I’m starting to get used to the new version of Blender and its new rendering engine. I’ve mainly been working on the Obmunjalae as practice. I went off on a tangent planning through its construction steps (again…), but finally got back around adding some new details.

Not satisfied with just making a fantastical vessel, I have also designed out its framework. I’ve done something similar with the Ayra Katrin Library, actually thinking out the steps used to build the structure. I whipped up a quick turntable view of the framework below.

A purple crescent is the insignia of the Obmunjalae and shows up on the vessel in many places, including on the engine frame that you can see in the video clip.

I’ve settled on a name for the large Voidplane craft: Obmunjalae (oh+b, m+uh+n, j+ah, lay) which in the Gwil language translates to “Voidplane Master”. This was a title for its owner, but over time people also started calling the vessel by the same name.

Between the last update and this one, I did some rebuilding of the vessel’s frame and shell. I found a better tool in Blender to create cleaner cross sections. The Obmunjalae’s shape creates some interesting challenges because the floor cross sections are not regular elliptical shapes.

Another change to the vessel is the frame pieces that attach to the engines. Originally there was just a deck between the engine and machine room. Now there are large braced frame pieces, which you can see pretty well in this back shot.

The hangar now has a third mooring spot at the opposite end of the door. There are also two smaller elevator shafts instead of one large one. Instead of lights hanging from the ceiling, there are now lamp posts along the railing providing the main lighting for the hangar.

The design of the nose door has been updated. The door itself is a bit smaller, as I aligned its frame to be spaced evenly with the other main rings of the frame. The hardware that opens the door is also significantly different. The changes resulted in the door only needing two points of articulation – an initial push away from the frame and then a rotation. The earlier design pushed forward, then pulled outward, then rotated. There’s also some bracing framework attaching the hardware to the main frame rings.

Something I’ve never done before on the site: here’s a video! It’s of the nose door opening, playing at 4x actual speed.

I also started working out early ideas for the “Machine Room”. The vessel is powered by a large crystal core (the big glowy purple thing in the picture). The door on the right leads out to one of the engines.

I’ve been working on a vessel for Sharpheart – a large Voidplane craft for which I haven’t settled on a name yet. It is owned by a traveling adventurer sometimes nicknamed “The Voidplane Queen”. She lives independently of other nations and travels great distances through the Voidplane on her ship, all the while collecting, trading, and exploring. No one else travels as far, and she is responsible for many of the sparse nations being aware of each other.The vessel has a hangar bay in the middle (you can see it through the big side oval window above), two floors on each side with various rooms (14 of their balconies can be seen above), and one floor with a large single room on each side (topped with the oval roof window). The floors are accessed via an elevator, which is the gray circle to the right of the big roof window below. The back section houses the mechanical room and the two wind turbine engines.

There are Voidskimmer craft in the pictures as a size reference.

Pictured below is a partial view the front. At the bottom left is the nose of the craft which also acts as the door for the hangar room. The first balcony is where the vessel controls are located.

The architectural side-view is below, where you can see how the ship is vertically symmetrical. On the Voidplane, a gravity-like force pushes things to the center of a plane (which for this vessel lies along its center line), so someone standing on one side of the ship would be upside-down in relation to someone on the other.

This is a scouting vehicle used by Sha Rephart to travel on the Voidplane. The outer rim provides balance as well as a pathway to funnel air through the internal propeller engines. You can see one of the intake/exhaust openings near the front. The engines on this craft can work in reverse, and can independently change the output of the right and left sides in order to turn.

On the top deck is the navigation post, with simple directional controls (a forward/reverse and a turning dial) and a “beacon compass”. Two desks beside the post are primarily used by the navigator to work with maps. Beacon compasses utilize beacon crystals placed in various areas around Sha Rephart’s territory. When a small piece is extracted from these magical crystals, the shard is attracted to the original like a magnet, except that this pull will not lose strength for hundreds of kilometers. The compass contains multiple shards of beacon crystals that navigators use to triangulate their position on the Voidplane.