The Etherian Sol has landed! Well, crashed, but...

I will be adding the name of the ship to the hull as a decal, but for now it's unwrapped, textured, and placed in the scene. Originally, I was going to make the gold parts a light birch, but I realized that it wouldn't have stood out from the temple or pop out enough.

I used multiple references to create the ship, trying to stick to real life as much as possible. The details inside the silhouette of the ship are meant to resemble vines growing up to the front, getting more distorted as they move along until it looks more like a meteor with an air pocket around it. The oblong pieces in the middle were meant to create a spine type look to the ship, but I am now thinking that I will get rid of them in a later pass. However, the main piece of inspiration, and what I modeled the ship around is the Ribbon-tailed Astrapia.

The long, winding pieces on the sides were the first parts that I modeled, before creating the ship. I did make some small adjustments to the final shape of the 'tails' a little bit in order to keep from clipping through the ship, but the overall design came from them first.

When I had come up with the idea, I did not have any proper drawing paper on me, but I did use the notebook in my backpack to quickly sketch out some ideas:

I would have liked to have started modeling the ship sooner in development, but unfortunately, there were multiple uncontrollable set backs, which we were luckily able to adapt around fairly well.

Additionally, this week, I modified some parts of the temple to accommodate the new shape of the ship and set up ambient occlusion to make sure it could create the gradient that we wanted for our Ukiyo-e style. Fortunately, it did work out quite well, despite being very subtle.

I finished all of the work for my electives early, which means I can now focus much more on the game. Next week, I will be breaking the right wing off of the ship and wedging it in the tower to create a platform to walk on, finalizing the geometry in the temple, unwrapping everything, and placing the final textures onto it, before playtesting at the library on Saturday. I had to take the textures off this week, because of a small, unexpected problem, but it should be fine by next week.

The Etherian Sol before unwrapping and texturing: