Create a Spaceship Corridor – Part 1 of 2

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Discover how to model this complex sci-fi scene using the mirror and array modifier.

Length:
1 hour 15 minutes
Software:
Blender 2.63
Difficulty:
Advanced
Rate:
VN:F [1.9.17_1161]
Rating: 4.8/5 (105 votes cast)

In this tutorial you will discover:

  • How to model a spaceship corridor
  • How to conceptualize a scene using real world examples and fantasy
  • Why greeble is important and how to model it quickly

We’ve all watched a sci-fi movie and wished we could be part of it (wall-e anyone?), and whilst creating your own scene isn’t reality it’s the next best thing.

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to create your own spaceship corridor using arrays, mirrors and whole lot of modelling.

Disclaimer: This tutorial is a biggie! Whilst the runtime is just over an hour it will probably take you 3-5 hours of actual modelling to do it yourself. So proceed at your own commitment!

Finished Result (Part 1)

Download the Finished .blend

Further Inspiration

Not sure where to take this tutorial? Check out these links for further space corridor inspiration:

Watch Part 2

Create a Spaceship Corridor - Part 1 of 2, 4.8 out of 5 based on 105 ratings

About Andrew Price

User of Blender for 9+ years. I've written tutorials for 3d World Magazine and spoken at three Blender conferences. My goal is to help artists get employed in the industry by making training accessible and easy to understand. I'm an Aussie and I live in South Korea ;)
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  • BinaryLinux

    Great tutorial Mr. Price! However, I have two questions:

    On those resistor type thingys, you can see a blue line. Is this the “Mark Sharp” indicator?

    And, how does the edge split modifier work? I’ve tried using it in the past, but I could never acheive a good result with it.

    Thanks for you supreme work.

  • cdnirish

    Great tutorial! Been looking for something like this for a long time. Personally, I don’t mind the time-lapse – I use GOM player to slow down anything I need to take a closer look at.

    And in a way, resistors and transistors have made it into the future – the “greebles” used on a lot of the fantastic sci-fi building, ship and vehicle models seen in movies are made using parts from model aircraft, armour, car and sci-fi kits that are cut up, re-combined, etc then slapped on in “aesthetically pleasing” ways to create detail, along with anything else to hand (including fried electrical components) that can be stuck on to sheet plastic with a bit of glue. It’s much faster than trying to fabricate everything from scratch.

  • http://www.pantherdynamics.yolasite.com/ Marius

    Heya!

    Just played a little with the idea today. Hope you all like it:
    http://www.pantherdynamics.yolasite.com/panther-dynamics-blog/space-station-getaway

  • marcorama

    Mr.Magoo you done it again

  • http://noyet chi-chang wu

    very good vedio！

  • greg p

    This is an excellent tutorial, I really have been wanting some thing like this since… well, ages!
    I thought it was a shame to spend all night rendering by cpu, which got me to thinking…. anyway, have a look at this , would surely save tons of render time?

    http://eat3d.com/free/floating_geo

    (Particularly the last 4 minutes.)

    Thanks for this, waiting for part2 !

  • Calixto

    William….WOW, you did a very, very nice job. Excellent indeed!

    Calixto

    • Wiliam Barber

      Thankyou… looking forward to continuing it

  • Wiliam Barber

    Excellent excellent tutorial, looking forward to part 2 … I’ve recorded a time lapse of my version so far … http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJshQapoYss

    It’s not identical, I watched the tutorial then did it from memory and kind of went with it… thanks again as always good sir.

    • http://www.pantherdynamics.yolasite.com/ Marius

      Wow!! Way to make it your own!! Great stuff!!

      • Wiliam Barber

        Thanks :D

    • Wiliam Barber

      Just posted up part 2 … http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YlPF7EEfTc … I’ve got to admit, this tutorial has sparked off one of the best times I’ve had in Blender for ages :D

      • http://www.pantherdynamics.yolasite.com/ Marius

        Liking the room at the end of the corridor, especially the corner pieces. From the top wireframe mode, it did not look like they were gonna fit there. Excellent work! Really looking forward to your final render!!

    • Wiliam Barber

      I’ve not finished modelling (let alone texturing) the room beyond the door, or part 3 of the video…. I couldnt resist starting the materials and compositing on the corridor after pt.2 of the tutorial came out though :D … http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/84/composite02.png/

  • Calixto

    Andrew, this is simply phenomenal! Very good work. However, since you brought up the issue of “productivity”, which is a very real world matter, I have a question.

