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Blade Runner Blimp Replica

This model has many complicated features which made them take several months to finish it. Firstly the magnitude of lights they used to highlight important features like the screens on each side and outline its shape with the light on the ends of the sticks. These were all made with fibre optics that is all managed inside the model. Also theres a motor inside the ship that rotates see through coloured plastic which periodically changes the colour of the lights randomly. As well as this, the model features two spotlights that move back and forth as they obviously do in the movie. 

The shell of the model itself was created by vacuum forming some off the original kit and then by trail and error reshaping them until they fit together. 

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Yuri Gagarin

First man in space

April 12 was already a huge day in space history twenty years before the launch of the first shuttle mission. On that day in 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (left, on the way to the launch pad) became the first human in space, making a 108-minute orbital flight in his Vostok 1 spacecraft. Newspapers like The Huntsville Times (right) trumpeted Gagarin’s accomplishment.

Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American in space less than a month later.

The first cooperative human space flight project between the United States and the Soviet Union took place in 1975. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project was designed to test the compatibility of rendezvous and docking systems for American and Soviet spacecraft and to open the way for future joint manned flights.

Since 1993, the U.S. and Russia have worked together on a number of other space flight projects. The Space Shuttle began visiting the Russian Mir space station in 1994, and in 1995 Norm Thagard became the first U.S. astronaut to take up residency on Mir. Seven U.S. astronauts served with their Russian counterparts aboard the orbiting Mir laboratory from 1995 to 1998. The experience gained from the Mir cooperative effort, as well as lessons learned, paved the way for the International Space Station.

In-orbit construction on the Station began in November 1998, and it has been staffed non-stop with international crews since November 2000. The first Station crew, made up of U.S. commander Bill Shepherd and cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev, was launched on board a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. The crew returned to Earth on the Space Shuttle Discovery in March 2001.

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Tom Sachs

SPACE PROGRAM

For more than a decade Sachs has pondered the homespun technical ingenuity and romance with the unknown that brought America the Apollo program. Experimenting with models of varying scale ("Lunar Module (1:18)," 1999; "Crawler," 2003) has culminated in the realization of his own life-size SPACE PROGRAM. Pirating the milestone in collective memory when man took his first walk on the moon, Sachs reconstructs its key components, built to scale his way. By recollecting this historic event as a custom-made experience from the free domain of public imagination, he renders it totally in and of our time, charged by a vigorous artistic idiom that is ambivalent to the core. In a new twist on his shameless cannibalizing of corporate identity, Sachs now has the giants of high-style branding - Nike, Prada, and the like - working for him to produce items (lab coats, space boots) for the detailed inventory of his funky space odyssey. In addition to the huge, intricately built lunar module that is the centerpiece of SPACE PROGRAM - replete with such classic Sachsian features as a fully stocked booze cabinet, toolkit, and soundtrack necessary for survival on an alien planet - visitors will find a fully functioning mission-control unit. On a grid of monitors, the liturgy of space exploration unfolds in a live demonstration by Sachs and his team, involving countless rituals and procedures, from instrument checks to moon-walking and sample-collecting to splash-down. Thus the gallery becomes a sort of reliquary of both the material traces and special effects of the artist's encounters with the terrible sublime. ABOUT TOM SACHS TOM SACHS is a sculptor, probably best known for his elaborate recreations of various Modern icons, all of them masterpieces of engineering and design of one kind or another. In an early show he made Knoll office furniture out of phone books and duct tape; later, he recreated Le Corbusier's 1952 Unité d'Habitation using only foamcore and a glue gun. Other projects have included his versions of various Cold War masterpieces, like the Apollo 11 Lunar Excursion Module, and the bridge of the battleship USS Enterprise. And because no engineering project is more complex and pervasive than the corporate ecosystem, he's done versions of those, too, including a McDonald's he built using plywood, glue, assorted kitchen appliances. He's also done Hello Kitty and her friends in materials ranging from foamcore to bronze.

A lot has been made of the conceptual underpinnings of these sculptures: how Sachs' sampling capitalist culture, remixing, dubbing and spitting it back out again, so that the results are transformed and transforming. Equally, if not more important, is his total embrace of "showing his work." All the steps that led up to the end result are always on display. On a practical level, this means that all seams, joints, screws or for that matter anything holding stuff together, like foamcore and plywood, are left exposed. Nothing is erased, sanded away, or rendered invisible. On a more philosophical level, this means that nothing Sachs makes is ever finished. Like any good engineering project, everything can always be stripped down, stripped out, redesigned and improved.

