June started off with a large push to finalize the exterior of the Freightstar as well as work on marketing and packaging materials.
Completing the exterior required the finalizing the intakes, engines and adding the fuel tanks to the sides of the main cabin. All items that took some time to flush out.
With the exterior done, sets and compositions were experimented with to see if a box design could start to take shape.
This, of course, also paved the way for work to begin on the interior and supporting structures. Currently the only interior item complete are the cargo pods.
During the month I reached out to a couple artists to get their level of comfort with what I was working towards. The above are some guide photos I selected to gauge interest as well as explore what I could create to help the artists I hire.
At this point I get to the kicker of the month… I will be shelving the Freightstar for now. Let me explain why…
During the month of May and June I experimented with resin 3D printer technology. I bought my own resin printer and at first was having some success with it. However, as time goes on I’m finding that many of the negatives are deal breakers for what I’m trying to achieve. It’s clear to me that 3D printing with resin requires a different design and manufacturing philosophy than what I originally thought. It was a good experiment but one I need to move away from if I’m to move forward with a product I can make in-house for the time being.
This unfortunately means the Freightstar needs to be shelved for a later date. The Freightstar was designed with the high precision of resin printing in mind. Many of the printed parts are too highly detailed for my standard FDM 3D printer.
As such, I will be moving onto my second ship, currently named the Mantabone. At this point I’ve begun concepting and design work on this ship and will be making the required changes to build it in-house like my legacy Star Citizen models. I will be looking into a finer nozzle for my FDM printer as well as doing reliability tests to see what the ideal setup will be for short term, low count production runs.
See you next month!