    Would it not have been more efficient and effective to use bump maps for the control panels rather than having the hardware render each and every mesh within each panel?

    Given that the camera doesn’t focus on the panels directly and they’re rather shallow, low profile surfaces, wouldn’t using images of control panels to create a bump map profile affect been more advisable in a production or game scenario?

    Thanks,
    Calixto

  • be2inas

    rusty pipes on a space ship. some future technology:)…

  • mayollo

    nice Job Andrew . I love the tutorial

  • http://www.parkin-fx.com Gary Parkin

    Hi Andrew
    I liked the speed modeling but you can slow it down just a bit. Made me sick moving around. I use VLC Media player so I slowed the video down, and you sounded pretty funny in slow motion. LOL
    Anyway, yes it looks great. Amazing what you can do with a few shapes. I kept thinking “Wow, resistors and transistors made it into the future”.
    Great stuff! Can’t wait for the texturing part. Especially the lighting.

  • Loki2643

    Nice tutorial :)
    Have you ever considered using vertex-snapping or edge-snapping to align all those parts? You could have saved some time (e.g. when you positioned the pipes and the grates)… I use it a lot… it really helps reducing the frustration-level in such projects … ;)

  • http://www.youtube.com/onjofilms Fred Flinstone

    To answer your question about time-lapses, I think it works well. Could have been done again for the bay door to cut time down. So yes, won’t mind to see them in the future.

  • Alda

    That’s super, Andrew!

    However, something weird I noticed near the end of the video: the final model you showed had something like 260,000 vertices, and the tutorial model, which is supposed to be simpler and less detailed, had a whopping 460,000. How can that be?

    • http://www.blenderjunk.com Daniel Queen

      he didn’t keep the bevel modifier IIRC.

  • stehr

    If your graphic card can not render becouse the scene size, you have to reduce the ’tile size’ in the Render>Performance settings. For my 1G graphic card 512 is ok.

  • peter

    what we are looking at is the original design and concept of a star ship from alpha centuri– Andrew worked with the original engineers and made a major contribution
    to earth modeling

  • Original SF fhan

    Andy, great looking scene, as to the comment on it mot being practical, I have a couple suggestions.

    1. On board a spacecraft space may be at an absolute premium and access corridors are stuffed in wherever possible. It may be the odd shape is dictated by need to have various machinery running along certain areas which might make the corridors seem oddly shaped.

    2. The complex walls maximize the amount of ‘behind the wall’ sort of thing you can access from the corridor, Making the walls look normal I.E. like in a building, would minimize the area you could access behind the walls. If a lot of the ship is dense machinery and such, it may be necessary to access a lot of if thru the walls of corridors, hence the area of the walls is maximized.

    That’s how I’d explain the weird walls often seen in SF movies, they provide access space to the machinery running between corridors and such.

  • Sammy

    Wow! Andrew am so looking forward to doing this this weekend

  • Kacique

    Demasiado bueno. y real el resultado del render.

  • Maiger

    Great tutorial as usual! The time-lapse is fine, but maybe a bit slower would be better, so people who really want to see every detail would have an easier time following. 5-7x instead of 10x?

    Can’t wait for part 2, the finished result looks so good. Spacestuff is always interesting.

  • AndyCalauor

    Awesome! wonder if Andrew will take on a extra terrestrial landscape after this?

  • AE

    This is awesome… Fantastic looking result. Way better looking than the spaceship tuts.

  • Paing Paing

    hi , May i know the software name you used to capture your screen , please ? Thank you

  • Pragmascript

    Very cool tutorial :)

    It would be cool if you could make a Part III, in which you take the scene from Part II and make a low polygon version of it, for exporting to a 3d engine (like unity3d)
    with normal map / ao baking and stuff^^

  • Chris

    Your comments about the “practical” nature of structural shapes are way off. A straight shape that you talked about is one of the weakest shapes you can have.

    • Chris

      From a structural engineering point of view.

      • http://www.blenderjunk.com Daniel Queen

        perhaps practical from a manufacturing point of view, hah.

        • Chris

          Well, since he talked about it from a structural strength point of view…

  • http://amateurworks.wordpress.com/ Hellhound

    Can’t watch this for more then a few minutes but I have to say I’m looking forward to working on this later when I get a break. Thanks for it up for us Andrew.

    • http://amateurworks.wordpress.com/ Hellhound

      Thanks for putting it up is what I meant to say.

