What got me into playing with computer animation is that I wanted to try my hand a producing a YouTube book trailer for my novel Fisher King: Percival's Descent, a sci-fi space opera. The Fisher King of the title is an interstellar freighter serving as a setting in the book.
I thought some sort of flyby would be nice, vaguely inspired by Star Trek(s) and Red Dwarf TV show opening credits. That got me to learn about the Blender, the 3D modeling and animation suite. Well, I did a little flying logo experiment in blender. When my then whimpy desktop Pentium PC took 13 hours to render 2 seconds of 30fps 1080p video, I decided I needed a more suitable machine.
Not being rich, I bought a used, circa-2011, HP Z600 Xeon workstation and upgraded it to dual Xeon CPUs (12 core, 24 thread), 48Gb RAM, an SSD, and an nVidia GTX 960 video card. The video card was the hottest CUDA-based video card I could find at the time that had only a 6-pin (instead of 8-pin) power connector, a limitation of the HP Z600 motherboard.
The model of the Fisher King you see here is simple: two globes connected by a tube of repeating elements. The stars are 360-degree, wraparound image. The ship's surface is a UV-mapped metal plating texture.
I still haven't made the book trailer, but here is an experimental video of a flyby by the Fisher King.
I see that I need more visual variety on the connecting shaft between the globes, and maybe to add some greebles (a technical term for "little doodads and thingamabobs") to the ship. I'd appreciate any viewer feedback on how to make the ship and the shots more visually interesting.
