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SpaceshipGenerator: A Blender script to procedurally generate 3D spaceships
- solinent 6y agoSome more in Houdini: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNPO_w9YRb0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNPO_w9YRb0
- pzone 6y agoBig fan of this Houdini artist's procedural helmets and robots https://twitter.com/mglhs_com/status/1081153465328549889 https://twitter.com/mglhs_com/status/1081153465328549889
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gerdesj 6y ago"Upgrade to 2.8x required" 8( Sadly, I've only just installed Blender so I have no idea how to update the add in. Give me a couple of years to get to grips with it please.
- risos 6y agoI guess you must've downloaded an older version of blender. The latest official release version is 2.82 which you can download here https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-82/ https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-82/ .
- stoolpigeon 6y agoNo- it's the script that needs updating. eeereerews has the link to the issue that leads to a link with a corrected version of the script
- gerdesj 6y agoNot on Arch Linux I didn't 8)
- eeereerews 6y agohttps://github.com/a1studmuffin/SpaceshipGenerator/issues/31#issuecomment-588253066 https://github.com/a1studmuffin/SpaceshipGenerator/issues/31...
- tenken 6y agoInstall via steam store, snap store ... No need to worry about installs from source.
- gerdesj 6y ago... pacman ...
- tinus_hn 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23375064 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23375064 This comment links to a newer version of the plugin.
- gerdesj 6y agoThank you. Well, the Helpdesk can look after itself for a while now I've vanished down a rabbit hole.
- andarleen 6y agook now THIS is what i am here for - thanks for the link!
- GavinB 6y agoJust needs some rendering presets, star field backgrounds, lens flare, GPT-2 title generation, and you've got random SF novel book covers!
- xwdv 6y agoWhy not randomly generate titles as well? And perhaps a synopsis.
- yellowapple 6y agoRandomly generate the ship names by pulling random phrases out of literature and you've got yourself an Ian Banks novel.
- cerberusss 6y agoMay he rest in peace. I had such pleasure reading his books, and the ship names were very funny indeed. Someone on HN pointed me to Neil Asher, who also authors the same genre and sometimes similarly names the ships.
- arethuza 6y agoI think the Mistake Not... would like a quiet word.
- nineteen999 6y agoSpacescape is good for your procedural starfields: http://alexcpeterson.com/spacescape/ http://alexcpeterson.com/spacescape/
- smcameron 6y agoHere's something to make procedurally generated gas giants: https://github.com/smcameron/gaseous-giganticus https://github.com/smcameron/gaseous-giganticus Here's a skybox generator: http://wwwtyro.github.io/space-3d/ http://wwwtyro.github.io/space-3d/
- smcameron 6y ago
- corty 6y agoReminds me of the spaceships in Avorion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R7xwseIkcE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R7xwseIkcE
- yellowapple 6y agoWas just playing that yesterday, and was getting ready to jump back in today. BoxelWare revamped the procedural ship/station generation immediately prior to the 1.0 release, and they're fantastic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLdmGxLWWfI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLdmGxLWWfI
- rossjudson 6y agoAll these ships have Bangle Butt.
- kebman 6y agoThis got me thinking about Limit Theory [1], where everything will be procedurally generated. Not sure if the project is still alive though. I remember getting so hyped over it in 2014 or something... [1]: http://ltheory.com/faq.html http://ltheory.com/faq.html
- bottle2 6y agoDidn't No Man's Sky do this? I haven't played this so I'm not sure
- tck42 6y agoSadly looks like no: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joshparnell/limit-theory-an-infinite-procedural-space-game/posts/2270873 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joshparnell/limit-theor... It doesn't appear the code was ever released either.
- nurettin 6y agoWell, it appears someone received a bonus of $180,000 without releasing any code. Thanks again, kickscamter.
- MagnumOpus 6y agoYes, that was a really elaborate scam by the notorious Josh Parnell. Made all the right noises and made off with $200k, releasing not even a single line of code.
