Tag: nasa

The Rocket Library

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!

A collection of most of the rockets I have modelled, all done to the same scale.
A collection of most of the rockets I have modelled, all done to the same scale.

(Click for a larger version.) Continue reading “The Rocket Library”

The Saturn 1B model, Follow along with the build.

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.

Rockets of the World
Rockets of the World

Continue reading “The Saturn 1B model, Follow along with the build.”

Tutorial: Importing Blender 3d content into Lightwave or Vue

One of the frustrations of working with CGI is that you sometimes find a brilliant free model, but it’s not for your software. And a specific example that has frustrated me is that there are some great models available in Blender format on the NASA 3d object library site:

NASA 3d library
NASA 3d library

Now, whilst I have heard of Blender, I’ve never tried to use it, and 3d packages can be very difficult to learn. But I decided to give it a go. Maybe I’d be lucky! Continue reading “Tutorial: Importing Blender 3d content into Lightwave or Vue”

NASA PRANDTL Flying Wing – finished renders

Some finished renders of the flying wing design. See previous posts for the work in progress, and sample reference images.

The sky was the most difficult part here. I was compositing onto panoramic photos, and had to make my own sky. I really liked the dark greyish green, but it’s not very realistic.

Continue reading “NASA PRANDTL Flying Wing – finished renders”

NASA – PRANDTL Flying Wing for Mars

This concept is a flying wing, or bodyless plane, currently being tested for a possible flight to prove the concept. It is intended to work well in the thin atmosphere of the planet Mars, and would be tested at very high altitude on Earth, where the pressure is similar.

You can find out more about the project here:

https://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/features/mars_airplane.html

Here’s the current state of my quickie project, I’m still very unsure on what to do on the bottom of the craft.

Mars flying wing WIP - Front on
Mars flying wing WIP – Front on

Continue reading “NASA – PRANDTL Flying Wing for Mars”

Lunar Escape Device

This is a design that was considered for the (much) later Long Stay Apollo missions, where the LEM would be on the Moon for a long time. And there were concerns about reliability.

So they came up with a light weight design that would be a few bits strapped together, to get the astronauts up into munar orbit, where the command module might be able to rendezvous with them.

But it would not have been needed for the cancelled missions, and the ones beyond that were not studied in any great detail, so the design was not taken any further.

There are some interesting variations described on Wikpedia here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Escape_Systems

Continue reading “Lunar Escape Device”

CGI Planet Mercury, done in Lightwave 3D

Here’s an old CGI model of the planet Mercury I did, based on some maps NASA released using information from the MESSENGER probe to the planet.

mercury-n-2

The model is in Lightwave 3d format, and available fr free to members of the Foundation 3D forums, in the file area.

Continue reading “CGI Planet Mercury, done in Lightwave 3D”

Magnetospheric MultiScale satellite

Quickie project, based on the file downloaded from the NASA 3d object library. This basically comes dow to resurfacing, and setting up a scene or two!

This NASA satellite studies the magnetic field of Earth in high orbit.

mms-holder_rgb000 Continue reading “Magnetospheric MultiScale satellite”