How to Create a Spaceship in Blender - Part 1 of 2

get a VC's Andrew price here from blender Google calm very proud to present this tutorial to you it's something that's been requested for a very long time and and that is of course how to create a spaceship so a lot of my readers are apparently sci-fi fans because as I said this this has been requested quite a lot so I'm very happy to present it to you now I've been putting it off for a very long time because I know it's a very hard topic but I decided to delve into it and and that's what I'm going to be delivering for you guys today so this that you can see right here in front of you that is the final it means the finished product that we're going to be aiming to create in this tutorial so I'll show you before we before we crack into it I'll show you what the finished scene looks like in blender this is it right here so obviously part one this is going to be how to model this spaceship okay so you can see it looks quite complicated but it's all going to be covered in this tutorial and then in part two we're going to be getting into the lighting you know setting up the materials or whatever else you know all that good stuff it gets quite complicated and then I'll show you briefly as well the compositing this is this is all going to be covered in part two but just to give you an idea of the scope of what we're going to be doing in this tutorial series so when it comes to creating a concept spaceship really the word concept essentially means something that does not yet exist it is entirely from your imagination so when it comes to creating a concept anything concept spaceship concept house concept car you start with a sketch so I'm not by any means what would you call it I'm not by any means good at drawing um I just have a tablet and I went into Photoshop and I just sketched out this very rough looking design you can see that I sketched out a side view a top view and a rear view which is um is very handy if you're looking into sketching your own I recommend you at least have those in there that will help you um model it but yeah so that's some thats what i started with so and you can see that this design here looks a little bit different than the final one but I changed things on the way as I went meat that's fine you can go ahead and do that but yeah so for this tutorial we're actually going to be using some reference images which are right here we've got a front and a side and a top view and this is of course based off well this is really this spacecraft right here so um I recommend if it is your first time to be attempting to model a spaceship I do recommend that you use or you follow this tutorial - um - what we're creating right here however by all means go for if you want to go ahead and sketch out your own and then maybe use this tutorial as a sort of a guideline to uh figure out how things are done you can do that as well it's entirely up to you yeah really it's it's all up to your imagination whatever you want to do there's no rules or anything like that I thought I'd just show you the the creation process that I went through in order to get to the final thing because it doesn't just automatically BAM all work together there's a whole bunch of different choices and decisions you have to go through anyway so this is just oh I started it at this the Monday the front of this week so I've been going I've been working on it for about four days or so just to give you an idea I'm you can see it started out looking a bit like a boat a few people on Twitter said it looked like a canoe so I changed that very quickly I tried to get more of a plane type shape going you can see I'm moving around the wings I've added an afterburner here that I went for a metallic type shader put in the earth I tried to change the color schemes a little bit and I wasn't really too happy with them the way the colors were looking so I went for a very neutral looking type seen until I finally got to this image right here which has been flipped to create this scene that you can see right here so that just gives you an idea of basically how it was all put together the creation process of that so anyway part 1 of this tutorial we're going to be just covering the modeling and we're going to be creating this spacecraft right here so without further ado go ahead and open up a new scene in blender okay so the first thing we want to do is go ahead and low in those sketched out blueprints that I showed you earlier so go ahead and hit n which is going to bring up this I don't know what you call it's not us it's a sidebar this is the toolbar that's a side bar anyway and then go to background images click on add image and we're going to locate it right here so I'm going to start with this one front PNG you can find these by the way beneath the video I've provided the employees so you can obviously follow the tutorial and then you'll notice if you go to the front view and we go to that mode there that you'll you can see it's there that's loaded in that's fine but then if you go to the side view and the top view as well you can see that the same image is loaded in and obviously you only want it to be visible from the front because otherwise it would just be pointless so from here in this drop-down box where it says axes go ahead and click front so now if you go to the side or the top view it's not visible but if you go to the front it is okay so now we can go ahead and click add image again and this one we're going to be loading in the side side reference image and then of course from the axes you want to make sure you hit right so then if you go front and then right you can see you've now got two separate different reference images and then one more for the top so this one right here load this in and then of course from the axes select top so now front side and top you can see we now have those three images in place which is really perfect okay now with this default cube right here I think I'm actually going to start with that so one thing that is important before you are before you really get into the thick of it is you want to make sure that your reference images are all on the same scale as each other because you notice the device scale this cube down so that it's roughly the width of that spaceship right there if I go to the top view mode you'll notice that it's it's completely out of whack with this sketch right here and then the the side view as well yt the side view you won't be able to tell but anyway you get the point so it needs to make you need to make sure you get it matched up before you start so first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to move this these bottom vertices down there to the the very bottom of the spaceship and then the top vertices right here I'm going to move that to the top of just of that line right there just sort of where it sort of cuts off I'm not going to include this sort of what do you whatever you want to call that thing I'm not going to include that anyway just leave it right there and