The New Horizon

Here's an elevation render from Maya with some Photoshop garnishes of the ship called the 'New Horizon' from the season 4 story arc, episodes 22 - 25 of  'The Clone Wars'.  This ship was both a school and bus (school bus) for the 'youngling Jedi'. During production George Lucas was set on making a spinoff series on the young Jedi tooling around a long time ago in a galaxy far far away in this ship.  Unfortunately, it was not to be.

It started off with with these simple design sketches in pen and ink. I like working in the 3/4 angle initially. They were scanned in digitally and I gave them a little tone in Photoshop so the director can see the shapes more easily.  In the beginning it's always about the finding the most harmonic shapes.  Also it has to have the 'vocabulary' of Star Wars design.  Just like 'Star Trek' has it's own 'vocabulary' of saucer bridges, nacelle engines, etc, so does Star Wars. Some of cues you see are 'Blockade Runner', 'Republic Frigate', and old Joe Johnstone designed engine configurations. 

The second one was chosen so I started building it in 3d.  We had to work fast! Here's the orthographic.

The final design model is completed. Scale is illustrated with the standard Clone Trooper. When assets were bigger and the Clone was harder to see we had to use the Republic Gunship as well. Initially the ship was a quarter larger than the final but it had to be reduced.  I would've like to detail the ship more but after a certain point, time to finish becomes critical.  Texturers can simulate detail with panel lines and panel color variation. So from this point I moved toward giving the ship a color scheme.

Star Wars is all about a "used universe" so the equipment has to have plenty of carbon scoring, chipped paint, and dirty fluid streaks. These screen captured angles of the ship are not the most dramatic, but they're necessary for the texturers so they can see every nook and cranny of the paint scheme.  A dramatic shot is not always the most informative.