CMSV Langley

Canadian Resource Corporation - Vancouver Class Freighter

Description:

Canadian Merchant Space Vessel (CMSV) Langley is a Vancouver class cargo vessel designed to carry large amounts of gases (Hydrogen, Helium, etc) from gas siphon plants in the outer planets to stations in the inner-system.
She was commissioned by the Canadian Resource Corporation and built at the Tranquility Dry docks by Bauer Sniers International and is the fifth of her kind following the Vancouver, Richmond, Burnaby, and Coquitlam. She has been in service for six years now.
The Langley uses three 2nd Generation magnetic confinement fusion engines based on miniaturized stellarator technology. During regular operation, the vessel follows a brachistochrone trajectory, using the engines for constant acceleration at 1/10g. This allows the Langley to traverse between the Earth and Jupiter (4.2 AU) in approximately 20 days.

Process:

The visual you see above is the third iteration of a spacecraft design I have been working on and refining for many years now. More telling, this is the first completed project of mine that utilized Blender 3D, a popular and free 3D modeling program, as a major component. I had been dabbling with Blender for a few close to a year and I’m just starting to figure it out. As some branches of my graphical work have steadily started pushing the capabilities of Adobe Illustrator, it was only natural that I moved on to 3D space proper.

The model was created in Blender 3D. In some of my previous projects in the software, I had trouble brainstorming and developing detailed models with had a tendency to stall progress. This time, I had plenty of material to work with.

The idea was to have a basic form model that would then be detailed in Photoshop and Fresco, before doing final graphic design touches on Illustrator. A good amount of work went into making the model and I was very tempted to just keep adding more detail in the model.

After I finished creating a general model, I colored it in Blender and then rendered out the project. The image was then brought into Fresco and Photoshop for the next step.

I hadn’t done much Photoshop work in a while, but I was excited to be using it again. Much of the decal positioning was done in Photoshop, using the transform and skew tool to get things in the right place. The weathering and line work was done in Adobe Fresco on my iPad Pro. At the time, I was wondering if adding a possible hand drawn component would contribute something to the look of the design.

As I mentioned, this is the third design. It’s also the first to be done in proper 3D. The prospect of incorporating 3D modeling into my creative workflow is exciting and I’m really looking forward to what else I’ll be able to do. I kind of view the continued use of Fresco and Photoshop as a crutch for not properly learning how to do textures and UVs in blender, and with the amount of time I spent in both programs to achieve this level of detail, it could be argued I could’ve just learned to detail them in blender. That is something I will tackle on the following projects.

Still, I feel the evolution is very apparent between each iteration. You can see the previous versions below. I can only imagine what future versions may look like.