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Apollo 13

Mission Objective Apollo 13 was supposed to land in the Fra Mauro area. An explosion on board forced Apollo 13 to circle the moon without landing. The Fra Mauro site was reassigned to Apollo 14.   Crew James A. Lovell Jr., Commander Fred W. Haise Jr., Lunar Module Pilot John L. Swigert Jr., Command Module Pilot Backup Crew John W. Young, Commander Charles M. Duke Jr., Lunar Module Pilot John L. Swigert Jr., Command Module Pilot Payload Odyssey (CM-109) Aquarius (LM-7) Prelaunch Milestones 6/13/69 - S-IVB ondock at Kennedy 6/29/69 - S-II ondock at Kennedy 6/16/69 - S-IC ondock at Kennedy 7/7/69 - S-IU ondock at Kennedy Launch April 11, 1970; 1:13 p.m. CST Launch Pad 39A Saturn-V AS-508 High Bay 1 Mobile Launcher Platform-3 Firing Room 1 Orbit Altitude: 118.99 miles Inclination: 32.547 degrees Earth Orbits: 1.5 Duration: five days, 22 hours, 54 minutes, 41 seconds Distance: 622,268 miles Landing April 17, 1970 Pacific Ocean Recovery Ship: USS Iwo Jima

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Kerbal Space Programme

To bring his ambitious project into existence, Falanghe and his team turned to Unity. “We chose Unity almost from day one,” he says. “We had already done some small projects with it, and we chose it at first for how quickly you can put something together, and how simple it is to deploy what you created.” He had worked mostly with Flash back in those days, and considered creating KSP in Flash at the start of the project. “But we quickly realized Flash could only have taken it up to a certain point, and since we were already contemplating the potential for growing the game if things turned out alright, we decided to go with Unity from the start,” he says. “I’ve been very happy with our decision. Once we familiarized ourselves with it, we loved working with it. The modular behaviors, for instance, are something we abuse a lot in KSP. C# is an awesome language to work with also. I’m a total convert now, definitely.” He says that Unity Asset Store packages like EzGUI, Vectrosity, AdvancedRagdoll, and SmartWater have saved the team a lot of time and effort.

Getting the idea rolling was a rather speedy process. Falanghe put the first version of KSP together in about a day, just to see something that vaguely resembled the concept on screen. “It was no more than a few stacked cylinders and some forces applied with some particle effects, set against a flat terrain plane and a skybox,” he recalls. There were no camera controls, or any other controls at all, and hardly any code for that matter. “I had set the parameters for the forces and joints just so that the cylinders that were supposed to be SRBs broke loose while the rocket was still in the frame. That was version 0.0.”

“Through all our updates, we’ve focused on having a playable game at all times,” says Falanghe. “This is a very important part of our development style—it would be very disheartening to have something unplayable. Besides, I can’t sleep if some script in the game won’t compile, so the game in an unplayable state for any amount of time could really affect my health!” There were moments during development where he says he was utterly stumped by one problem or another, and sometimes it did feel like they’d hit upon an unsolvable, project-sinking issue. He recalls one such case, when the team first got into making the physics transition into its two-body deterministic solver. “There were so many issues with disabling the PhysX rigidbodies mid-flight and putting the ship on rails, and then transitioning back out again, I felt we had taken a step longer than our own legs were that time,” he says. Despite the stress, however, they eventually found a way around each issue and picked their way out of the rut.

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Escape from Tarkov

Battlestate turned to 3D terrain generator World Machine to procedurally create the perfect environment on which to stage compelling gameplay. Once the base was generated, the result was split into 35 sub-terrains and given a custom LOD system and dynamic terrain output preforms.

To handle the huge amount of detail, Battlestate used custom scripts to offload resources outside the field of view. “Basically, what we built amounts to manual occlusion culling. The normal method required a lot of CPU resources given the size of the maps and amount of detail,” continues Nik.

“We were determined from the start to create large and detailed areas, which means we need to put an extra emphasis, from the ground up, on how they’re optimized. This comes down to careful planning for how to handle issues like occlusion culling, but we also have Unity specialists hard at work revealing opportunities to reduce RAM consumption and CPU time – a rather huge but rather thankless task. The Unity Profiler, specifically the Memory Profiler, has been a huge help in this regard.”

Providing an adrenaline-charged package takes more than just ballistics and gun models, and this is where Unity’s Mecanim features came in.