- kebman 6y agoSince no end product is guaranteed, you're taking a risk when you're helping people on Kickstarter. I think that is pretty clear from Kickstarter's charter. Thus I wouldn't exactly call it a scam. If anyone is scamming anyone, it's Kickstarter itself, since all you get for your risk-taking activity, is the finished product of whoever you decide to help, and none of the potential profits associated with it. Usually speculation is associated with a percentage of profits, and there is none to be had at Kickstarter. All you are doing there, is helping someone potentially finish something they're working on. Further more, Kickstarter does not seem to communicate the speculative nature of what they're doing well enough. IMHO that's the "scammiest" part of their whole business model. I personally followed Mr. Parnell closely online, and if his work was ever a scam, it's one of the most elaborate and time-consuming out there. I don't think it's cool to judge someone for having an obvious mental breakdown. And I don't even think you're entitled to feel angry at anyone but yourself for risking money on something with so little to gain. On the other hand, Parnell sure did give to his followers, particularly in fantasticly marvellous visuals and ideas of something that probably should have been made with a team of several talented programmers and artists, instead of just one person. AFAIK he also gave out demos to backers. But if this is how you feel about Josh Parnell, I won't even ask what you think about Chris Roberts... ;)
- Ninjinka 6y agoI remember seeing this a while back when I was looking into how a procedurally generated trading card game might work, where every single card was unique. It ended up being beyond me, but I'd love to see it come to life at some point, similar to Keyforge.
- Hemospectrum 6y agoThe result screenshots are pretty cool-looking... and I personally wouldn’t board any of these spacecraft! The decks should be stacked along the main engines’ thrust vector, so the acceleration doubles as a source of artificial gravity. Maybe I should open an issue...
- barclay 6y agoI think it was the first "Expanse" book that referenced that... and it rocked my world. Never able to willfully suspend it since.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- yellowapple 6y agoThe problem with that is that you'd have to be always thrusting in order to maintain that artificial gravity, which doesn't sound feasible. I'd argue a more practical design would be to include centrifugal rings (even number, paired up in opposite rotational directions, so that they offset each others' torque). That way you still get artificial gravity, even while the ship's hanging out in orbit. As a bonus, the habitats might be able to double as reaction wheels (though I don't know if this is exactly feasible; reaction wheels usually spin much faster, IIUC, though maybe bigger wheels don't need such high speeds to control the attitude of a spacecraft).
- Hemospectrum 6y agoIt depends on how long, and how often, you burn those engines. If you’ve got a big torch that can sustain a large fraction of one gee for weeks or months, and your fuel is cheap enough, why turn it off at all? On the other hand, if it’s only good for a big push at the beginning and end of your trip, and you’ll spend the whole time coasting, spin is absolutely the way to go. The Expanse, as mentioned in other comments, showcases both these designs. Most ships fly a brachistochrone trajectory with a mid-point “flip and burn,” but the Mormons’ giant colony ship has a drum.
- Archit3ch 6y agoProcedurally generated spaceships was the first idea that came to mind when I learned about Blender's scripting capabilities. :)
- metalliqaz 6y agoThis is very cool, but they all looks like the same "kind" of space ship to me. Even though I'm sure they are very different, they aren't distinct. And in that way, this doesn't seem very useful.
- TuringTest 6y agoThe "extreme" examples are more visually interesting and distinct. But yes, its too obvious that they all follow the same scheme.
- lgierth 6y agoI recently started playing No Man's Sky, a space game that has systems and planets procedurally generated. More varied spaceships and spaceship classes are something I'm looking forward too, maybe the developers can take some inspiration from OP.
- Daub 6y agoProcedural general works well for terrains and ecosystems, but not for man-made objects. There has been some great work on procedurally generated architecture, but they all need extensive manual tweaking before they can be used. This tells us a lot about what differentiates design from natural forces.
- HiroshiSan 6y agoReally interested to see how the concept art industry will adopt tools like this
- minitoar 6y agoReminds me of Warning Forever, which would generate 2d spaceships: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warning_Forever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warning_Forever
- potatofarmer45 6y agoOne of my favorite aspects of Diablo was the randomly generated levels. Imagine a space strategy game, where your "civ" is randomly generated giving you a random tech tree, with random ships of random attributes. That would so much more depth and replay-ability and make it much much harder to over optimize.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- trynewideas 6y agoA more up-to-date fork since this original repo hasn't been updated in two years: https://github.com/ldo/blender_spaceship_generator https://github.com/ldo/blender_spaceship_generator
- splatcollision 6y agoThanks! I only tried using the original which wasn't updated for blender 2.8.
