Here is the final painting for my Star Trek Enterprise ship design. I’m calling this the NCC-1701 Predator since the design looks a little more like an attack ship. This was painted in Photoshop with the 3D render at the bottom layer serving as reference. The current state of the painting is a little rough. I can spend a couple of more hours to tighten everything up but that’s probably not necessary as the design I wanted is pretty much there. And it can be a grueling process to to clean up and paint details on hard surfaces, especially when you have to keep all the perspectives in check. Anyhow, it was a hell of a lot of fun to get to this point. You can click on the image for the full resolution. Painted with the Cintiq 22HD.
The Initial Painting Stage and the 3D Render as Base Image
This is an early stage of the painting process. To get rid of the harsh lines and angles in the 3D model render, I use the smudge tool. Most of the process is painting right over the image using a square brush in Photoshop. I do like the square brush over the default soft round brush in Photoshop for these hard edged paintings. The square brush gives it a nice hard edged effect.
Here is the 3D render of the Enterprise concept model that I built in Maya.