then now you can see inside view mode that that now that base right there that is actually in front view mode is which is lined up perfectly in side view it's completely out of whack so with the side view image here selected you can go ahead and change the where it appears there like so and if I just stretch this it out so that it goes right to the very edge you can see that that is roughly about the same height as as our image at the front there as well so you can see it that's actually pretty good so then if I move this down here to the very tip and then if I position that about there let's say for example then the front view you can see that it is it's coming together it's I suppose the the reference is is fairly okay anyway so what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to select that that edge right there I'll sort of that face right there and then I'm going to delete it and then holding down alt I'm going to right click there then move that across past that origin point right there then I'm going to go into mirrored so I add a mirror modifier then turn on clipping and then I can now clip them together at the front there and now we have mirrored editing so that now when we model something on one side it appears on the other like magic okay now one thing that's still out of whack is the the top view now I'm not sure if you'll actually need all three reference sketches I mean I generally didn't use the top reference one that much so many times I've attempted to do this tutorial but anyway it kind of helps if you you know if you want to use it so it just now is the time to make sure that they match so that's why we're doing this right now so I want that endpoint there to match there and then the nose to match there as well just make sure that it's some it is actually lined our line is there and let's move that to the very front as well so just right there okay so I want to increase the scale of that again just a little bit more increase it change the Y just a little bit like so and then the X as well I'm holding down shift while I do this as well because it allows you to move it along smaller increments otherwise if you try and you can see how quickly that Wizards pass so holding down shift really does help okay so I think that is roughly in the right spot okay now some important tips to remember as you're modeling this because it's going to get quite complicated I have to warn you is that because this is a very reflective shiny looking ship you want to make sure that the the sort of the surface the overall flow of the vehicle is a nice smooth line from one edge to the other now I'm sure you've probably seen it yourself if you've seen some artwork that's posted online that someone's made of a CG car for example and you'll notice that in some of the images people upload the door like wherever there's a door or you know a break up of the normal shape that the reflection looks slightly warped and like the surfaces look uneven it looks like there's a few dents in it and things like that and it's all unintentional and that's really because there's there was problems with the the overall that the flow of the vehicle and that's the only way I can really call anything it's the flow so you want to make sure that from the front all the way to the back you've got a nice even surface all the way down so that when you've got reflection light and all that kind of stuff it doesn't have that choppy uneven effect that you often see with them vehicles on line so that's very important so I'm just mentioning that right now so anyway what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to create a loop cut right in the center here and I'm just going to move that up to be about there because you'll notice that from the front all the way up to that point there you can see it there's a very straight line across the bonnet and then there's a slightly less curve going across to the top there as well and then in the side view as well what I'm going to do is just move move these outwards a little bit because you want there to be it's sort of like opening up sort of it starts out very small and then as it gets out towards the back it's um yeah as I said it's kind of opening up so I'm making this slightly wider than the concept sketch because when I go ahead and add in subsurf modifier that you can see right here I just turn that up you can see that it kind of smoothes it out a fair bit and you lose a lot of that shape anyway we don't actually need that just yet but I'm just just giving you an example okay so now we've got the basic outline of it we can go ahead now and start adding in some loot cuts and just progressively as we go start adding in more and more detail now these black lines that you can see right here this is the portion which is slightly hard to create if you look in the final image here you can see that it is actually kind of like a cutaway so there's like a groove in the vehicle and then underneath that there is a light that is shining through so each of these black points right here are actually going to be modeling that at the end so for now what I'm going to be doing is just creating loop cuts and I'm just going to ignore those black lines for now but making sure the mesh topology sort of takes it into consideration anyway I'm talking too much I'm going to go ahead and add a loop cut right here and I'm going to add another loop cut on the other side right there and I'm just going to position this to about there and then this one here and this one here like so it's just a matter of roughly piecing it together now you get better at this the more you do it basically so don't worry if for the first time it's a little bit hard to kind of you know it's a little bit stressful as at times as well I know it can be when you're not really sure where everything should go but just just do your best and just use my tutorial as a guideline of course now you'll notice that this portion right here this kind of cockpit area it's kind of going in a very different sort of style direction to the rest of the ship so this points right here you've just got some very basic sort of vertical cuts but then here you've got a cut that goes all the way up so it kind of goes horizontal and vertical and I actually I wanted this as part of the design because I thought about you know if this was a real spaceship you kind of want away like kind of an emergency ejector point so I kind of thought like if this this vehicle is on fire or something like that or something happened then this whole portion here could kind of eject outwards and then you know the cockpit could just kind of float around and then they could be rescued later on or something so that's what I was thinking so that's why I kind of put in this little cutaway area right there so but anyway it's a painter model so anyway just just to keep that in mind so I'm just going to create a loop cut that goes to about there and then another loop cut which is going to go to actually I'm just looking at this I can't actually