“It was important for us to have character animation be as accurate as the guns themselves. Characters need to run, crouch, and crawl just as real military operatives would, and this also makes transitioning between animations very important,” explains Nik. “These animated transitions don’t just have aesthetic implications but also gameplay. How long does it take to stand up and run? How quickly can you reload your weapon? Mecanim was an important tool for us to tune the many actions and make them feel realistic and fluid.”

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Hearthstone

The team was small by Blizzard’s standards: about 15 people for a number of years. In terms of the folks tasked with bringing the game to mobile, that sits at around four or five. “One of the things that really made Unity a great solution for us, is that we really like to iterate here at Blizzard,” says Chayes. “That’s one of the things that’s been core to our game development process in the past: we spend a lot of time going over the mechanics, multiple times, and working on them to make sure they’re as polished and as awesome as they can be.”

Because Hearthstone was a smaller game and had a shorter development timeframe than some of its other titles, the Blizzard team didn’t have as much time to go through its traditional iteration cycles. “One of the great things about using Unity is the speed with which you can iterate allows us to learn things that are working and not working, very fast,” says Chayes. “The fact that you can run the editor and it shows the same thing players are going to see in the game – and then stop it and go and identify bugs or polish things you want to tweak – really helped us learn faster about some of the things we thought we could be improved.”

“Another thing that was really great about Unity was that it had native support for a lot of the tools that our artists like to use – Photoshop and Maya – and can read in their base file formats, without having to go through some conversion process, which also sped up our process.” He says that one of the tools the team got out of the Unity Asset Store was PlayMaker. “That’s something we’ve used in the game to create scripted events alongside our animation system. It was actually a big help in enabling our art team to independently make cool events in-game.”

Indeed, this was the team’s first experience with Unity, turning development at one of the world’s most successful developers into something of a learning experience. “One thing that’s been great for us is the amount of support we found, even for issues we didn’t anticipate, as we began development with Unity,” says Chayes. “It was really easy for us to jump online and find out that, ‘Oh hey, guess what? This problem we ran into, other people have already encountered it in the past. We don’t have to go and find the solution on our own because there’s this great network of support.’ That was another huge reason why we chose to go this direction, and it ended up really helping us time and time again. On the whole, I think the Unity community has been awesome.”

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Meats Meier

Meats utilises a very unique style of loosely forming human shapes from a plethora of other strands. As seen with this second image there are loads of intertwining and waving strips that come together to produce the face which I find really fascinating. Whereas with the first the like to add these as flourishing to the original piece, like with the curling, Paisley like hair. One aspect that I really like about his style is that even through all of the madness that he creates you can still make sense of the sculpt when at first glance it may look like nothing.

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Ian Spriggs

Ian has several styles ad all them are excellent. Firstly, he mostly exercises his hyper realism style wit even a scarf that looks like it was taken straight from real life. The hair and the details and markings on the hands make her look real. The second is that sci fi/fantasy style which again is to a great standard. He has covered the character with plates that are broken up and theres lots to look at all over the figure. This is an artist I may want to refer back to if I follow through with sci fi vehicle/prop design. 

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Alireza Akhbari

Alireza has a great emphasis on hair in his sculpts and uses Mudbox to create his mostly caricatured works. I really like the extremely high detail and quality of the hair which some strands being lighter shades than others actually being able to see each hair rather than it being a 3d built up texture. As well as that the detail in the facial features are brilliant even to just the little scar on the top of the nose and small birthmarks around. 

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Scott Eaton

Scott uses zBrush to create sculptures of mainly full body figures of people. The technique of roughly making out the shape of the face and stature makes it look as if it was chiselled into stone or modelled with clay. I really like this and it separates him from other figure sculptures. 

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Apollo 11

Mission Objective The primary objective of Apollo 11 was to complete a national goal set by President John F. Kennedy on May 25, 1961: perform a crewed lunar landing and return to Earth. Additional flight objectives included scientific exploration by the lunar module, or LM, crew; deployment of a television camera to transmit signals to Earth; and deployment of a solar wind composition experiment, seismic experiment package and a Laser Ranging Retroreflector. During the exploration, the two astronauts were to gather samples of lunar-surface materials for return to Earth. They also were to extensively photograph the lunar terrain, the deployed scientific equipment, the LM spacecraft, and each other, both with still and motion picture cameras. This was to be the last Apollo mission to fly a "free-return" trajectory, which would enable a return to Earth with no engine firing, providing a ready abort of the mission at any time prior to lunar orbit insertion.

