Making your first ship from scratch
Creating a ship for Pioneer, step by step.
Contents
Overview
This step by step tutorial is intended to guide contributors trough the process of modeling, texturing and setting up a ship, and then putting it into Pioneer. It won't cover advanced modeling or design questions, but will show the basics and some good practices. Working knowledge of the basic handling of Blender, GIMP and Inkscape, or equivalents is assumed. Note that this article isn't intended to be a tutorial on these tools.
Software
We will use the following tools:
- Blender - An advanced cross platform Open Source 3D software. If you are new to Blender, the CGCookie basic course will cover the foundations for you.
- [1] GIMP - cross platform 2D raster editor software for creating textures. It's a bit harder to find good basic material for it, but you can try this playlist for example. DIY Graphics also has some videos on GIMP.
- [2] - cross platform 2D vector editor for some texture work. The official page has a range of tutorials. DIY Graphics has some tutorials on Inkscape too.
- Model_viewer - the build-in model viewer tool of Pioneer.
You can also use any other program you are familiar with. They need to be able to handle some formats like Collada (.dae) for models, .png and DDS texture format for textures.
Folder structure
It's important to have a good structure for your source materials. It makes life easier both for you and anybody else who needs to work on your creation later. I do it this way for example:
- Ship name/
- /ship.blend - I usually put the .blend file on the main folder of the ship.
- /sketches - I put any drawings and sketches, brief, description to this folder.
- /textures_src - Texture source files, like Inkscape or GIMP project files, and any exported layer or maps such as AO goes here. More on these later.
- /textures - The final texture files go here.
- /preview - Preview renders and WIP-s go here.
It's also useful to have and stick to a naming convention, but more on that later.
Sketching
This is not really a technical thing, but a good practice when you are working on assets intended into official Pioneer. First step is to visualize any idea before you dive into modeling. It's easier to try different things, proportions, shapes and such, or to get feedback before you sink hours into something that turns out to be a dead end. The nice thing about these is that they don't need to be pretty. You can doodle something with a ball point pen, or put some primitive shapes together in 3D. Checking the silhouettes is also a good idea, since that is what our eyes notice first. You can find a bunch of thumbnail sketches on the dev forums.
Modeling
Coordinates and transformations
Pioneer uses Y as the longitudinal axis of the ship, X for left-right and Z for up-down. You need to align your ship with this in mind.
The scale of any object should be 1 on all axes to avoid problems and distortions. This is a very important thing, so don't forget to Apply (freeze) it (ctrl+a -> Scale in Blender, Object mode). You can also clear any object scaling with alt+s. Rotation and position can be anything that makes sense while you work on the model.
Modeling
Let's go trough modeling a very simple ship model to show some useful things. It will be improvised without any real sketch though. The aim is to show some modeling techniques.
