CityEngine and SpaceShips

Well, sometimes I like to escape from making urban blocks and buildings in CityEngine. So I often turn to scifi for practising/testing my procedural code writing skills. Last weekend was no exception as the new Beta of CityEngine 2021.0 dropped, what better way to test things (without breaking real work) that using CityEngine to create fun geometries I don’t normally do.

So this time I’ve turned my attention to scifi spaceships, taking a heavy dose of inspiration from old TV. I started with 2001 inspired ship…. But then someone mentioned Blakes7 on a linkedin post I did… and well I couldn’t resist trying the Liberator!

CityEngine has primitive shapes (sphere’s cubes, cylinders etc..) that you can use and that’s what much of the scifi ships are boxes and cylinders with lumpy bits occasionally…. Any way here are some progress pictures, I’ll probably provide an update when I think it looks finished. You can see most of these screenshots are from CityEngine (the distinctive grid is a giveaway!), check out the Edit Scene Light and Panorama settings and you can add your own (non-blue sky) 360 panorama, I did a search for “space 360 panorama / hdri” images….