Ship Revisit (Work in progress)
Recently after about a month of game time with Star Citizen, I started to think about my old ship design from my first year of study at AIE.
I decided to see what it would be like taking the utility and functional detail of ships from star citizen and apply them to the design principles of the ship in our game for 1st year major project.
A little back story
The ship's primary purpose is to aid in the terraforming of an uninhabitable planet. It also has the ability to introduce life once the planet is habitable. The goal for me is to design the ship and its internals to accommodate for everything a pilot would need to acheive this.
Why a sphere?
Its probibly one of the more challenging shapes to use for a space ship and be able to make it work well. I wanted to see how far I could take it.
It was also the one chosen by the team to go with for the year1 project. I still see value in keeping it this way in its primary form at least.
Reference of the original ship concept art.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/EVYAxN
Internals overhaul
I thought about the needs of the ship as a tool and how to fit everything on board that would be needed for the player to live, work, create and reach the primary goals of the game.
Blockout
My first steps were to block out ideas of how to block out the levels and scale, and a list of all the things in it and how they would be categorized by deck. After my initial side view planning I soon realised ive mapped out everything in a straight line and not factored in horizontal space.
Refinement layout
This is where I decided to refine the layout via an isometric grid. The aim was to reconfigure my initial block out to factor in width of the deck spaces. Technically this is still just layout planning and block out sketching so there isn't any real design considerations for the props and environment assets on each deck as yet. I would consider them more place holders. Breakdown of each deck is further down.
What I did find through doing this is the decks can be condensed down further and the space tightened, along with the ship being scaled down from 22m tall to something probably down to 15-18m tall. Right now it feels too luxurious regarding space.
This is my first pass on reapproaching this, so the floorplan will likely change as I work toward a 3d block out.
For context, how each deck stacked. 2 units =1m
Breakdown
For the below breakdown click on each image to display at full size.