show you but about there so I'm just making it so that it's that point is in line with that green right there and then I'm going to move these vertices here down like so just so that it's in line with this black line there because essentially that sound that's all we're doing is just making these black lines match up basically so that's what we're doing right now all right and I'm going to go ahead now I'll add in a loop cut actually what's going on up there oh okay alright so you want to make sure that you grab both vertices because they're kind of behind each other so just keep that in mind okay okay all right so I also have to warn you in this tutorial there's going to be points where I'm just kind of pushing and moving things around and I'm not really saying very much and that's really because that's what modeling is a lot of the time it's just making very small adjustments and that's right so it's just one of the things that you can't really get around and otherwise I could just kind of skip whole portions of the tutorials and just not show you how I did things but I know people don't like that so I'm trying to show you everything I was also focusing on what I do and sometimes talking can kind of be a distraction so I'm hoping you'll bear with me and points in this tutorial okay so currently right now you've got a very square-ish looking ship now it's important that you try and get a nice curvature like a nice smooth surface at this stage in because the more loop cuts and stuff that you create then yeah the less freedom you really have over stuff like this so I'm just grabbing actually let me just see if I can maybe add a because there is such a thing as edge slide okay that's cool yeah that's really good I like that okay so edge slide if you're not familiar with it it allows you to keep all the vertices along you know whichever you know in correlation any way you can sort of see how it is if I just click if I just G and then move that you can see some vertices like the ones down the front they are kind of getting out of whack and the ones at the back aren't really you know where they should be but if you use the edge slide and you can kind of move things in and it'll affect everything equally so it's um it's a really great tool and it's one I think I learnt about in in one of blender cookies tutorials I think it was all CG cookie it was just a really great tip and I was just like wow that is amazing so I've been using it a lot and now I'm sharing it with you so okay so I'm uh of course yes that's right so I'm trying to get this nice smooth shape now across here so I'm going to go I'm going to grab these right here these vertices and maybe those there and I'll just push them out a little bit just so that it's kind of filling out the mesh or the shape of it just a little bit more so you kind of get a more thicker looking ship because you don't want something looks very thin I've tried it in the past where you know if it if you don't have a thick enough ship it just looks very weak very impressive and I just doesn't look very nice so I'm just trying to try and get the right shape right now now I'm going to delete those vertices at the top there so that you've got a nice cutaway because this next portion where we're going to be modeling this cockpit area it can help to have that sort of cutaway there anyway actually before we get into that I'm just going to model right here this wing right there because we're going to be extruding out the wing later on as well and you can see that that also aligns perfectly with this air vent so if I add now another loop cut in right there and then let's say let's move that down a little bit just a touch not you a guy all right cool actually I might just try using that edge slide there on that one as well straight edge slide okay I'm not actually sure that edge slide was really necessary anyway so it's just um I'm just playing around with things you know just trying to get the shape as best I can without embarrassing myself but doesn't always go that way okay so I'll create another loop cut right here just on the other side of that black line right there okay and then we're going to be cutting away um you know along these right here and these right here as well I'm just going to be removing those faces I'm going to do it at the end though because once you've got you know if you separate it like that and then you say oh I want to add in a loop cut right here you can see that it now there's not a loop cut on these ones so it helps to have it all as one mesh for the most part and then start cutting things the further you know once you're sure that everything is the way it should be anyway I need to get it drink of water all right cool okay alright so again I'm just keeping in mind the overall flow of the vehicle making sure there is a nice smooth line all the way down to the back of the spacecraft it's very very important I'm going to go ahead and remove that at the back there okay so I've got a nice even cut like that okay now when it comes to modeling this cockpit area right here and what we're going to be doing is just extruding or sorting extruding duplicating that right there those two vertices move down duplicating that out now I'm going to extrude that up just to where that white point ends and I'm going to grab those two all that one edge right there and I'm going to extrude that down too right there where you can see that you've got that point because once we add in those those sort of those cuts whatever you know the black areas where there's the light can be shining through you want to make sure that it is in line with another vertice on the other side of that so it's very important otherwise it's all going to look out of whack and also make sure that you are going to and from the front and side view modes as much as you can because yeah that's really important that you do that because otherwise it's just going to be a pain you finished modeling everything then you go to another view and then it all looks out of whack so to saves your time if you do it as you're working okay so I'm just going to extrude that out now to here let's move that inwards and extrude this one out to there like so and I'm going to create a loop cut right here just so that you can get a more smooth edge and because I've created one there I need to create one on the opposite side right there okay and let's let's extrude that upwards to there another one to there actually I think that's maybe too much okay because of course you need to keep in mind what is on when we create a face across these right here sorry creating yeah basically these have to be connected to this area right here so you want to make sure that you have the same number of edge loops on both sides essentially so I'm just going to move that up to there and we will need to create an edge loop along here so let's go ahead and do that right there and then another one right there and then now we can go ahead add in a face there face there and a face right there and then now for