- klmadfejno 6y agoThis is really cool. Spaceships feel like a limited choice for this though. Being able to generate models of humans or animals already animated to a standard skeleton would be a hugely useful asset. As a hobbyist game dev I'd love to buy random monsters off the unreal asset store, but I can't help but feel it'd be really lame if the monsters in your game were seen in some other unrelated game. That would be super limiting on any immersion instantly imo. Tools like this could help a lot. Maybe it's even easier since the skeleton would be the same? Not familiar with modeling
- Daub 6y agoIt amazing the traction that Blender is now getting. After a lifetime of delivering our 3D courses in Max, our school has recently switched to blender. Despite being long-time Max users, all our staff having nothing but praise for Blender. They are like kids in a candy store. It was the Covid thing that precipitated this move. Max is platform-dependent, making it unsuitable for home use. Today I returned to Max to tweak an old project and I am reminded of what a funckwinkle it is: full of built-in bugs and inconsistent UI choices. The design landscape is very subject to catastrophic change. I remember when Quark Express went from being king of the hill to playing second fiddle to InDesign, in what felt like a couple of months. This was the outcome of some very poor customer-antagonising decisions by Quark.
- mortenjorck 6y agoI tried to learn Blender about ten years ago and just couldn’t get past the UI. I tried again this past week, and have already modeled and rendered a proof-of-concept for what I was hoping to do with it. The 2.8 UI redesign was nothing short of a game-changer.
- jointpdf 6y agoDo you think it would be simple enough for an 11 year old to learn without getting too lost? My nephew is into claymation and is generally artistically inclined (but otherwise not very into school, even in the best of times). I’m looking for something to help him learn remotely, so anyone’s tips or resources would be appreciated.
- rkuykendall-com 6y agoI'd have more confidence an 11-year-old could learn it than a 30-year-old. It's amazing thinking back at how quickly and absolutely I could immerse myself in things back then.
- cslucano 6y agoMy son, eight years old, and I spent the whole lockdown learning Blender. He is learning 2d in school; I found Blender a great tool to improve his math learning. He dreams about creating a game.
- noisy_boy 6y agoVery cool. I used to draw spaceships as a child so this brings back memories. Suggestion for OP: add more curves to the mix to increase variety.
- cat199 6y agoalso 'wings' and 'wing alikes'
- angry_octet 6y agoQuite good, though very much in the style of Aliens. I'd like to see if some deep learning techniques can make ships like Chris Foss, Peter Jones or Angus McKie. https://www.chrisfossart.com/ https://www.chrisfossart.com/ https://arthive.com/artists/65054~Peter_Andrew_Jones/works/354661~Spaceship https://arthive.com/artists/65054~Peter_Andrew_Jones/works/3... https://www.pinterest.ca/lleephoenix/space-art-angus-mckie/ https://www.pinterest.ca/lleephoenix/space-art-angus-mckie/
- awinter-py 6y agowhich part docks with ISS
- spectaclepiece 6y agoReally cool. I recently began playing around with procedural 3D design and found Sorcar[0] which gives Blender Houdini like capabilities. A good place to start for anybody interested in exploring this sort of thing. [0] https://github.com/aachman98/Sorcar https://github.com/aachman98/Sorcar
- rurban 6y agoBut still away from Houdini which is the gold standard still.
- juanuys 6y agoPreviously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11929493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11929493 Also, someone a while back posted procgen for 2D spaceships. Will update when/if I find it.
- qubex 6y agoAre you talking about Warning Forever? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warning_Forever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warning_Forever
- arriu 6y agoPerhaps this one? https://github.com/zfedoran/pixel-sprite-generator https://github.com/zfedoran/pixel-sprite-generator
- juanuys 6y agoThat's it, thanks!
- baq 6y agobig spaceships should be skyscapers instead of boats so thrust works as gravity. looks nice though!
- dreen 6y agoI've never done any 3D modelling, how feasible is it for a programmer to approach it purely via scripting? Im very familiar with Python, and this script doesn't look too complex.
