How to Design a Startfighter Influenced by a Hunting Owl Using Blender

Introduction

My name is Jannis Mayr. I'm a Senior Concept Artist and designer working primarily in games and film. Ever since I watched The Lord of the Rings for the first time in 2001 and saw the incredible matte paintings by Weta and Dylan Cole, I knew this was the field I wanted to work in. I was already reasonably good at drawing and painting, and I had a strong interest in learning 3D as well.

I developed my drawing and painting skills from a young age, both through self-practice and through a school that actively supported art education. I was a gamer and had my own PC from around age 12, and I experimented early on with 3ds Max and compositing software. That path eventually led me to a film school for digital production in Germany, where I gained a broad foundation in filmmaking, software, and art.

After graduating, I began building a portfolio focused on matte painting and concept art, while working first as a colorist and later as a VFX artist and matte painter for film and television. Over time, I was brought on by concept art outsourcing studios, including Karakter Design Studio, Terraform Studios, Axis Animation, and others.

I've contributed to major game productions such as God of War: Ragnarök, Destiny 2, Marvel 1943 Rise of Hydra, and Horizon Forbidden West, and in recent years to several large Hollywood film productions alongside countless smaller projects. Exchanging knowledge and ideas with other artists in the field has been invaluable in sharpening my skills, but the most important driving force has always been a deep, burning passion for creating: environments, creatures, space ships, characters, and music too. I simply have to keep making progress, keep learning, keep building. Without that, I start to feel genuinely unsettled.

Night Owl - Close Orbit Dominance Fighter

Star Wars was an influence in the sense that it's one of the most iconic sci-fi IPs ever created. It's hard not to be shaped by it in some way. But in this case, its influence came later in the process. When I started sketching, I simply wanted to design a starfighter. It wasn't planned to be part of the Star Wars universe at all. It was just a gap I wanted to fill in my portfolio.

I began with the cockpit window shapes and worked outward toward the wings. I tried several wing configurations and found myself drawn to TIE fighter-style wings, but I didn't want to just create another TIE fighter, so I kept sketching variations. Eventually, I landed on a wing shape I was happy with.

In hindsight, I can see the unconscious influence of podracers and TIE fighters, even though I wasn't consciously using them as references. These are some of my early explorations. Obviously, they are very TIE-inspired. I just tried to get away from that a bit to create something new:

As with most projects, I built a reference board in PureRef before and during the design process. At some point, it occurred to me that it would be interesting to see how an owl might influence the design. Since owls are winged predators, the concept felt like a natural fit for a fighter. It turned out to work beautifully: the wing shape and the nose of the fighter translated very naturally from owl references, the ear-like feather tufts, the broad flat nose, the winter camouflage, and the downward-angled wingtips all found their way into the design.

Modeling

I do most of my 3D work in Blender. One of my favorite workflows is building a mirrored setup and exploring shapes symmetrically. I typically work with a single Empty as the central pivot point for all elements, and I keep the geometry simple in the early stages. Panel lines are mostly created with textures, mapped onto the geometry using simple cube mapping, and then shifted around in the UV editor until the result feels interesting.

Some panel lines are, of course, cut directly into the geometry. I sometimes use Booleans for this, and I further reinforce intersections and extrusions with an ambient occlusion shader with edge-tracing. While working on the wings, it became clear that a folding mechanism would make a lot of practical sense, both to allow the pilot to enter and exit more easily and to reduce the ship's footprint when docked inside a carrier or on a landing pad.

This was actually the point where the strongest Star Wars influence entered the design. The iconic Imperial Shuttle folds its wings in a way that made intuitive sense for the Night Owl as well. That said, I never fully modeled the folding mechanism. I only animated the wing movement for the takeoff sequence. As a concept piece rather than a game or film-ready asset, I try to save time wherever I can throughout the process. Simple geometry tends to stay clean on its own, though that isn't always the case when it gets more complex.

Topology and UV Unwrapping

The model is a mix of simple geometry and subdivision surfaces. For unwrapping, I kept things straightforward: cube mapping, project from view, and Blender's Smart UV Unwrap. For the turbines, I used cylindrical mapping with a ship hull texture, which always works well. Everything was done entirely in Blender.

Texturing

I set up all my materials in Blender. The shader is fairly complex, combining airplane hull and spaceship panel textures with edge detection driven by Bevel nodes and Ambient Occlusion. In many cases, textures and AO alone are enough to get a convincing result. The worn metal look, however, was handled in Photoshop rather than in 3D. I used rust textures in Overlay or Soft Light blending modes and then painted on top of my base render.