this area at the back here this one should be a little bit easier because it's quite flat okay so just piecing this out we're going to make that edge there nice and sharp at the moment it's quite smooth but that'll be sharp one twee arm once we get into the rest of it but for now it's okay so I'm just going to again just duplicate those that row of vertices if you hold down alt like so you can select the edge and then I'm going to extrude that out to the end just like so and do the same for this end I'll throw this this vertice right there and then no that's fine okay create a face right there and then another face right here as well and there you go so it's now you can see it's a little bit out of whack so we're going to be cleaning that up but for now it's okay now one thing you'll note here is that you can see it is kind of anyway you essentially want to make sure that the the vertices that's on the other side you've got that you've got geometry on both sides of this dividing line here because if you don't like say if this one is down here and then these ones are out here then you'll notice that it's kind of it's it's not a very even smooth divide because there's geometry on this side but there's none on that side so you want to make sure that it all lines up so that you can get a nice smooth line yeah where the light is going to be coming from so something like that it should be okay I'm just going to select that let's just move that up a little bit just like that move that down and we'll move this up and this one here up as well okay cool all right so I'm hoping you guys are able to follow this so far I know that it can be a little bit frustrating as you're as you're modeling things especially with you know this type of I mean for one thing it's a concept so I mean you can't really have a look at the reference image as well which is really really annoying at times you just want to be able to have a look at a final product but you don't have one so it's all based on your imagination and then if your imagination is shorty then your image is going to look shorty as well so it is quite difficult so that's why I'm going to give this one the tag of an advanced difficulty setting because it's really it's not for beginners even though I'm sure probably a lot of beginners are watching this right now because is one of the first things a lot of people want to create once they get into blender so if you are struggling and it's your first time don't feel bad because basically that is very normal is indeed it's going to it happens to the best of us so it's all part of a learning process okay so we're just we could see we're getting a very nice sort of smooth shape across everything so far and that is what is important so just move that out like so this one has to be in line with that one right there and this one going to there these ones moving outwards and then this one outwards as well all right excellent okay so if you haven't saved it yet you should probably go ahead and undo that as soon as possible I would recommend that blender is good but it's not that good so keep that in mind okay cool now when it comes to this side this window right here I'm just going to select these faces and going to extrude them downwards just like that so we've got a kind of a lip area right that like so and then in order to make it sharp you need to adjust the creases okay so up here in the side bar if I go ahead and change that mean crease to one you can see that that edge is now a lot sharper so I'm going to do that for that one there this edge right here as well and then for that edge over there I'm sorry along the tops as well Adam increase there and then for that final point there on the edge as well so there you go now you've got a nice cool looking windows that's all looking quite good so far okay so what I might do you can see that just across here it's looking kind of squarish like it's yeah right there you can see there's kind of a corner where there really shouldn't be one so if I just select see if I can do edge split for all those edge slide okay yeah you can do an edge slide for all of them which is kind of cool so let me just see if I grab those those ones right there I can start doing an edge slide I might do one I'll create a loop cut right there as well let's just slide that down a little bit and the same with this one and what this is going to do is just smooth out that that corner that was there previously you can see it's a lot more smoothed out which is um exactly what we wanted so it's coming together quite nicely if I do say so myself okay excellent all right so now we've we've got a rather basic looking shape of it yeah we'll go ahead and we'll do this some this nose of it right here so I'm going to delete these vertices and essentially what you want to do is create a kind of a mixture between horizontal cuts and then vertical cuts as well so yeah you want to mix between it so what I'm going to do is create a few loop cuts along the bottom of the spaceship it doesn't really matter all that much because you're not going to be able to see it too much so so that's not a big deal um and let me just see how we're going to do this okay let's create a loop cut right there let's run it a loop cut just extrude that in as you can see right there then create a face and then it's create another face right here whoop and let's see another face there another face here then let's create one right there and then one right there as well and I'm going to have to do something fancy at the top here because as you can see I've got one too many edge loops so let's go ahead let's delete that one right there and then move that in there you go now you can see it's all matching up so that's kind of it's given us yeah otherwise you'll get problems where it looks as though it's kind of like creased it's kind of pinched so if you can get a nice even squares that's sort of the type of shape that you're aiming for so it's not too even but it's it's better than it was like having rectangular shapes so that's looking okay and now if you go into the side view here you can grab these vertices at the top move them back and you can get a nice kind of smooth bonnet or hood whatever you want to call that part of the ship it's looking a lot smoother right now and I can push that one back push these back as well okay alright move that in scale that inwards as well let's move that towards the front going into the top view this is one of the few times you could probably use the top view just to get that nice looking shape like so and there you go you can see that there's it's kind of pinching towards this end there but I might show you a way you can fix that later on if you like but yeah that's it's not looking too bad I think and now that we've got this uh-oh excuse me I am losing my voice by the minute now we've got that there we can go ahead and we can create some headlights just by grabbing that face in the middle there and then extruding that inwards and you've now got what looks like some snake