle, I don't know why the bottom's smooth and the top shows facets...

I have a few overlapping faces on the top and bottom halves of the forward hull, They're separate bits extruded from the upper half circular ends of the central hull.

It looks more or less like what I'd envisioned, so I guess it's mostly successful. I may post some quick tuts on how easy it was to do the wings and the tail sections since they were dead easy and a lot simpler than they look and would give a blender newbie some confidence in blender.

First of all, There is a Image width Limit of 640px wide. If you want to have high detailed images like those, please either give us a link to them or make smaller thumbnail versions linking to the larger versions. Just in case you don't already know how to do this with a program like gimp for instance, then there is a tutorial detailing how to do this here on these forums and can be found here:

[ HOWTO ] Making and Using Thumbnails.

Next, While the Image size is beyond the 640px Limit, the Model is awesome, I really like the design of the ship and the like. I really hope to see this textured and hope you'll keep it up.

GREAT WORK.

Sorry I had to change the Images into link on you, but when the images stretch the forums even on my wide screen HD monitor set at it highest (1680x1050) resolution size, then that way too big of an image to not have a thumbnail linking to the larger file.

Pretty cool!

I've seen blender to that thing where it decides to not smooth mesh before, and I don't know why it does it...it may be some really obscure bug.

It's weird but when I click on the links the image fits on the screen.
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As to the ship I'm still tryng to figure out how to kick that smoothing issue, nothing I try seems to work. I'm painstakinsly trying to manually link the upper and lower curved sections on the forward hull.

Yeah, one guy had a cylinder set to level five subsurf, with set-smooth on...and it STILL looked blocky. He eventually deleted it and replaced it, and then it worked, but I think it's just a weird bug.

Well, we can hope that 2.5 or 2.6 addresses this bug