Concept by me
Background is from NASA
E4 Chariot
Single stage to orbit craft by EIOS. Helping bring the world closer together, even to the heavens. Capable of carrying anything from passengers to cargo.
PROCESS
Concepting
This model is all part of Project Vista. For the story I needed a passenger SSTO(Single Stage To Orbit) vehicle and since I wanted to keep my world as hard-scifi, I used the space sim Kerbal Space Program to assist in the design. Got in without an exact idea on how it should look and let the testing process shape it.
Once I made a working SSTO, I used that design as the main inspiration for the concept. In Krita I finalized the design of the vehicle.
Modeling
All modeling was done in a subdiv workflow in Maya 2023.
UV
To get the texel density correct, I made a UV checker material and assigned it to a UVed piece. From there I sized the UV until I didn’t notice individual pixels from a desired distance.
UVs were also organized with each V row taking up one side. Right sides were mirrored versions of left sides, allowing me to reuse textures. While Maya is very cranky about doing that, I was able to export files to Blender, flip them + fix normals, then reimport them back in Maya
V1: Left
V2: Right
V3: Center
Texturing
Texturing was all done in Adobe Substance Painter.
This project was the first one I used custom vector decals. Concepting in a regular 2D drawing program Krita, then create vector versions in Affinity.
Also created some custom repeatable textures to create the heatshield.
Compositing
While waiting for the storyboard and script to be written, I did some proof of concepts for realistic looking renders. To do this I looked through NASA’s archive of photos of the Space Shuttle and tried to recreate them using my spacecraft.
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