A new project: Rocketship!

Post date: 10-Feb-2013 03:16:02

I've been wanting to model this up for a year or two now (and gen'rally wanted to up my Blender skills while I was at it) so I was super happy to get time yesterday to sit down and have a hack at it.

...and super happy with the results, too, once I wrapped my head around Blender's Bezier curves (thanks primarily to this BlenderNerd video.) The trick was tying a Bezier curve to a circle as a Bezel object, and then tweak the curve until I had the inside and outside shape I wanted. Copy and paste for the engines, add some extruded Bezier curves as engine supports, and bake out the result as polygons in an STL file, and voila - now it's a product in my Shapeways store!

Ultimately, though, this for a single purpose. My podcasting alma mater, Starship Sofa, is about to reach it's three-hundredth episode, and I'd really like to present Tony with something to celebrate this milestone - I think one of these rocketship in shiny stainless steel (preferably engraved with 'SSS 300' or something like that) would be awesome. It'll cost about $400 AUD to do, though, so I'll need some help - anyone interested in chipping in? Should I run a Kickstarter or something?