Full sail ahead

The proud ship Epilogue I sets sail on the seas of time! This build was put together by Joebricksy with help from fellow members of the Gazamo build team.

Joe’s been a crafter for some five or so years now - three of which have been spent as part of the Gazamo crew - and the experience certainly shows with this ship design, incorporating elements from different cultures and time-periods to create something really striking.

“I wanted it to look sci-fi but at the same time really old - so that it doesn’t belong to any one time,” says Joe. “I then added a few gothic elements to the bottom side and even some oriental details, like the wings. The reason I wanted to combine so many different styles was that I’ve built quite a few ships now, and they’ve each been one style - it feels like you’ve seen every different style now, so I wanted to do something that hadn’t been done before.”

The inspiration is surprisingly not nautical: “The idea came from me watching Back to the Future from the night before. I really liked the film, so I wanted to make something similar to that, and then I thought, well, if there’s a time-travelling car, why shouldn’t there be a time-travelling airship? You can’t really see that it’s a time-travelling airship now, but that’s what gave the main inspiration.”

In terms of process, Joe says he doesn’t tend to spend a lot of time planning things out in detail. “I just start with one part and just go from there. I may have some ideas how I want it to look later, but during the process of the build I come up with ideas for things I’d like to add. For this build I started with the hull - because it’s the main piece - I lay it out first, then fill it in and later add the details.

“I used in-game tools like WorldEdit and VoxelSniper, but most of it was built block by block. The things like sails can’t really be generated by WorldEdit, so they have to be placed by hand. Then I use Mineways to import the schematic into an obj file. I can import that into Blender, along with the textures and materials, and then do 3D animation with it or render the build out to get the lighting that I want.”

Impressive stuff!