Art Spotlight: Big Hovercraft

In Art Spotlight, we invite Sketchfab artists to talk about one of their designs.

Hello there!

My name is Dennis Haupt, I am a 3D-artist for over 8 years and my favorite 3D tool is Blender. Currently I am working as an animator, 3d graphic and Interface designer at InGAsys in Germany. I’d like to show you the process of my newest creation called „Big Hovercraft“

I’ve always wanted to create a large hovercraft vehicle and coincidentally there was a challenge on cgtrader “watercraft-challenge”, so I made this thing.

Update: Dennis actually WON this contest!

Pictures of large hovercraft found by the image search on Google were my inspiration.

Here are some techniques and attitudes I’ve used for this model
 
First up I had set the unit to Metric and I activated the Length in the Edge Info panel to display the edge length in the 3d-view.

I used the solidify Modifier for walls, rooms and other parts of the ship. Solidify gives you an even thickness and you don’t need to care about the thickness in the modeling process, it is adjustable, fast and saves me a lot of time.

Without solidify Modifier:

With solidify Modifier:

Here’s another example:

For the railing and other parts of the ship I used the wireframe Modifier. It’s quick and dirty, but you get a rough idea on how it might look when it’s done, is similar time-saving as the solidify Modifier.

Without wireframe Modifier:

With wireframe Modifier (thickness = 0.1145, offset = 0.000):

For the hovercraft bottom I used a curve with some settings.

Without curve settings:

With curve settings (Depth = 0.149, Resolution = 3, Offset = 0.014, Extrude = 0.034):

I recorder my work, as always, and then I created a 2 hours and 46 minutes
long time-lapse videos so you can see the whole creation.

 
I have invested 18 hours working time for this, but maybe I will create a low poly version with textures and animations, for games or whatever ?
 
Thanks for reading, I hope it was interesting!

Big Hovercraft – design (High-Poly)
by DennisH2010
on Sketchfab

Thanks Dennis!

Dennis creates a lot of beautiful Blender art – visit his Sketchfab portfolio to see more!

– Bart