  • Psycho

    Nice Tutorial, but you forgot to put a Link to the Star Wars Trailer in the description.

  • http://www.blenderjunk.com Daniel Queen

    Nice tut. BTW, at around 52:40, the word you were looking for about the part to connect pipes is “flange”. ^_^

  • http://www.farzadmir.com farzad mir

    Hi Andrew
    plz upload your video tutorials in vimeo , because youtube for my country is filtered.
    I many thanks to you.

  • Jesse

    WOW! This is totally up my ally! Thank you Mr. Price!!!!!

  • daffi

    nice..Andrew, how long was the rendering process?

  • John

    Hi Andrew

    I was wondering if you can create an architecture tutorial modelling something like the new London Olympic stadium. Now that the London 2012 Olympics are about to start, it might be a good inspiration on how to model venues used at the Olympics. I think that you can make use of a lot of advanced blender features in trying to model something like a stadium.

    John

  • http://tszek.tumblr.com/ Tom Sz

    Oh Andrew, I kinda wish you would have had this a while ago, when I was making corridors for our space comedy:

    http://youtu.be/2o5xF6vsmiY

    Thankfully, ours is supposed to look cheesy, so I guess your stuff would have classed it up too much. Blender really came through for us though.

  • http://cr-middaugh.110mb.com MiD-AwE

    Andrew,

    Very nice tutorial. I don’t mind the time-lapse but it could really hurt newbs. I know when I was just beginning to learn blender I would’ve teared up over it.

    BTW- thanks for the spin tip. I’ve used it before but not like that. In fact I always do pipes as beveled curves but I’ll do it with spin now to save polys. And, the edge split tip is awesome.

    Thanks and I can’t wait for next week.

  • fyardlest

    Hi, it will be great if someone can make a tutorial putting himself into it with blue-screen and camera tracking.

  • Keavon

    The final result looks amazing! This will be a very helpful tutorial, especially since I’m making a game that will use a theme sort of like this!

    As a piece of feedback about the final piece, it looks a little bit too grungy/rusty/dirty/old, and not spaceshipy-hightechy-new kind of feel. But it still looks great!

    Looking forward to watching this tutorial and part 2!

    • Mark

      Think of it as a corridor from a Minmatar ship from EVE online, matches perfectly hehe

  • IrokRhus

    gj and In my opinion you should use more time laps parts in your videos. That’s a good idea

  • Julian

    The final result looks pretty nice. Some of the textures look weird, though. Like they have been mapped using unwrap from view or something (on the left side in the middle and on the left, diagonal panels – it’s barely noticable, though).

  • rombout

    Wow, the final outcome is awesome!!!!! really great shot here man!!
    PS why do a lot of people never use real measurements and simply do so and so?
    Some render engines need to have actual measurements for the best and realistic outcome. How does cycles go on this? really most make a difference how big a model is, cause everything needs to be doubled, tripled or whatever while the input is pretty much the same.

    • Loki2643

      Yeah, I asked myself the same question :) Personally I always try to make everything as realistic as possible. I even set the units to metric for that reason. ;)

  • http://www.youtube.com/onjofilms Fred Flinstone

    Wow, awesome. Been wanting something like this forever. You rock.

  • Daniel O.

    Andrew this is amazing! It takes a great tutorialist to get through an hour’s worth of material as smoothly as you do. Keep’em coming!

  • Adrian

    LMAO XD

  • http://blender360.blogspot.com jose.j

    Que bueno que hayas hecho este tipo de escena. Son muy interesantes.

    Saludos

    Good thing you’ve done this kind of scene. They are very interesting.

    regards

  • Ricardo C.

    Man, i really didn’t want to use my pc in this insane heat but then this happens.Oh well, sauna it is then.

  • Jarek

    It seems that this tut will be one of the best! :D Thanks a lot man :D

  • Jon

    So excited for this! Woot!

  • Moses

    Hello Andrew i am sending this message via my iStone in ancient egypt under the rule of Ramses the 3rd. Lovely tutorial and i will watch it later as wifi off the pyramid is weak. Gotta run, the phaorah’s guards are coming.

    • http://therobbi5.blogspot.com Robbi

      Lol I laughed so hard at the iStone part, gotta remember the hilarious moment an apple user turns against his apple device!
      I agree on the “lovely tutorial” part too…

  • emugen

    The final result looks awesome

  • davinade

    First!

    • http://derek1906.site50.net/ Derek

      Want a cookie?

    • Blendercross

      Wow that looks fantastic – great job Andrew!!

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