September Art Challenge - Starscape

[Starscape]

I've been playing around with textures and and materials in Blender to see what I could manage to build in 3D for this challenge.

I hadn't thought of this as my final design, it was just something to play around with to see what worked... I'm surprised at how well it turned out:

 

[B.J.]

oooooh! Nice! How'd you do the actual ship part of the coin?

 

[Starscape]

Thanks!!

The ship part (and most of the other central detailing) was created using a "bump map", which uses a 2D image to simulate a detailed 3D surface. The 2D ship image is a render of one of my 3D models, which I'd built in Anim8or.

 

[B.J.]

I figured you used a bump map, but I didn't think that using a regular image would get good results for something like this. I would have thought you'd have to generate something like a depth of field map.

 

[Starscape]

You're right, I discovered fairly quickly that using a regular image for a bump map wasn't ideal. I've lost track of all the different brighness and contrast setting I used on the original image to try get the best bump map.

Eventually, I'd created a reasonable-ish effect with the bump map and then tweaked it using a (greyscale) colour map of the original ship image.

It was all trial and error, really.

 

[Kaziarl]

Dude... I want that! Get that over to the Franklin Mint now man!

 

[Kaiser]

Now thats just freak'n awesome

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

Dude... I want that! Get that over to the Franklin Mint now man!

Franklin Mints' Star Trek products aren't usually this tastefully understated.

 

[Starscape]

Thanks guys!

I've fine-tuned a few things on the front of the coin:

And here's the flip-side:

 

[lennier1]

Absolutely stunning!
It´s definitely something I´d pay good money for as a collectors item.

Any plans for an inscription on the rim as well?

 

[Kaiser]

Absolutely stunning!
It´s definitely something I´d pay good money for as a collectors item.

Any plans for an inscription on the rim as well?

What Leinnier said

 

[B.J.]

Sweeeeeet!

 

[Starscape]

Absolutely stunning!
It´s definitely something I´d pay good money for as a collectors item.

You can't get a better compliment than that.

Any plans for an inscription on the rim as well?

I was thinking of putting some detail on the rim. An inscription is a nice idea, although I'm not sure what it could be... ship's motto, owner's name?

 

[Kaiser]

Absolutely stunning!
It´s definitely something I´d pay good money for as a collectors item.

You can't get a better compliment than that.

Any plans for an inscription on the rim as well?

I was thinking of putting some detail on the rim. An inscription is a nice idea, although I'm not sure what it could be... ship's motto, owner's name?

Id go with both

 

[lennier1]

Absolutely stunning!
It´s definitely something I´d pay good money for as a collectors item.

You can't get a better compliment than that.

Any plans for an inscription on the rim as well?

I was thinking of putting some detail on the rim. An inscription is a nice idea, although I'm not sure what it could be... ship's motto, owner's name?

Thanks.
What about the ship´s motto and the stardate of her launch?

Many bigger coins tend to use something that´s short and to the point. For example, before the introduction of the Euro the biggest regular German coin had the first words of the national anthem: "Unity and justice and freedom".

 

[Starscape]

Here's a render of the edge:

A touch of Tennyson for the ship's motto: To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

 

[Kaiser]

Here's a render of the edge:

A touch of Tennyson for the ship's motto: To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Superbly Done

 

[Klaus]

Since we have so many cool entries I thought I'd bump them to the front, also to remind everyone to send them in by tomorrow night to Ptrope!

 

[Shikarnov]

No offense to the other entrants, myself included, but I don't think it gets better than this. WOW! Starscape, your coin is incredible! Nicely done.

 

[Klaus]

Yeah, my winner-alarm went ding-ding-ding when I saw this one... it's usually pretty accurate, too..