Free Spaceships

While searching the internet for inspiration for greebles for my spaceship - it's still too smooth and needs more bumpy bits - I stumbled across a website with free spaceships. It's called Solcommand and it looks great.

I downloaded one of the spaceships for fun, and it went very smoothly. I double clicked the OBJ file, expecting it to open in Blender, but it opened in a strange windows program called 3D Builder, completely to my surprise. I had no idea this app was even on my hard disk.

Solcommand was a very pleasing little find, but didn't have the greebles I was looking for, so I kept Googling.

I finally found some great greebles at Deviant art, which I did not steal wholesale but which I did, as we artists say, use for reference and inspiration. Perhaps, with a magnifying glass, you can pick out some of the new greebles on my spaceship in the picture below.

The spaceship is so large that, even though I spend a lot of time crafting the greebles, they tend to look just like boxy bumps or pipe-like bumps from a distance. This is why greebling is usually the sort of thing that people do with a texture, but I like to know that each greeble is a real pipe or block, not just an effect of the light on a flat piece of spaceship. To show the importance of greebles in creating scale, here is the smooth spaceship before I started adding the greebles.

The difference, I hope you'll agree, is stark. And it is well worth the hours of tinkering about that I invest to populate the surface with bumps and irregularities. (At least, that's what I'm always telling myself). After the bumpyness is complete, then I'll give the hull an attractive color and move on to creating the floors inside. The reason for all this effort, of course, is that I'm working on the next in the series of RPG supplements I write, called Spaceship Owner's Guides. They are available from DriveThruRPG, and there are already more than ten of them.