WIP Badger-Class Shuttle Explosion

['lectric eye]

I've started work on a short particle effects shot for my reel, in which a spaceship gets hit by a missile and destroyed (With PFlow). As I don't have much modelling experience I decided to follow the Badger Dropship tutorial and convert it into more of a shuttle craft along the way.

I've made the plating a bit chunkier and turned the air vents into some kind of exhaust vents. Now I've got as far as modelling the wing, which I'm redesigning as the original looks like it's meant for slowing the fall of the ship as it drops from orbit. I love the turbines and want to keep them on the ship as warp engines (I've remade the back end to include a couple of Star Wars style boosters which will have a blue-white mental ray glow material applied, for non-warp propulsion).

The only snag is it doesn't seem a good idea to bolt the turbines/warp engines on the outside as they are on the original, since they could so easily be shot. I need to work out a design that lets me show them off as they look so good, but also protects them. Anyway here's a couple of WIPs, not much to look at yet but I'll keep posting as I go along. Hopefully this will be interesting to read, and any suggestions are welcome

[scorp323]

Looking very nice, working on something similar too!

Will keep an eye on yours, maybe you have some inspiring ideas

cheers

['lectric eye]

I took a bit of a break from this recently, mainly due to other commitments (OK, a box set of 24 and Nine Inch Nails' last ever UK concert with special guest Gary Numan) but I'm back on it now. I wrestled with the shape of the wing for ages, and finally came up with the basic blocked out shape you see here - a kind of casing for the turbine which I'm using as a warp engine. Tomorrow I'll chamfer it a bit and add some chunky panelling. I've been mainly making particle systems lately and it surprised me how much I'd forgotten about modelling.

['lectric eye]

Here's the latest on this project. I spent ages making the panelling then decided I didn't like it and re-did it all in a chunkier style. I'm thinking of modelling a very sleek, smooth alien fighter ship which will launch a missile at it to blow it up.

[BiroBoy]

Very cool, I like the idea a lot.

If you can be bothered to do a search, a long time ago I did a Particle driven tornado where I made a script that took the barn and converted it into particles so each piece could be interactinf directly with the tornado.

I posted the script on the wip thread, wouldn't take a lot to convert it into what you would need.

[andrea1969]

I like the ship style and the project idea ... about this, are you thinking about an energy weapons shot rather than missile from the alien ship ?

['lectric eye]

I just read the whole saga of Biroboy's tornado - I laughed, I cried, I questioned reality at the end etc It's a really impressive effect but I think this explosion is going to be quite fast compared to the tornado. I'm planning on replacing the ship with a collection of warped panels, broken pipes and things (instanced geometry particles) which will get thrown out of a big explosion. Along with motion blur I'm hoping that will look ok.

I was thinking about having the alien ship fire lasers at it first, or even have the shuttle launch some fighter drone type things like in the game X3, which could circle around it in a crowd sim shooting lasers before being blown up. Hmm, this is turning into a much bigger job than I thought...