Many little space ships...

[CompanyB]

I've been playing around in Zbrush at work..and have been focused on designing at least one small space fighter a week to make myself fluent with all the 3D tools.


The ships can be any scale..so I've been printing them out the same scale as the X-wing miniatures.


More to come as I get some painted up and get some new designs completed!

[dijit]

Lovely stuff! 

[Inso]

Very cool 

[housecaldwell]

In ZBrush?  Wow - I thought that was more for organic modeling.  I guess it does help with those sweeping lines, though.  Is it difficult to get the panel lines and more mechnical bits sculpted?  (I'm planning on purchasing zBrush in March to go along with my current sculpting tool of MOI)

How are you printing them?   

Sorry for all the questions but you are doing what I want to do. :-)  (I've done a few things via Shapeways)

[TwoGunBob]

Super cool stuff! I can't say why, maybe it's just all the different designs but it totally cooks up a Battle Beyond the Stars vibe in my head. Even though the designs don't bear like anything in common with them. I'm just weird.

[CompanyB]

I actually find Zbrush is great at quickly knocking out sculptures either organic or hard surface. Especially for miniatures and printing miniatures this small. I probably would not use it for high resolution renders for video...but for miniatures and toys it's pretty good. A few robots I knocked out..



I can knock out a ship in a hour, once I have all the pieces.  All the space ships are actually different combinations of about 2 dozen different components I've crafted.  Once you've made one wing, or engine, you can reshape it over and over for different uses.  For panel lines, I just draw/incise them into the mesh using a wacom tablet.  Or I can also create black and white designs in illustrator and stamp them into the mesh.


It's exactly the same as working in clay or green stuff.

For printing, I just use the mesh to .stl export built into Zbrush (and this is Zbrush core..not the full suite so it's only $150!!)
Once exported I upload to Shapeways and use their online 3D tools to size the files to what I want, then print away!
You can see the shapeways renders here: https://www.shapeways.com/shops/companyb

Luckily the princes for Extreme detail are pretty low for stuff this size.  Should be easy enough to cast these in metal once I have a few dozen designs done

-Brent

[Hobby Services]

Very nice.  Planning on selling the metals once they're made?

[tomrommel1]

very nice spaceships indeed

[Andym]

Any chance of you upscaling some of those ships and selling them? There's some great designs and I think they'd be great as 28mm sci fi cars if they were made the right size! I'd buy them for my Megacity 1 project!

In particular, I'm thinking these would be great.....





Maybe without the turret on the second two.

[Jagannath]

These look great - we need more squadron scale ship miniatures. As an aside, how taxing on a computer is ZBrush? I've got a 5 year old MacBook Pro with 8gig of ram that's pretty healthy, I quite fancy a dabble if it was up to it.

[CompanyB]

>>Selling the metal ships?

Yes. I have a rule set these will go along with now, and I am working on the writing for the ship stats and the histories, etc.  I may have  poll though as to which ships.  I have about 12 right now...probably will wait till I have 50 then pick out the best ones.

>>Upscaling?
Sure.  These can be in any scale.  Maybe once I have the fleet scale ones completed I can look into limited runs in resin of a few of the others.  I haven't thought about future cars..maybe that can be the next project for reworking some of these. It could be an small cast on demand project like the E50M I'm doing in the Weird War thread.

>>Zbrush:  Pixelogic has a free app called Sculptris that is pretty much the core of Zbrush.  I use a 2012 MacBook Air and I'm seriously underpowered for 3D, but it zips along just fine.  A big need with Zbrush though is a Wacom Tablet.  It's simple a must have, especially for sculpting humans.  I have a 32 inch Cintique tablet and 2 pens.  That alone is double the price of my laptop.

I would say that if you are good at sculpting with clay, and drawing with a pencil, you can slide right into Zbrush within two or three weeks with constant workflow and lots of tutorials. My workflow is also to have each model be composed of dozens of smaller parts and shapes.  So in the ship image above...I pretty much am using that same wedge wing (the small ship with the turrets) on every single winged ship.  The wings are just stretched, squished, trimmed, or somewhat altered.  Once you build a library of parts though, thats when the program becomes fun to use, as you have a starting point.  I have to admit though that when I picked up Zbrush and started playing with it...I didn't have any specific type of creation in mind.  I just played with it and tried to discover uses for the shapes I was creating.  I think I would be still stuck in the tutorials if I had something specific in mind.

I'm also sculpting some 28mm figures.  I have a series of miniatures and characters I'm working on for a company B WW2 release in the next year or so...  But that's another future thread.

[Jagannath]

Thanks both, interesting to know - we have a Wacom at the office that my photographer and designer bought in haste last year that I could make use of. Something to mull over anyway. Sorry to derail.

Ships look mega though - if you could do a 1/300 lander/orbital type VTOL I'd bite your hand off for it!

[Bergil]

Totally jealous of your zbrush skills there. Love those little fighters and robots

[Andym]

>>Selling the metal ships?

Yes. I have a rule set these will go along with now, and I am working on the writing for the ship stats and the histories, etc.  I may have  poll though as to which ships.  I have about 12 right now...probably will wait till I have 50 then pick out the best ones.

>>Upscaling?
Sure.  These can be in any scale.  Maybe once I have the fleet scale ones completed I can look into limited runs in resin of a few of the others.  I haven't thought about future cars..maybe that can be the next project for reworking some of these. It could be an small cast on demand project like the E50M I'm doing in the Weird War thread.

>>Zbrush:  Pixelogic has a free app called Sculptris that is pretty much the core of Zbrush.  I use a 2012 MacBook Air and I'm seriously underpowered for 3D, but it zips along just fine.  A big need with Zbrush though is a Wacom Tablet.  It's simple a must have, especially for sculpting humans.  I have a 32 inch Cintique tablet and 2 pens.  That alone is double the price of my laptop.

I would say that if you are good at sculpting with clay, and drawing with a pencil, you can slide right into Zbrush within two or three weeks with constant workflow and lots of tutorials. My workflow is also to have each model be composed of dozens of smaller parts and shapes.  So in the ship image above...I pretty much am using that same wedge wing (the small ship with the turrets) on every single winged ship.  The wings are just stretched, squished, trimmed, or somewhat altered.  Once you build a library of parts though, thats when the program becomes fun to use, as you have a starting point.  I have to admit though that when I picked up Zbrush and started playing with it...I didn't have any specific type of creation in mind.  I just played with it and tried to discover uses for the shapes I was creating.  I think I would be still stuck in the tutorials if I had something specific in mind.

I'm also sculpting some 28mm figures.  I have a series of miniatures and characters I'm working on for a company B WW2 release in the next year or so...  But that's another future thread.

Any chance you can let me know if you do do a limited run? I'd be first in the queue! I've been really struggling with civie stuff for my project and theses would be perfect!

[CompanyB]

Couple more ships from this morning.  Both use the same parts...just combined differently and stretched.





Hmmm, a dropship?  Challenge accepted!

-Brent