Design 3

1 A long time ago the game was going to be about large cruiser sized ships. One of the original sketches was for a flattened ovoid ships with cooling fins that projected at an angle. Being a great fan of reuse I added a cockpit and weapons to create a space fighter. My concept was a main hull that was smooth metal, contrasting with the painted engine pods that would contain a lot of surface detail. There would also be recessed weapons tubes to keep the ship looking sleek.
2 The first step was to create a low-poly mock-up of the design in Blender and then skin it in Substance Painter. At this point I wanted something that looked like 50’s style smooth-bodied metal craft, drawing inspiration from the MIG-15 and F-86 Sabre. So I went with mostly shiny metal and little paint. Other than generating a few renders this model was never used - but it did prove the concept of the fighter was workable (at least in my mind!).
3 The next step was a low-poly asset, this was really the first milestone asset for this design. Modelling turned out to be way more difficult than the concept and I couldn't get a good looking metallic surface. So instead I went with a bold asymmetric paint-job. This was close to original sketch, just the engine pods were smaller and had less detail. This assets was used in earlier builds of the game.
4 When it came time for a higher-poly asset I decided to make the ship smaller as it felt too large when compared with the others. I also moved the cockpit forward slightly. This is an earlier version of the high-poly design where I hadn't settled on the type of fins yet.
5 This was the first milestone asset for the design, a high-poly model that could be used in the game engine. This predates the configurable weapons and fins so the little wings you can see are part of the model, not add-ons. Even though the model was passable I felt that more surface detail was needed.
6 A revamped model was created with more of the surfaces being smoothed and more polygons added. Extra detail was added around the engines and on the underside of the craft. Not visible here but more detail was added to the engine mouths as this would be the part of the model most visible when using the ship.
7 This is the second milestone asset for the design and the last version that had fixed weapons and finds. At this point I was experimenting with a cut-out in the engine compartment but this ended up being too complex for little visual impact.
8 This is the final milestone asset. It has configurable weapons and fins, these have been set to something that looks like the original models. There's also more surface details via normal maps. The image come from the Confinerator program.

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Design 3

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