nostrils which is kind of weird okay so it's like that alright not bad if I turn on smooth shading then you can see how it's looking so far I'm not terribly impressed with the nozzle just yet so I might just work on that a touch more I'll just show you how we fix things how I fix things so it's probably not always correct but you know it's the best the best I can do so all right okay you've got kind of what looks like a if you look at it from the front it's going to be a little bit more obvious but it's you've got kind of like a smooth line that goes from down there to the front and then once it gets to here it kind of makes a sharp inwards turn so it's not really fitting in with the rest of the spaceship so I'm not sure if I can follow the top view that well so what I'm going to do is just kind of backpedal slightly just to pull it out a little bit and then let's grab that there pull that out a little bit as well and then those move that out to about there as you can see and then now you don't have too much of that problem where it's not sort of fitting in with the rest of the of the mesh it's looking a little bit nicer there these headlights they really do look like nostrils I just turn up that mean crease there and then add in a loop cut to about there you can kind of cleans it up just a little bit and then the more that you increase that subsurf to then the cleaner that that hole there is going to look as well so that's something else to keep in mind I guess but yeah one of the one of the most important things is as I said to get that nice clean line from the front to the back so if you can imagine and this is something I've actually done a few times if I just take that front vertice there and then that one at the back hit shift D and then if I hit F you can see that it's drawn a line from there to there so really all of these vertices here should be in line so you should have from the front to the back of the ship everything is falling into place and it should be looking good but it doesn't always there's noise work out that way unfortunately but if I just grab I might try the edge slide again try to line it up as best as I can let's move that there let's do another edge slide move that across another edge slide here as you know that can be left the way it is can move that down just to touch and then this one here as well okay so you can see that you've now got a nice line down from the the front to the back just like that and you can see it's a it sort of looks a lot smoother so if you can try and do that for your entire mesh so it can be as you can see it's a little bit out of whack but it's one of the things that I did my ship as I was modeling it and you know it does take a little bit of time to get to do this but yeah it really does help the the overall look of it so I just move that down a little bit to there and then move these ones down here as well okay okay cool so it's um you get the kind of gist of it so the match is coming together okay so far so what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to go ahead and get into these um these cuts right there for the mesh so if I turn on face selector mode then hold down alt you can see that I can select those faces whoops not those ones these ones right there then if I hit X and then select faces we've now created a nice cut for our mesh so you can see now how it's going to be all coming together once we are get into the the good stuff but anyway so once you're happy with how how it's all looking so if I just if I just clean up this little area here because I think there is a large gap going on right there where they shouldn't be that's again because you want to make sure that the geometry is lining up on both sides as it's not in some places I think it's because of that edge sliding that I was doing before um so it's can be a little bit push and pull with a lot of your modeling just one of those things I guess move that around that one goes to there all right now I'm going to add a mean crease in there and another mean crease in right here and that's going to give us a nice sharp corner that you can see just like that and then you want to make sure that this one and this is it's really important cuz you can see the way that is right there that looks really really horrible so you want to make sure this is lined up right there and then what we're going to do is once we create those indent those lights we're going to be creating a triangle where are that where those are meeting so try and get the exam as lined up as best as you can like so and if you're wondering how we're going to be creating those indents we're going to be using this solidify modifier and we're going to doing a fancy trick which I learned which is going to allow us to yeah it's a very easily create a few in cuts like that and then yeah so it should be good let's go ahead and save our save our file just like so and I think I think the rest of it and you can sort of get the gist of how it all comes together and it's not it's not too it's not too hard okay so the next step is to go ahead and add in a solidify modifier so you go up here modifier and then click on solidify now if you're not familiar with what a solidify modifier does is it allows you to add thickness to a mesh so this thickness value right here if you turn that up you can see that it is now adding thickness to the edge now you'll notice that if you go into edit mode you've still got just the one side that you're controlling so you're just moving these around but it's added in a fake thickness what we're going to be doing is we're actually gonna be applying that then removing the faces on the inside right here but keeping these edges and then we're going to be connecting it all up with faces inside there and that's where we're going to be making the light emit from at least in part two anyway okay but anyway one thing that's important to note is that once you've added the solidify modifier is to make sure that you click on recalculate normals because sometimes if you've got the normals the normals by the way if you're not sure is the direction that the faces are facing if they're facing in the wrong way then you'll have the thickness on the wrong side of the mesh so just by clicking on recalculate or whatever you'll fix that problem so anyway so now we've got in this this nice thickness here you want to make sure that you get that somewhere around about 0.8 0.9 something I think like so our number be point one point one that could be okay um yeah anyway of course this this solidify step is really only necessary if you're creating the the exact image that you know this particular spaceship if you're creating your own you might not have to do this but obviously I'm sure you can figure that part out yourself now the way we're going to be deleting the insides so these faces on the inside here because we don't actually want them we only want that edge that RIM as I said so what we what you can do here with the solidify modifier is you can actually set a material