Steampunk Project

The Theme "Steampunk"

Steampunk airship examples

A generic Blimp/balloon with the hull of a 18th century ship/galleon, the balloon is what I want my main fuselage to be based on, similar to the blimp below. in this specific image the main hull is made from what seems to be wooden planks, supported by iron beams. The main balloon is made from a stretched fabric that is relatively weak, but has enough surface area to lift the hull of the ship. The balloon is attached to the hull via ropes.

A larger Vessel consisting of many steam engines with lots of pipes/chimneys with enormous amounts of smoke pouring out I would like my design to have these features, but not so stereotypical. so I would not like to have so many engines and chimneys, but i would like to incorporate them. The materials that this ship is made from would suit my design, dim weathered metallic materiel, and damaged rusted old leather and Iron/Steel.




Large turbine, found on the wings of a commercial jet liner, this is the engine design that I am going for, except all the wires/pipes/cables will be concealed as they will take to long to create using maya. I plan to make it very rusted and weathered.

The cockpit found on the millennium falcon, is the kind of design I want to relate to my design, as I like the large viewing arc from which the pilot can see.

Initial ideas

The ideas that I planned, based on the images above. include a large variety of balloons and sails, similar to the generic airship, design, I included many different shapes and used lots of forms of kinetic movement e.g pistons, turbines and engines. A few of the designs featured a wooden hull, but I preferred a metal fuselage.

MY DESIGN

I went for a rather simplistic design so a plain balloon/blimp with steam powered turbines either side of the fuselage, with a main large cockpit at the front of the ship. The materials that I plan to use are lots of weathered metallic and dull colours, also the use of dark torn leather would turn out nicely.

Fins based at the rear of the ship are used for controlling pitch, even though the engines control the yaw. Chimneys on top of the ship 

The engines rotate to control the elevation and throttle of the ship. e.g up down forward backward. But the lack of technical advancement, the engines where prone to spontaneously combust.

I decided to go with a quad engine design using a similar turbine design similar to the one in my research, with the main fuselage as a blimp/balloon. the Cockpit took a more rectangular look than what I intended, but it still worked out none the less. I used less chimneys than I had hoped, but I think that it still gets the message across.

My design, dubbed the fat pigeon ^^^


PROBLEMS!!! and SOLUTIONS

I moved onto the texturing, and had a lot of issues come up, such as Textures not appearing, due to the file becoming corrupt so I had to use separate images for each section of the ship, otherwise nothing would work.

This caused most of the Texturing to go horribly wrong, I tried to use the most simplistic textures I could but some of the UV's where done incorrectly, so I had to make due and tried to make them as hidden as possible. I would have had enough time but I was absent for medical reasons for nearly 2 weeks so I had less time than most of my classmates. I managed to catch up with some of the work at home via independent study.

ANIMATION




Different forms of animation have been developed over the years, here are some examples.

Stop motion: Stop motion is created by using a series of screenshots/photographs and forming an motion with multiple images, e.g. clay figures being re-posed after every picture that is taken.

Computer Animation: This is the most common form of animation found in the modern era, with 2D / 3D and such things as flash animations, they are rendered out in frames, the more frames there are the smoother the final result is, similarly there are different dimensions for the render, the most common now is 1080p 60fps although people still use the lower 720p 30fps.









My animation was rendered at 24FPS and was 250 frames long, with 3 different camera angles, to give you a sense of the slow moving behemoth, and the  camera angles add character to the ship, by showing its movement.

Evaluation

The research that I did on the overall topic of steam punk, could have done with more information on the back story and origin of the theme, I focused more so on the materials and imagery that the steam punk era offers.

The UV texturing on my design was not done to the highest standard, but I made do by using very simplistic textures, even though the texturing was not done correctly I managed to make it work.

The animation was 10 seconds and featured multiple camera angles, but the motion path for the animation was very plain and didn't show much.