In this part of the tutorial series we will add some basic textures to our model using Blender’s built in texturing and colouring features. This will begin to give our model more realistic look and allow us to start blocking out the larger areas of colour so when we come to UV Unwrapping later and painting the model in a paint program we have a good idea what should be where.
Did a little more work on the communications tower for the Imperial Star Destroyer model today. This consisted of mainly making modules that could be then duplicated and placed onto the tower exterior. This is the technique I will use throughout the cladding of the buildings on the spaceship. Just a couple of hours work on this today. I’ve also added in some composition to the rendering to make the engine glow more realistic by adding some blur and glare filters to those parts.
Progress on the Imperial Star Destroyer modelled in Blender.
So I decided to take on quite a detailed modelling project, a Star Wars spaceship, the Imperial Star Destroyer. On the surface it seems a pretty straight forward modelling project, but in reality there is an almost infinite amount of detail that you can put into this model depending on how much time and effort you want to expend. I am going to go for a pretty detailed model, probably going to take me several days, or a week or more to complete. Today I managed to get the basic structure in place, proportions correct and began work on the engine bay. This has a lot of detail to it. I saved some time by re using as much as I could, and tiling some panels that I made which contained various engine components. When tiled effectively and rotated and scaled it’s not overly noticeable, and it looks like it should be that way. Below is a rendered output from todays work. The problem I am most likely to run into is the power of my computer and if it is capable of handling such a detailed model! I’m just working out of a Macbook Pro laptop.
The rear engine bay is starting to look pretty good, it still needs a bit of work, to complete it, a few more details around the two side engines. After completing the engine bay I will work on the communications turret above. You can see I already blocked out this section of the model ready for finer details to be added.
Rear engine bay of Imperial Star Destroyer – Day 1
Imperial Star Destroyer Engine Bay – work in progress
Day 1 progress, around 8 hours of total modelling time
Blender Vue 