Mission Highlights Apollo 11 launched from Cape Kennedy on July 16, 1969, carrying Commander Neil Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin into an initial Earth-orbit of 114 by 116 miles. An estimated 530 million people watched Armstrong's televised image and heard his voice describe the event as he took "...one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind" on July 20, 1969. Two hours, 44 minutes and one-and-a-half revolutions after launch, the S-IVB stage reignited for a second burn of five minutes, 48 seconds, placing Apollo 11 into a translunar orbit. The command and service module, or CSM, Columbia separated from the stage, which included the spacecraft-lunar module adapter, or SLA, containing the lunar module, or LM, Eagle. After transposition and jettisoning of the SLA panels on the S-IVB stage, the CSM docked with the LM. The S-IVB stage separated and injected into heliocentric orbit four hours, 40 minutes into the flight. The first color TV transmission to Earth from Apollo 11 occurred during the translunar coast of the CSM/LM. Later, on July 17, a three-second burn of the SPS was made to perform the second of four scheduled midcourse corrections programmed for the flight. The launch had been so successful that the other three were not needed. On July 18, Armstrong and Aldrin put on their spacesuits and climbed through the docking tunnel from Columbia to Eagle to check out the LM, and to make the second TV transmission. On July 19, after Apollo 11 had flown behind the moon out of contact with Earth, came the first lunar orbit insertion maneuver. At about 75 hours, 50 minutes into the flight, a retrograde firing of the SPS for 357.5 seconds placed the spacecraft into an initial, elliptical-lunar orbit of 69 by 190 miles. Later, a second burn of the SPS for 17 seconds placed the docked vehicles into a lunar orbit of 62 by 70.5 miles, which was calculated to change the orbit of the CSM piloted by Collins. The change happened because of lunar-gravity perturbations to the nominal 69 miles required for subsequent LM rendezvous and docking after completion of the lunar landing. Before this second SPS firing, another TV transmission was made, this time from the surface of the moon. On July 20, Armstrong and Aldrin entered the LM again, made a final check, and at 100 hours, 12 minutes into the flight, the Eagle undocked and separated from Columbia for visual inspection. At 101 hours, 36 minutes, when the LM was behind the moon on its 13th orbit, the LM descent engine fired for 30 seconds to provide retrograde thrust and commence descent orbit insertion, changing to an orbit of 9 by 67 miles, on a trajectory that was virtually identical to that flown by Apollo 10. At 102 hours, 33 minutes, after Columbia and Eagle had reappeared from behind the moon and when the LM was about 300 miles uprange, powered descent initiation was performed with the descent engine firing for 756.3 seconds. After eight minutes, the LM was at "high gate" about 26,000 feet above the surface and about five miles from the landing site. The descent engine continued to provide braking thrust until about 102 hours, 45 minutes into the mission. Partially piloted manually by Armstrong, the Eagle landed in the Sea of Tranquility in Site 2 at 0 degrees, 41 minutes, 15 seconds north latitude and 23 degrees, 26 minutes east longitude. This was about four miles downrange from the predicted touchdown point and occurred almost one-and-a-half minutes earlier than scheduled. It included a powered descent that ran a mere nominal 40 seconds longer than preflight planning due to translation maneuvers to avoid a crater during the final phase of landing. Attached to the descent stage was a commemorative plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon and the three astronauts. The flight plan called for the first EVA to begin after a four-hour rest period, but it was advanced to begin as soon as possible. Nonetheless, it was almost four hours later that Armstrong emerged from the Eagle and deployed the TV camera for the transmission of the event to Earth. At about 109 hours, 42 minutes after launch, Armstrong stepped onto the moon. About 20 minutes later, Aldrin followed him. The camera was then positioned on a tripod about 30 feet from the LM. Half an hour later, President Nixon spoke by telephone link with the astronauts. Commemorative medallions bearing the names of the three Apollo 1 astronauts who lost their lives in a launch pad fire, and two cosmonauts who also died in accidents, were left on the moon's surface. A one-and-a-half inch silicon disk, containing micro miniaturized goodwill messages from 73 countries, and the names of congressional and NASA leaders, also stayed behind. During the EVA, in which they both ranged up to 300 feet from the Eagle, Aldrin deployed the Early Apollo Scientific Experiments Package, or EASEP, experiments, and Armstrong and Aldrin gathered and verbally reported on the lunar surface samples. After Aldrin had spent one hour, 33 minutes on the surface, he re-entered the LM, followed 41 minutes later by Armstrong. The entire EVA phase lasted more than two-and-a-half hours, ending at 111 hours, 39 minutes into the mission. Armstrong and Aldrin spent 21 hours, 36 minutes on the moon's surface. After a rest period that included seven hours of sleep, the ascent stage engine fired at 124 hours, 22 minutes. It was shut down 435 seconds later when the Eagle reached an initial orbit of 11 by 55 miles above the moon, and when Columbia was on its 25th revolution. As the ascent stage reached apolune at 125 hours, 19 minutes, the reaction control system, or RCS, fired so as to nearly circularize the Eagle orbit at about 56 miles, some 13 miles below and slightly behind Columbia. Subsequent firings of the LM RCS changed the orbit to 57 by 72 miles. Docking with Columbia occurred on the CSM's 27th revolution at 128 hours, three minutes into the mission. Armstrong and Aldrin returned to the CSM with Collins. Four hours later, the LM jettisoned and remained in lunar orbit. Trans-Earth injection of the CSM began July 21 as the SPS fired for two-and-a-half minutes when Columbia was behind the moon in its 59th hour of lunar orbit. Following this, the astronauts slept for about 10 hours. An 11.2 second firing of the SPS accomplished the only midcourse correction required on the return flight. The correction was made July 22 at about 150 hours, 30 minutes into the mission. Two more television transmissions were made during the trans-Earth coast. Re-entry procedures were initiated July 24, 44 hours after leaving lunar orbit. The SM separated from the CM, which was re-oriented to a heat-shield-forward position. Parachute deployment occurred at 195 hours, 13 minutes. After a flight of 195 hours, 18 minutes, 35 seconds - about 36 minutes longer than planned - Apollo 11 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, 13 miles from the recovery ship USS Hornet. Because of bad weather in the target area, the landing point was changed by about 250 miles. Apollo 11 landed 13 degrees, 19 minutes north latitude and 169 degrees, nine minutes west longitude July 24, 1969.