for the inside or the yet those inside faces there so if I am you can see I've got a base material here if I just call this one exterior let's just go exterior then if I add another material directly below it and then I just call this rim or what is the inside faces like so and then let's just give it a viewport color of red so you can actually tell what it's doing and then if you go down here to this little fire if I click on one it will now use material number one for the inside faces as you can see right there now that's really cool because what I'm going to do now is apply the solidify modifier then I'm going to go back to here and I'm going to click on select and then it's going to show me all of those bases that are just using that material then you can go ahead and delete the material whatever else but anyway it's a really cool is better than actually like extruding in those edges by yourself it can just get messy if you try and do that so I found that this way works quite nicely and you get some sort of more even looking results so anyway we've got that in place now let's go back to them the modifier stack here you might want to by the way as a precaution duplicate the mesh and then move that duplicate to a to a separate layer like that and that can just help you you know if you have to backpedal or whatever it can just sort of help you with that anyway so now I'm going to go ahead and click on apply solidify modifier like that and you can see that there is some issues right now immediately noticeable and that's because it's now applied a face to the entire inside of the of the mesh which is kind of ugly but anyway doing that step that I told you about just before going here and selecting inside faces then hitting select I can now go ahead and click on faces remove those faces and now the inside of our mesh is exactly the way it was before but we now have those nice rims there which is really what we're what we did it for so now to get rid of that ugly thing that's happening right there I'm going to go ahead and delete these edges okay so it's fairly um the basic step just delete just delete and whoops what about these ones that one right there that one right there this is just the sort of XS you can call it of of our works okay so that one oh you've got this one this entire one right there let's delete those this edge right here and you'll notice that as you do that you can see that it kind of snaps together a little bit better we're going to have to UM do something with the mirror modifier as well just to clean it up a harm as well but you can see that it's getting rid of most of that horribleness and then this long one along whoops okay so you can't do that let's select it one by one I tried to do a edge loop selection but that obviously didn't work and then I think that final one right there and I think that's just about it so now if I go let's go mirror did you do mirror and pull that out pull that in and then if I delete you can see I've got some vertices here that shouldn't be there okay so now that's cleaned up that and then if I select that move that in and out so the problem is that it's not currently in line with the mirror this mirror modifier so if you just select that edge then move it out and in then it will fix it up should fix it up automatically just like that so it's kind of like reminding it of where it should be so it's kind of like snapping into place so move that out and then in out and then in it's just a messy side effect of using that tool but for the most part it's I think it's not too bad with those vertices there and and there we go so now if I actually apply an edge split modifier oh I've already gotten a split okay if I set this to let's say let's go 60 did you do something like that in split Hanul what is that done in a minute the subsurf should be it should be before it mirror edge split I swear I've got that round the wrong way and it actually looks like it's working it seems like the edge splitter is applying after it and I okay so yes no that is in the right spot I need to now be applying a mean crease like so and now you can see you've got that nice clearly defined edge right there so we need to do that for all of the edges here so you want to make sure that you go into edge select mode just like this then you're selecting all of these edges one by one like so edge edge then turn up the mean crease all the way to one this one here as well edge edge all the way up to one just like so and then for this one here because you want to get that nice sort of tight corner that I was talking about so if I just turn that up to one you can see it's now looking a lot tighter just like so okay cool so now what I'm going to do is go ahead and start adding in these faces that you can see right here so we don't actually need that material anymore so you can go ahead you can go ahead and delete that and yeah alright so now let's go ahead and and start piecing this all together okay and let's just start filling that in so I just hit face so I'm selecting these four here face just like that so you can see this is a kind of repetitive motion it's not really all that thrilling but you know if you put on your music and you are and you just go through it and you apply these faces it's one of the easier things to do in this tutorial is to just go through it like this once you've done it by the way what's going on here hang on that's something messy okay so I've accidentally added a face where they definitely should not be one okay just like that alright add in the face where it should be okay all right we're getting there okay so now if I just select that edge right there then I'll select the other edge as well and then if I apply a mean increase of 1 you can see we've now got a nice very clean very neat looking sort of indent cut whatever you want to call it right down there so it's very very easy as you can see so I'm just going to go through now and I'm going to do that whoops I'm going to do that for all of the entire ship so now that this is a fairly repetitive time but I just tell you something that happened to me this morning I was asleep it was 5 a.m. this morning and I was rudely awoken here in Korea in my apartment by somebody that was sitting outside my apartment in his car honking okay now just honking just burn like that and you know you think well he's probably you know just trying to you know maybe he's waiting for somebody to come out of their apartment maybe giving them a lift or something that's what I thought and um you know he's probably just you know just one little toot and and that'd be fine but no he didn't stop and the person that he was waiting for obviously didn't come out of their apartment because he did not quit he kept honking for an hour one hour and in an area that is completely surrounded by apartments and I was furious absolutely furious and the thing is and if I'm sure some of you listening if you spent some time living in a country where they don't speak English as their first language will really