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Our first capital ship was one of the most difficult
and time-consuming 3D-models we have in the game
as it was created over a long period of time
and went through several design changes.
We had the original concept from Ulrich Zeidler.
He is a very famous concept artist who also made all the concepts for X3.
We began work on our first capital ship based on that concept.
First was a rough blockout, but then we were not happy with the resulting design.
It made a good impression on paper, but it simply didn't work in the game.
The surface areas were too big, too smooth and didn't lead to
nice gameplay in particular areas of the capital ship.
We began to modify the concept in detail ourselves.
The results were chaotic. The ship evolved from a very simple and linear model
to an extremely time-consuming and complex spaceship that had cost us almost half a year's work with three people.
Three people working on it simultaneously that is. Christian Vogel, my predecessor as a Lead Artist,
was then directing this whole thing. He tried to achieve the result that it truly was fun
to fly over the surface and that its gun towers did not just look like tiny pimples on the big ship
but integrate well with the surface. It cost us a lot of sweat and work to get that far.
Nothing much from the original concept remained in the final model.
We really went with adopting design elements from other ships we liked.
All this resulted in a very time-consuming but also very beautiful 3D-model.
It is one of the best looking capital ship we have in the game. Definitely.
In the end we were happy to see that we're able to create such a nice result ourselves.
I am Lino. I have worked here at Egosoft for one year and I am purely a graphics artist.
I receive concepts from Alex working next to me or from someone else and I convert those concepts into 3D-models and build up the spaceships,
space-stations and interiors. At the moment I am working on a concept that was presented on Facebook.
We started a vote there over three different station concepts done by Alex.
Out of the three, option C was selected and so I get to build it along with Christian.
We share the work as the station was a bit too big for me to finish alone in a short time.
Because of that we made a little blockout and now divide up the work and that's what I'm working on at the moment.
I work with the open source program called Blender. It is completely free and allows me to access the workflow.
It works wonderfully. I create the model in my program and the geometry is then exported
to 3ds Max, which is what the others work with and also where our exporters work. Starting from there it continues
by putting on colours and adding lights to finalize it for the game. But the basic geometry and texturing
works just fine in my program. I'm the only one here like that - the only one using open source.