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Assets for the C4D Project

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Adam Savages Kitbashing and Scratch Building

These are both techniques for designing ships or structures from just an simple idea like a sketch from a single angle (scratch building is just building something from scratch). In this video he has a single drawing of a ship and his first step is to visualise the entire craft and how he would build it. He’s also using styrene which is a thin, durable, easily cut plastic ideal for this purpose. From cutting pieces from this he can build the basic shape of the ship, sticking them all together with weld on 3. An important aspect to notice here is that he uses off cuts as internal structure to strengthen the entire ship.

Then when this is done you can neaten the edges by sanding down all of the overhangs. It’s important to add these as you may accidentally have to little and then the kit will seem warped slightly.

The next stage is to add some detail or as he said to simply just break up the empty space. In this case he has some large, blank areas in the sides and front. To do this he takes a thinner sheet of styrene and adds panelling of it onto the blank space. As well as this just tiny squares of the styrene dotted around really help to make the ship far less boring.

The last stage is to kitbash to really add a lot of fine detail to it. Popular sources for this are other space ship modelling kits as well as tanks, guns etc. Any and all of these will have tiny parts which are perfect for this purpose. All you have to do is find these parts and dot them around until a ship is finally made. A tip he gave is to use domed pieces as they kick light and immediately draw attention to wherever they are.

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Vitaly Bulgarov Store

This store has a lot high quality premade parts ready for futuristic kit bashing. These parts already have rivets and cables running round them so the creator doesn’t have to find work arounds to add these. They’re useful because they will cut out a lot of time in the material finding and design process. It will allow much more reliable and high quality designs for space ships, vehicles, buildings and mechs etc.

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Derelict Ship

This was designed by Ridley Scott for the Alien covenant and Prometheus movie. When he was looking for inspiration he found himself looking at a painting in H R Giger’s Necronomicon which looked like a musical instrument similar to a saxophone he said.

After he redrew this is thought his new ship design looked like a giant croissant, so he used that as a base for the curved ship.

One of the main ideas behind the design is that it should look as if it’s been planted and that it’s yet to mature. This is perhaps the cause of all of the smooth, round surfaces with little to no hard edges. That it’s like this because it’s when the Alien from the movies is first born and that it’s symbolic of a beginning.

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Close encounters of the third kind

The ship in Close Encounters was designed by Colin Cantwell, the same person who made designs for Star Wars. It’s is comprised of lots of random prongs, protrusions and towers all over it. Also with its round, rotating base I believe it was inspired by generic UFO designs as the film itself isn’t really about the aliens, more the main character being driven mad by them. So they he made a ship that was blatantly alien but with an updated design for more impressive and futuristic visuals.

In contrast to his designs for Star Wars, it’s is much more random and un-neat compared to the Star Destroyers and X-wings with more smooth and uniform faces.