much of their language at all then in a situation like that there's not really all that much you can do because you can't run down into the street and start yelling at the guy in English to stop doing that because obviously that's well wrong for many reasons so you just have to sit there you just have to bear it and and as such I had to um yeah basically just kept getting repeatedly woken up over the course of one hour so today has been much other days because I haven't had much sleep at all and I wish I could say there was some like sweet justice to the end of that story that you know somebody ran down there and you know told him off or you know took a baseball bat and maybe smashed in his headlights taking it too far but I wish I could tell you that but no I think he just drove away I think eventually just maybe got sick of it or maybe the person came out and he just drove off so you know it just it just makes you wonder you know what why some people just aren't thinking at that hour of the morning and who could possibly be sleeping something that's been on my mind all day at you know why why why do people do that but anyway I just thought I were I and that that's not really a very cool story really it's just I just thought I would take you know this platform you know being I'm recording a tutorial just to talk about my moment of stress so um so there you go so you can see that I've now um I've done the entire mention that time so you've now got a nice some nice clean-looking lines over our entire spaceship as you can see right there and now what I'm going to do is I'm just extrude out the wing of the aircraft also the spacecraft whatever it's a it's an aircraft let's be honest it could be anyway so so - I'm - extruded out very very easy just going to top in your mode right here and extrude that out and then let's go scale that back a bit to extrude that out just to touch more as well and let's go SX as you can see right there and what I'm going to be doing is I'm just cleaning up the mesh because you want to try and get it as you know as smooth looking as you possibly can so by having it so that these are all these vertices you know the the the above and the under ones are in line what that's going to do is just make it so that it's um it just looks a little bit tidier so just doing this and help the end result essentially so that's why I'm doing it okay so I'm just moving that up the end there because I want to get that nice sort of cut it's going through there just to about as you can see right there and I'm what I'm actually going to just remove those two vertices then I'm just going to create triangle which I normally you know I don't recommend and I don't I don't think it's a good idea but in this scenario it's better than having a bunched up you know for like that for a corner I say for for a face it you know just for the sake of having a face with four you know four vertices or whatever there's our eye any point so I'm just using them just using a triangle anyway okay so I'm just adding a crease along this wing here basically doing what we did just for those those in debt yeah those in in in in cuts whatever you want to call it you know I don't have a word for these kind of things so I'm just just playing it by ear I'm going to put let's go to smooth shading so we can see what's going on and oh look at that doesn't even line up so I'm just going to move that across there and I'm going to extrude it outwards all the way out to the edge here as you can see that I'm doing right now and I'm going to create an extra little endpoint right here because we're going to be adding in these kind of delights essentially so again having a look at the final image these little points here just got a little tiny bulb at the end of it and that's just so that other ships you know other spaceships or whatever they can see it if if they come too close to it I mean I don't know I kind of thought about it after and I thought you know if you've got these massive lines with these lights shooting out of it you probably don't need little lights on the wings as well but you know I thought it just it just makes it look a little bit nicer so I decided to throw it in anyway so add a little bit something extra to it to make it look a little bit less boring so anyway so now for this little for this little point here what I'm going to do is just grab let's say these vertices right here whoops those ones okay so those right there if I just go into top view you can see oh look at that I haven't even got it in place okay so well you shouldn't even be there for starters let's remove you you're not welcome at all and if I just scale that down now you want to make sure again you've got a nice clean line from there all the way down there not something that looks like a been bent so yeah just try and get it again if you want to do that lion trick again where you you know draw an imaginary face between the two or not imaginary you know I need an edge between two vertices you can go ahead and do that but I think that's um it's not too important so anyway so now I'm just going to UM yeah grab these points right here that you can see let's grab how many do we want those ones top view let's see um I put the Papa something like all right I'll grab the next ones over here as well and then just extrude that upwards as you can see right there and now let's add in a mean crease okay mean crease and another one here mean crease and then let's just grab those vertices there at the end pull that down and now if I go to go select them Y and take this sum this end face right here I'm just going to extrude that forward just like that then set a mean crease for that to 1 now if i duplicate that scale that down set them increase to 0 then extrude that out then if I delete that face it's their face deleted you can see that you've now got a nice little light coming out of there um a little bit skewed so let's just clean that up just a little bit I probably helped I think okay so how we going to do this let's just move these points here right down just like that oops zip okay there we go so you just want to create because obviously we're using the subsurf modifier so provided you've got a square shape then the rest of it should come out as a circle once the subsurf modifier has been applied to it so now that you've got a nice little bulb there scale that down and there you go now you've got a little thing for the wing which is it's not too bad I think actually I kind of realized what's happened here there needs to be let's just delete that delete yeah that actually stretches out right to the very end of it I've just remembered so all right let's just add a loop cut in here you can see that I've really stuffed this up okay almost there not sure if you're aware well obviously you're not aware you there's no way you could know but it's uh it's actually one a.m. here in Korea because I've been trying to record this tutorial more than once today and it just hasn't been working out so sometimes I just have to keep