Making your first ship from scratch

Creating a ship for Pioneer, step by step.

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 in depth, but it will be more like a case study on ship creation, from idea to making it into a mod file. 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.
• 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.
• Krita - cross platform painting application which works very nice for texture painting tasks.
• Inkscape - 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 and Brief

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.

For this article, I'll be creating a medium cargo craft from OKB Kaluri. A larger sister of the Mola Mola. The basic idea is a rounded cone-like shape, with a three-way symmetry along the longitudinal axis. One main point is that Kaluri workhorse crafts have a relatively simplistic and compact build. Also it should look like if it could be a tail-sitter.

The basic structure is quite similar to the Mola Mola, even if the nose is more tapered. OKB Kaluri ships tend to be round with smooth curves and some abrupt shape terminations, like the tail side of this craft, as you can see on the thumbnails bellow. Another typical Kaluri features are the high visibility cockpit area and the heat-sink fins near the engines. The former is a subject of some debate as if Kaluri invented this layout and Mandarava-Csepel Shipworks stole the idea, or vice versa, since the two companies are doing corporate espionage like if it was a sports competition.

Cargo hatches will be on the sides and on the top too, and there will be a docking collar over and back to the nose.

(thumbnail drawings come here)

This painting shows the direction I want to take this ship. At least three times as long as the Mola Mola, which makes it about half the length of the Vatakara, so it will be along the line of the Deneb.

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.