Like the idea.
Your ship designs struck a cord, when via researching a topic came across Nautilus-X, a NASA concept for a space exploration vehicle, also no harm getting distracted…happens! which by the way nice realism, especially Saturn’s rings and thanks for the breakdown. Anyways will keep tabs on how you get on 
I’m glad this is the kind of vehicle that my design is reminiscent of, that’s exactly what I’m going for. I’ll have to make some design decisions that are more like traditional sci fi, simply because of the time constraints, but I’m trying to make this look as NASA as possible.
Thanks! Here’s a modeling update:
I’ve worked on some smaller elements, like communications and cargo modules and such. I find that building a collection of smaller objects helps when working on the bigger ones. Instead of trying to model a ton of unique detail into each large section of the ship, I can just model the base shape, then fill up the surface with parts from the smaller objects. Greeble ftw.
I’ve planned out the design so there are lots of repeating elements. For example, the only reason I have four engines instead of one is that now I can do a quarter of the work, and still get a ton of detail. Here’s an example with the spine of the ship, you can see how it’s just one section copied out:
I’m also finishing the radiators (the big ‘wings’), but I can’t figure out what to put on the outside of them. They need to look like coolers, but they also can’t look too much like a CPU cooler, because that won’t work in space with no air circulation.
I’m also not quite happy with the square patterns on the inside, but I’ll fix that later if I have time.
I have gathered 450 reference images and movie screen grabs for this project so far. Every one of them was specifically selected for some shape, surface, color scheme, composition or other quality that I liked and wanted to keep in mind. I made a contact sheet just to see what it looks like, and thought it might provide some insight to what is going on in my head as I’m working.
Thank you DGruwier for explaining how you made your planet, quite clever using several spheres and the result looks great already. The modeling on your spaceship is coming along real nice as well, it looks beautiful and intruging with all its small details !
I like the detail of the models and the realism of Saturn so far 
One side note though, if you are using Saturn in your short film–I might consider changing the rings. If you are planning on a close-up with Saturn’s rings in the short film, you should take into account that Saturn’s rings are made up of millions of small asteroids and objects. If you zoom in on the rings and they still seem like they are paper thin, it will kill the realism. Might I suggest using particle systems to create the rings for close-up shots while using the ring images as color guides to tint the objects and asteroids. You could even animate them revolving around Saturn on circular paths and each path consist of a different material to match the ring pattern.
If you are not planning on a close-up of Saturn’s rings, then I would leave them as they are because they look great, as does the satellite.
Coming along quite nicely.
I have gathered 450 reference images and movie screen grabs for this project so far. Every one of them was specifically selected for some shape, surface, color scheme, composition or other quality that I liked and wanted to keep in mind. I made a contact sheet just to see what it looks like, and thought it might provide some insight to what is going on in my head as I’m working.
An axiom of 3D modelling, is that “You Can Never Have To Many Refs”.
This is, after all obviously a project of some complexity, So to be honest, the more research carried out prior and during each stage of the process make for a plausible outcome at completion, at least I’ve found in the past.
But yeah as above gathering specific material supporting a given train of thought concept’ing a design aesthetic is practically fundamental.
Anyways keep up the good work.
Thank you, glad you appreciate it :).
That’s a good idea, although I believe to see the individual particles in the rings you have to be extremely close. I’ll definitely keep it in mind though, it could be a cool effect to sweep over the rings very closely.
Exactly, I had a specific start date for the project since this is part of a final exam, but before I began, I spent months gathering reference and reading up on space travel in my spare time.
Anything you have a good reference of, is something you don’t have to invent from scratch. Inventing takes orders of magnitude longer than simply assembling from parts, even if those parts are completely unrelated.
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New update:
Finished modeling the fuel tanks. Hard to wrap my head around how the trusses in between the spheres would worked, so I basically just added random trusses (reusing parts from the heat radiators) until it looked like it could potentially hold together. It definitely would fall apart immediately in real life, b you’ll never get any closer to them than this, so it’s fine for now.
I can’t wait to see what it all looks like with textures and stickers and nice materials and everything, but I have to endure! I promised myself I wouldn’t start going into look dev until all the modeling is 100% done :surprised.
must. resist.