going keep going and one of those days so starting with of course the man who decided to honk his horn this morning things have been you know pretty rough anyway I'm not sure why I'm telling you this okay so now you've got that little end point there this one here is um essentially it's the exact same thing I just add a loop cut in just right here and then for this one this is where you only select those points right there and extrude that upwards and if I hit s Z and 0 you get a nice flat point right there okay s zero there we go again and now if I add an amine crease set that to one set this mean crease to zero then if I take the face that is at the end here extrude that forwards like so and move that one up just like that why zero we've now created a nice flat edge there then set that median crease to one pull this back shift D scale it inwards extruded that outwards set the mean crease to zero I feel like I'm repeating myself here because I think yeah that's what I am doing hum and there you go now you've got a nice little light on the middle of the wing there and you can probably create a mean crease just underneath that light as well and there you go it's now looking pretty spiffy if I do say so myself okay so we're almost I think we're almost there guys what I'm going to do is just add in these wings all sort of these fins if you want to call them that so that's very easy just take these two vertices that are here I hit shift D and scale that inwards to about there let's move that up and let's scale that to there let's extrude that up I mean and then now if I take that oops of course looking at it from the the right view would probably help as well and extrude that just to create obviously some thickness to it and then if I hit main crease turn that all the way up to one and take that crease turn that down to zero you've now got a nice looking fin and then if I hit ctrl L again just to select the fin you can see that you've now got some nice fins and there you go so having a look at the mesh from all angles you can see that the majority of it is armed is fairly decent there are a few areas that could do with some cleanup so you can see this area right here and if you wanted to add them in a little mean crease in there you can kind of kind of clean that up a little bit better but now the majority of the modeling is now done all there is one final thing I've just remembered whilst we're here um there's this little point I'm trying to show you the final image again right here you've got this bold where the jet engine is and this is really easy all you need to do is just add in a cut right let me see if I can do it loop cut now why can't I add a loop cut that's very annoying maybe it's because that is a triangle gosh that's probably why isn't it yeah that would be why okay so yeah so to backtrack on what I said previously let's just turn this into a into a square just so that we can now add in a loop cut okay just like this and then another loop cut right here so you've now got this this nice face right here now if I just extrude that upwards just like this to create this some sort of engine bay type area then I can take those move them down slightly and then just select this edge along here and there now let's set that mean crease all the way to one and you can see they've now got a nice looking sort of engine bay and if you want to make it even tidy around the edges you can just turn up that mean crease there that one right there and then sort of scale this inwards as well if you wanted to you could scale it along the x-axis then move that down and I think that just about does it so I'll just check over everything just to make sure there is nothing else that could be possibly cleaned up maybe done a little bit better oh there is one other thing we could probably do we can go ahead and add in that little air vent there it's something that can kind of just add a little bit of detail to the to the spacecraft because there isn't really all that much detail to it so I'm just adding in those two loop cuts right there then extrude that inwards then if I just select all of those vertices like so then turn the mean crease for that all the way up to one you can see if now got that light little vent there and then in the next tutorial once we add the materials I'll give that face in the middle there I'll give it a Tyrael that's completely black and and that'll look like it's you know at least possible as something an engine bay or event whatever you want to call it so and if you wanted to create another little vent at the top there but I found that that can be a little bit more problematic than you know what it's worth and the same with the little this little beta to the top there that I kind of put a hole in it I wasn't entirely sure I was thinking maybe that's like an air thing that kind of can cool down the engine or something it's not all that necessary but you can go ahead and add that in there can be some homework for you if you want to do that and if you want to go ahead and improve this model by all means go at it have some fun with it but I think I just you want to add this one final looking adjustment like that I think of that just about oh one final little thing just to create something on the other edge it's just seeing on okay so down here because you've got this nice you know the line there where the light is going to be shining through so you want to make sure that you've got faces underneath the underneath the wings so I'm just going to be taking let's add another little loop cut right there I'm just going to take these points and then just add a face to them like so and then of course that is going to allow us in the next part of the tutorial to very easily add in a yeah a light that's shining through underneath that and that could be probably cleaned up a little bit better if you really wanted to but I'm sure that you get the gist of it okay guys so so that was part one of the space craft tutorial is a little bit long a little bit lengthy but of course that's that's the nature of it that's just that's how it is so well I'm hoping that you learn some things from this and of course if you want to go ahead create your own concept spaceship for modeling whatever else please by all means go for it it's a very it's very fun and it's a project that you'll learn a lot from now I'm in the next part 2 of this tutorial series we are of course going to be getting into essentially creating this final image so I'm going to be adding the materials doing a lighting you know putting it in a scene with this star field in the background and then adding in that earth that we created in a earlier tutorial that's already on the site but yeah so that is that's where we're up to guys at the end of part one and I will see you guys all again for part two

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 372,597

Keywords: blender, tutorial, spaceship, sci-fi

Id: yaPd4ieTmng

Length: 62min 32sec (3752 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 26 2012