Also known as "Before I joined the TSML".

After spending a couple of weeks messing around with TrueSpace without really scratching the surface, I spent a weekend where I watched about 10 episodes of Babylon 5, and I decided that it might be fun to try creating a space scene.  I mean, how hard is it to create a space ship?

Much harder than I first thought.

		This was the first attempt.  The nose cone is a cylinder with a smaller top radius the top half of which was painted with a glass texture to give the impression of a window, the body a cylinder with four flattened torus' (torii, whatever the plural is) painted with a glass/wire texture, and the rear part is a copy of the nose cone, with different dimensions.
		When I got round to animating it, I realised that I should give it an engine, so I copied the rear section, made it smaller and subtracted it to give the cone shape.  Then I painted a sphere with a similar glass/wire texture to the fins around the body, and put an orangy/red local light inside it, and glued it at the top of the cone.  Click here for the animated version.
		This was my second attempt at a space ship, and this time, I was aiming for something slight more alien in appearance.  The body of the ship was made from six metaballs squashed into various shapes and was then painted with a texture I got through experimentation.  The wings are extruded splines.
		This is basically the same object, with another experimental texture applied.  Personally, the jury's still out on which looks best.  If you click here, you'll see an animation of this ship, plus an escort of four of the Explorer-type ships from above.
		This is the same Cruiser as above, but this time, escoorted by some smaller fighter-type ships (a.k.a the Chicky-Fighters - for obvious reasons).   They were made from two metaballs and the wings are the same as the cruiser, just sized appropriately and at a different angle.
		The Cruiser in this picture is different, partly because through my smooth quad-dividing of the other cruiser, the object was over 1MB and was hellish to load, move and render, the other reason was to make it more similar to the chicky-fighters. The laser beams are cylinders with red and green glass textures.   The only object in this that isn't mine is the fire object, which was created by Edward Swan and which I downloaded from the web.
		This was the third of the ships I created.  I used the spline polygon tool and drew an outline, which I then swept almost to a point, then copied it and turned it 180 degrees to make the ship.  The laser beams were just long cylinders painted with a green glass texture.
		This image is a composite of the above objects and techniques.  Click here for the animation.
	After a short break from using TrueSpace, I was having a bout of major insomnia and decided to go looking for some tutorials, to see if I could jolt my creative juices.   Did I ever.
		This was the result of following Mark Jeffers' tutorials on lens flares and planets, with textures and fidgets by me.