- Peckingjay 6y agoBlender has a great Python API[0] that allows you to do almost everything that you could do in the editor with code. You do have to run your code from inside the Blender app though. [0] https://docs.blender.org/api/current/info_quickstart.html https://docs.blender.org/api/current/info_quickstart.html
- jedimastert 6y agoI feel like headless blender could be kind of interesting...maybe someone should start a bug? Edit: good thing I searched the bug tracker. Next step, Selenium for Blender!
- capableweb 6y agoI'm unsure of why you say "almost" everything when the UI code is simply calling the python API to do it's function. You could do anything and _more_ in the python API, as it's what the UI uses but you can use all the parameters via the code while the UI doesn't expose everything. Unless something changed recently regarding this. Also, regarding executing the code from outside, you can run blender headlessly, running the code with it when running blender via terminal. So you could use it as a windowless client if you so wish.
- blincoln 6y agoBlender is a truly fantastic tool, but some of the scripting is a bit hacky, IMO. I recently built some pretty complex Blender automation[1], and my experience was that while technically nearly everything that can be done in the UI can be automated, there are problems that fell into two main buckets for me: 1 - There are basically two parts to the Python API - bpy.ops, and everything else. If something is in the "everything else" category, it works pretty well, but not everything can be done through that part of the API. bpy.ops is (AFAICT) the equivalent of using Selenium to automate clicking on web pages instead of actually interacting with the underlying API, and it feels super fragile. 2 - A lot of the API is not documented well, and I frequently ran into situations where there was no information on what I wanted to do, or the information was outdated. The impression I get is that most of the core Blender devs and users are not using the scripting features, or not using them extensively, because answers on StackOverflow and similar to things like "how can I change property X of every material's shader in my project, oh, and by the way, I have 1000 materials in my project" are usually "I guess you'll just have to click through each of those and set it" even though the API supports it if one digs far enough. A lot of the extensions I thought I could use as reference for things like arranging shader nodes in a useful way have been broken ever since 2.8, but there's no indication in the UI of this. The pane in the scripting view that continuously shows the script equivalent of actions taken in the UI is a big help, and again, Blender is a really, really fantastic tool. But I can definitely understand some frustration with the scripting feature. [1] https://www.thelostworlds.net/Software/Soul_Reaver_to_Blender_Conversion_Toolchain.html https://www.thelostworlds.net/Software/Soul_Reaver_to_Blende... - better docs are coming soon, I promise.
- jp555 6y agoThis is great!! Blender is SO HUGE, even after years learning it I've not yet dabbled much into scripting, but it's the spirit of sharing like this that lets us dive in to an examples and learn so much!! Blender is truly remarkable software, and it just keeps getting better and better! I'm loving the 2.83 beta grease pencil updates.
- splatcollision 6y agoHas this been updated for 2.8? I've used this when learning Blender scripting and the script had a bunch of issues with the procedural materials because of API changes. That being said Blender is some heroic software.
- thdrdt 6y agoFor those people who want to learn more about Blender here some lesser known YouTube channels with great content: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClUvUh2AoIhJRezjduP3xcQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClUvUh2AoIhJRezjduP3xcQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzghqpGuEmk4YdVewxA79GA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzghqpGuEmk4YdVewxA79GA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCREsnxg5H2HAj86KVREdGMw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCREsnxg5H2HAj86KVREdGMw https://www.youtube.com/user/mediagabbitt https://www.youtube.com/user/mediagabbitt https://www.youtube.com/user/Blenderfan93 https://www.youtube.com/user/Blenderfan93 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2U5mRfclG1Rrr1ztNkpGKA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2U5mRfclG1Rrr1ztNkpGKA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-6vHjpfo62aJpQk_n9siUw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-6vHjpfo62aJpQk_n9siUw Most of those channels show really professional work with great tutorials.
- noblethrasher 6y agoOf possible interest is Kate Kinnear's thesis[1], titled The Aesthetics of Science Fiction Spaceship Design, which is about techniques for procedural generation of sci-fi spaceships. Also discussed on HN[2]. [1] https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/handle/10012/4935 https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/handle/10012/4935 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17899458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17899458
- antpls 6y agoThat's really cool ! Even the "extreme" examples could be an entire specie/race/civilization in a space game