The Art and Graphics of Nick Stevens. Available for hire.I specialise in unbuilt space projects, and the spacecraft of the Soviet Union.
I’ve set up a shop on Fine Art America, where you can buy my work in various formats, from prints to shower curtains and duvet covers!
Here’s the link:
https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/2-nick-stevens.html
My shop on Fine Art America Continue reading “My Art is now for sale on Fine Art America”
In 2018 I was doing an international commute, and wanted something I could work on effectively while travelling. Eurostar is pretty comfortable, (particularly in standard premium), and the new laptop was seriously powerful, but I’ve never found it easy to work with a touch pad, and there wasn’t enough space for a mouse.
So I came up with the idea of tidying up the various real spacecraft I have worked on, and assembling sets of images rendered perspective free, to a standard scale, which would make it easy to clearly show the different sizes of the various spacecraft.
This soon became the Rocket Library project!
(Click for a larger version.) Continue reading “The Rocket Library”
This one was really quick to conceptualise, and took months to complete.
Mainly because I kept trying to cut corners with render settings that were not high enough, or assuming that I could fake a join between runs with different render settings, and it would not show…
Saturn, still image from the video…
Continue reading “Orbiting the planet Saturn, in ultra high definition”
This is a short blog post, which will describe how I go about edge renders in Lightwave 3d. It’s really easy and I find it a great technique for renders that are not photorealistic.
I am using Lightwave version 11.6, I’m not sure how this works in other versions. But it’s probably almost identical.
This is an effect that runs a line along various edges and boundaries. It can be used to emphasise fine detail, or to give a diagram effect. It works with transparency, and animates nicely.
Here’s an example.
Note how features of the telescope are highlighted with fine white lines.
Ready to start? Continue reading “How to do edge renders in Lightwave 3d, a brief tutorial”
I sometimes get into discussions about if a spacecraft design is realistic. These are frequently interesting, but it’s not straightforward. For example, there are serious designs from the early days of spaceflight which we now know could not work. Manned craft without heavy radiation shielding are a common example of this.
On the other hand, you have some fictional craft carefully designed to be as realistic as possible – the vehicles in “2001 a Space Odyssey” are a great example.
So how to handle it when some fictional craft are more credible than serious designs? here’s my attempt at a system, from the most realistic to the least. Comments and additions are very welcome.
Clearly you can’t get more realistic than this!
Example: Saturn V rocket
Continue reading “An objective system for how realistic / credible a spacecraft is…”
I gather from Twitter that some people find it interesting to follow my approach and progress when building a new model. So here’s a blog post where I will show how a project comes together, with lots of illustrations.
My starting point is to gather references, particularly high resolution photos, and plans with dimensions. Fortunately this one is covered in the excellent “Rockets of the World” by Peter Alway. It’s not highly detailed, but I find if you can get the overall dimensions of major features correct, then it’s not too tricky to fill in the rest from good photographs.
Continue reading “The Saturn 1B model, Follow along with the build.”
I recently came across the Frank Tinsley illustration of what he called a “Lunar Unicycle”, which might be better described as a monowheel.
Despite the lack of many illustrations, the design seems clear, and I decided to do a 3d version of it in Lightwave. Though I did later find a couple more pictures… Continue reading “The Frank Tinsley “Lunar Unicycle””
I visited the UK’s National Space Centre, partly to get better references for a CGI “Skylark” rocket, and thought it was worth a blog entry. I’ll be publishing reference photos, for the benefit of other modellers, in a separate post.
It’s located on the outskirts of Leicester, and a bit of a pain to get to if you are not familiar with the local public transport system. Easy to spot by it’s distinctive shape, dominated by the Rocket Tower.
The National Space Centre Web Site Continue reading “The National Space Centre, Leicester”
The Skylark was an incredibly successful British sounding rocket, with over 400 successful launches. Despite sounding like the title of an Enid Blyton book, at the time of the final launch it was the longest running rocket program in the world, bar none. First launch was 1957, and the 441st final flight in 2005. Continue reading “Skylark. The most successful rocket you never heard of…”
Nothing particularly, technical, or insightful here, but I recently got a bunch of space themed postage stamps from Cuba, and thought it would be cool to share some of them… Continue reading “A selection of space themed postage stamps from Cuba.”
