Saturday 10 August 2013

Ron Cobb: Science Fiction Design Hero

Remember Total Recall and the 5-second sequence of the shuttle making a VTOL landing? I loved that ship and yet nobody references, draws or builds it. Seems like a great design for a 2300AD starship...

I made an exhaustive and fruitless search of the interwebs for production stills or sketches of the Mars Shuttle that featured in the 1990 version of Total Recall. I loved the design - it seems something of a noble ancestor to the ship that featured in Prometheus.

This morning I dusted off my DVD copy and did a sweep of the extras - captured this great piece of Ron Cobb production art showing a non-VTOL version of the shuttle with passengers disembarking.

 

Screencapture - 3/4 view
 Screen capture: mostly front-on

An hour of pulling and turbosmoothing vertices to get the rough shape:
If I'm happy with the results I'll post the finished model.

1 comment:

  1. I had a copy of Starlog magazine (I think it was) that had a lot of Cobb's Total Recall concept art in it. Some fantastic pictures of Mars and a Camel in a space suit! It also had this image of the passengers disembarking and some accompanying images of the shuttle itself and how it attached to the 'mothership'. The idea being that there would be several shuttles connected to the long ship in tandem and triaxially and they would then be rotated so the shuttles had gravity for the journey between Earth and Mars allowing them to be used as habitation pods. I think the very first 3D spaceship model and animation I ever made, was based on that idea. :)

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