Visual Arts, Spaceship Assignment

This homework was quite fun actually.

For Visual Arts we were tasked with doing a paint over drawing of a 3D model that we made. The only catch was that we had to make the model of a spaceship.

Okay so I didn't do the right thing and save my project as different files as I went though versions of it. But, but but but, I can tell you how I started it off.

First off I started drawing some crude spaceships on paper, these would serve as the basis for the main design.

The first thing I thought of was to make a space drawing with a desert planet as the main setting. I started scouring the internet for photos of the middle east from space. In the end I found a fantastic photo of the Red Sea from space.

After I found the photo I wanted I then went about making the model. For the ship design I decided to look at games such as Star Citizen for inspiration. One of the ships, that I loved the design of very much, was the main inspiration of the ship design. 

The Gladius, which honestly is my favorite fighter in the game, was chosen to be modeled off of.

Behold, the Gladius.

For the ship model I didn't go all out with detail, I mean this was a draw over task so detail in 3D modelling wasn't needed.
Most of my attention was focused on the back of the ship, as I wanted it to be viewed from behind in the concept art. 

As you can see from the back I tried to get the wings and fins to match the game model.

I also paid attention to the front of the ship, as I could use renders from different angles to add more ships to the photo. 

Look at that low polly spaceship.

Annnd after that I was done. Now to add it to the photo.

Okay so I saved over lots of my progress, so I'll have to just say what I did and you'll have to believe me. 

Explosions

So what I wanted to try and capture was a space battle of sorts happening over a planet. I mean this would be cool if I could pull it off. For the first thing I did I imported a render of the ship and then started drawing over it with the brush tool to give it a paint job. After that I then added the engine effect onto the back of the ship. 

As well as this I also imported another ship model that I made in my spare time, to act as a carrier ship or something that took heavy damage, and was causing wreckage to rain down on the planet below. 

Oh I also had to give the planet some detail so I could make it look like the ships were actually fighting over something. I mean this wasn't Homeworld. For this I added a city that I found on google onto the edge of the sea, and added smoke and fire effects to it.

More explosions and spaceships.

For the next iteration of the image I changed the position of the carrier ship and added a new ship in the bottom left corner. Also I took a photo of Bagdad from space and added it onto the photo on the right hand side. 
Also there were more little details added to the image, like more smoke from the city, and ships in the scene. 

For the final iteration of the image, I thought the spaceship could use more detail, so I added some rust and grime effects onto it and improved the engine effects to give it a sense of movement.