As most of you already know I am a big fan of the TV show Planet Express made by Matt Groening the creator of the Simpsons. I've created a previous lighted display of the Planet Express spaceship weeks back when inspiration hit me. This again was the case this past week while watching another episode of the show playing on my Roku. In the episode the Planet Express crew needed to save the world by flying a small one man stealth spaceship to destroy an invading death sphere spacecraft that was headed for earth and destroying planets along the way. Professor Farnsworth the 180+ year old that is always inventing crazy things builds a one man stealth ship to be sent out to destroy the invader.
I liked the design of the little stealth ship (shown above) so much that I thought it would be a great project to try and model in Blender 3D as if it was a real spaceship and not just a cartoon. Shown also in the image above are the complete cast of the Futurama show. Starting on the right going left is Dr. Zoidberg (kind of a crab like alien), Bender (a girder bending robot), Hermes (the bureaucratic accountant for Planet Express business), Philp J. Fry ( a delivery boy from the 20th century who is now in the 30th century), Leela (Planet Express's pilot/captain and Amy Wong who is standing behind Hermes (an intern to Professor Farnsworth). Professor Farnsworth is standing on the platform just above the stealth ship. To the left of the spaceship is Zapp Brannigan (wanna-be space hero). Also pictured to the left are two secret service agents and the head of Richard Nixon in a jar. You'd have to see the show to understand that one for sure.
(Click on the image above to get a full screen view)
Here's the end result of my efforts to recreate the stealth ship in Blender 3D. I was originally going to only model the spaceship just by itself and thought I would go a bit farther with this project and put the ship in the hangar as shown in the original picture. I also included Bender the robot with the ship just so I could give it some scale and as Bender was another good subject to try and model I thought it would work out nicely. I did not count the number of hours I spent working on this latest creation as I was more concerned with getting everything to look the way you see here rather than bother about it. Bender himself was a challenge to get his features set up to match what is shown on the show so I was happy with my efforts to come very close.
As for the stealth ship I got several different images by shooting them with my DSLR directly from my TV screen. The one thing I noticed after reviewing the images was that the stealth ship kept changing in the episode of the show. I did not notice this while watching but it sure showed up while comparing all the photos side by side. I put as much detail into the small spaceship as I could and then worked with the little details that I could see within the hangar itself. After I was satisfied with that aspect of the modeling I kept playing around with different lighting until I was happy with the scene. The end result turned out very well so it will hold a place of honor in my Blender portfolio along with the rest of my creations that I've put together over the years. Thanks for checking out my latest Blender 3D effort.
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