Dragonfly Racer

Hello all, I wanted to try my hand at creating another space racing vehicle for my racing game. This time I got inspiration from pod-racers and dragonflies. Here is some of my process:

Okay, so sometimes in class I get to doodling random pictures and sometimes I get these grand ideas for certain model designs. While I do need to brush up on my traditional art skills, here was one of my beginning ideas for the front of the ship.

I wanted there to be eight engines, a spherical cockpit, two blast shields, and two guns. Things changed along the way, but I will show you my development process mostly in the form of screenshots.

I started by modeling the general shape of the engine that I wanted.

I added some extra edgeloops and front propeller cap, along with an exhaust cap and an exhaust opening.

I brought my doodle into 3Ds Max and attached it to a plane. I tried to use my drawing for the basic shape and to place the engines where I wanted.

After I created a simple engine that I was happy with, I began to duplicate, re-size, and place the engines into their appropriate locations.

I also began trying to connect the engine modules together.

Once connected, I used the "Symmetry" modifier to mirror the top engines to the bottom of the model. I also wasn't liking the look of the cockpit and needed some inspiration and so I began to search further. The engine placement started making me think of insects and so I stumbled upon dragonflies and liked the idea of having the upper engines represent the wings of the insect. I started building the cockpit by making it into a dragonfly body shape.

Here are some of the screenshots of the ship's body development.

After connecting the top wing/engine portion of the craft, I decided that the four bottom engines might not be necessary. A friend of mine (Jesse) also remarked that having all of that weight in the front of the ship looked a bit awkward and that I might want to tone it down a little. So I ditched the bottom engines and focused on the top ones.

This sci-fi turret (picture bellow) isn't mine, but I still wanted to give credit where it is due. As I was googling turrets I found this image and saved it as one of my inspirations. I like the shape and geometric look of the cylindrical barrels. So I gained ideas from examples I saw on the internet and then tried to make my own variation/twist of my ship's gun barrels.

First I started out with a eight sided cylinder and extruded portions of it outward.

I added extra edgeloops and liked how it was looking smoothed.

I wanted to gun barrels to be connected to the racing craft in a way that look more like dragonfly limbs and so I gave it a jointed arm appearance.

Picking out a color scheme is always hard because you can have many different appealing combinations. I started looking through color variations of dragonflies and tried various green color combinations. For one reason or another I just wasn't liking the direction the green was going, it just didn't look sporty enough. Most sports cars that I know of are composed of lots of blacks, reds, yellows, etc, and so I found a dragonfly reference that I could still use and get the sporty colors I was looking for.

I finally settled on choosing yellow and black for my two main colors. In Max I started experimenting with where to divide my colors up and how they could highlight portions of the vehicle and still look cool. These are the un-rendered colors on the ship.

Because Keyshot is awesome, easy to use, and available on one of our computers, I decided to use it for my rendering choice. Here are some of my renders. (I copyright these images as being the property of Joshua Mullen as of April 24th, 2014. I allow people to distribute the photos under the Creative Commons License, but with "All Rights Reserved").

Here is also a small animated turn table of the ship in Keyshot:

I hope that one of these days that this will be included in my space racing game. I will let you all know if any major developments occur and hopefully I can get some people to play test it for me. Peace!