Post-Production Settings

I generally set up my scene in Blender, with composition and lighting mostly finalized before rendering. In Photoshop, I add a few atmospheric and light-effect layers on top of my 3D base. These are really just the icing on the cake. Having a solid base render makes everything faster and helps avoid problems down the line. I love the 2D stage, but some things are simply better or easier to handle in 3D.

Since my model uses a lot of mirror modifiers, moving it around in Blender can be a real pain. My workaround is to instance the entire collection (in this case, the ship) into the scene and use that instance for rendering instead. The first thing I do when setting up a shot is place a few cameras and experiment with different focal lengths and points of view. Once I'm happy with the perspective and composition, I start bringing in light sources. I usually have a sun light in the scene from the beginning, but this is the stage where I properly set up the world environment and any additional lights.

For this project, I worked with several different setups: a bright, clean matrix look for the callout sheet and turntable, a snowy mountain scene with a single sun light, and a dark background for the hangar setting lit by a combination of Area Lights, Spot Lights, and practical light sources, including the blowtorch emitting a bluish light and wall-mounted lamps which are geometry with an emission shader. Lighting and camera setup:

When working on scene lighting, I often use it to guide the viewer's eye and balance the composition. It's a constant interplay of lights, darks, and colors to find the most pleasing result. Artistic principles like big/medium/small contrasts, the rule of thirds, and the golden ratio all come into play, and they apply just as much to luminance and color as they do to form. After years of working as an artist, these things become second nature.

I no longer consciously think about the rules. I just play until something feels right, and that's how I decide what to emphasize and what to pull back. In some cases, I like to add post effects using Blender's compositing nodes. Bloom, Lens Blur, and Chromatic Aberration are my favorites. You can achieve similar results in Photoshop, but why not take advantage of them directly in Blender?

I render exclusively in Cycles. Eevee occasionally comes in handy during the very early stages of modeling. I render one beauty pass with everything combined, plus a mist pass and/or a color-ID/clown pass, which I create via a viewport render in solid mode with flat random colors. The mist and color-ID passes are then used in Photoshop to generate masks for individual elements.

For the animation, I lit the scene using a large panoramic backplate I shot myself on a hiking trip in the Dolomites a few years ago. The animation was also rendered in Cycles with Motion Blur and Depth of Field. I created the heat distortion effect in After Effects, then edited and color-graded the final piece in DaVinci Resolve. Rendering in 16-bit (I use PNG sequences) is essential here. You need that dynamic range to have real flexibility in the grade.

Animation viewport:

Conclusion

I think successful design has to strike a nerve with the viewer. Either it's immediately aesthetic to a certain audience, or it sparks imagination by feeling familiar yet unique, something never quite seen before in this exact form. It can also be a spin-off of an existing IP that resonates with an established fan base, which I think is partly the case with the Night Owl. To work within an existing universe like this is still a challenge: you have certain design pillars to follow, but just as many constraints to work within.

From this project, I learned that there's still a huge appetite for Star Wars-style content. People seemed to genuinely love that the ship could believably exist within that universe. I also learned that you can pull off a compelling animation even with a partly unfinished model, something that was hard for me to accept as a perfectionist. On this one, I fell well short of my usual standards simply because I was so pressed for time.

My feelings about the design went through every possible stage: first, I thought it was awesome, then I completely hated it, then I loved it again, then I thought it was... partly okay. By that point, I'd already invested so much time that I just had to see it through to a dignified finish. The animation came together well, though it required relearning a lot. I originally learned animation in Maya. I worked on it in every spare minute I had, which weren't many, and at some point, I found myself deep in the sound design. I had never planned to take the project that far, but if not for an animation, when else do you get to really do sound?

My advice for beginners who want to become artists and designers: create personal work as much as possible. Technically replicate the art you love most, but always put your own spin on it. Don't be afraid of AI, and don't be intimidated by people who seem more skilled. There's always a bigger fish, and it doesn't matter. Use AI as a tool if it serves you, or don't use it at all, but first build a strong foundation in the fundamentals: composition, lighting, shape language, color theory, gesture, and anatomy.

Build a portfolio and get really good. I've heard many times that passionate, skilled people will always find their place in their craft, and I find that genuinely comforting amid the daily realities of job hunting. There will be difficult stretches, but there will always be a need for people who know how to design things.

See you around and thanks for the interview!

Jannis Mayr, Senior Concept Designer

Interview conducted by Emma Collins