Thank you! All of the modeling needs to be done by next week, or I won’t be able to render in time for my exams, so I could use some luck 
New update:
Getting close with the main body of the ship. I don’t expect to get any closer with the camera than this, so I’m fairly happy with the level of detail. Although I do need to add some greeble on the back of the engines and on the structure that connects the engines to the radiators.
Any thoughts? Any specific parts that need some love? Right click and open the image to see the full 1920*810 frame.
I came across this cool design for a foldable origami structure:
…and thought it would make a cool alternative to the classic zigzag NASA heat radiators:
So I combined them to this. I’m still not quite sure about these, I’ll have to see them in context of the rest of the ship. I’m worried they’ll just look like weird zigzags. I’m not going to animate them folding out, so I didn’t take care to actually model them out so they could be rigged to fold for real. That’s alright, they just need to look like they could potentially work like that, which is my philosophy for this entire project in general.
Just to be clear, these are the low intensity heat radiators that go on the habitation part of the ship. From what I could figure out, realistically you need two cooling systems for a ship like this, one for the intense heat of the engines, and one for just the normal heat buildup of electronics and people.
This is a great piece of work. When you are finished I would love to see this in the Science and Technical art forum to share.
Thank you! Where is that forum? I can’t find it
New update:
I’m working on the habitation part now. This part is supposed to look like a conventional spacestation, so I’m borrowing some of the visual elements from ISS, even if they don’t make sense in this context. I think it helps sell the association.
I can’t for the life of me figure out what the two big habitation modules should actually look like, but hopefully that’s the last big challenge of this project.
Here’s an full render of everything together so far (but no materials yet). Fun fact, any spaceship’s “up” is opposite the direction of thrust, which means that the correct way to see this spaceship is actually standing up. It’s basically a gigantic tower, and I tried to keep that in mind while designing the structure.
Figured this is a good oppertunity to show how the shield in front of the habitation area shields the crew from the, presumably, deadly amounts of radiation from the engines.
I’m not finished with modeling yet, but I was losing my concentration, so I decided to skip ahead and start shading and doing some test renders instead.
I’ve been modeling in Cinema 4D because it has a nice workflow for working with lots of small objects and duplicating them in various ways. But I’m migrating everything to Max because it has much better texturing, shading and rendering features (especially paired with Vray)
Here’s what I have so far. The “tail” part is missing, because I’m still working on that. At this stage it’s becoming more obvious which parts need more detail. I’ll deal with that last if I have time.
Here’s a WIP of the habitation module, along with thumbnails some of the previous concepts. I’m not completely happy with it, as it was causing me some headaches to figure out a shape that had that balance of looking good but also realistic. Eventually I settled on something I thought looked alright and started detailing that. Sometimes you’ve just gotta settle and remember that the audience doesn’t care how closely it matches your grand vision.
Oh, and I rendered this short animation test to try and gauge the render times, and get an idea of how this whole thing might look when the camera is working. The render took way too long, so I had to cut it off early. Looks like I’ll be using an a render farm for the final renders.
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The last second or so of the animation looks amazing. How long will the final animation be? Keep up the hard work!
I expect the short film to be 6-8 minutes long, but this ship is only going to be on screen for part of that.
I’ll do render tests in the mean time, but they’ll probably not be very long.
Done!
Well not quite, but asset itself is done, with textures and shading.
This is a downscale from a 5k render, but it’s still fairly high res if you right click and open it.
I’m working on a turntable, closeups and a couple of test shots showing it up close, but I might not post them until this time next week, because I have a final exam to prepare for.
By the way, the planet is a full, dynamic 3D earth I made a few months back. This is not supposed to be earth, but a planet made mostly of water (which is basically just an excuse not to have to paint textures for the land masses).
It has atmospheric effects, cloud shadows, sunset/rise tint, everything. What you see here is a nearly raw render. Maybe I should do a post about that some time.
This is downscaled from 5k, but the 5K render is still as crisp and sharp thanks to the extreme resolution of the cloud cover textures; I’m using a 40k NASA cloud cover texture from the Visible Earth catalog.
Awesome work man! not only the technical finesse in executing this highly complex scene with high level proficiency too completion but for me personally an excellent learning pathway, so well done indeed.
It has atmospheric effects, cloud shadows, sunset/rise tint, everything. What you see here is a nearly raw render. Maybe I should do a post about that some time.
Hell yeah! gets my vote if that helps any