8
Expanding the size of the military fleet
I spread the navy ships around a section of the Heighliner’s inner hull, and copy-paste that group around the rest of the circumference. This
is where 3D is at its most useful in my work: placing objects in space quickly saves me the effort of using vanishing points and perspective lines to
draw them manually. Once in place I move them around a bit to prevent them from looking too obviously like duplicates. I find it’s much easier
to build an orderly system and then mess it up artfully, rather than building a genuinely chaotic one from scratch piece by piece.
10
Painting details
I take the image into Photoshop and paint sunlight
sparkles, lights on the navy ships and other details with
the Hard round brush, bringing the image to life. The
streams of ships entering the giant doors of the Heighliner
originated as a night-time photo of a city horizon; the
randomly spaced lights, cut out and placed on a Lighten
layer, help to provide some chaotic detail to the scene.9
The Heighliner’s structure and happy accidents
The end cap and main front door of the Heighliner is made in the same way
as the hull. I melt and crystallise a bagel-shaped object, then Inset and Extrude the
faces before slicing it in half. This creates a weird-looking spout shape, but
something else happens to the surface. It randomly glitches for some reason,
resulting in these strange random spikes that protrude out from the surface. I like
this strange, unexpected result and keep it.
Workshops