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The first manned mission in the Apollo program launched on 11th October, 1968 from Cape Kennedy. Aboard the Saturn 1B were commander Walter M. Schirra, Jr., command module pilot Donn F. Eisele, and Walter Cunningham as lunar module pilot (although no lunar module was actually included for this mission).

This project is intended to make a 3d model of the Saturn 1B 'rocket' used for the Apollo 11 mission. It will be my occasional 'work in progress' and software being used includes:

Cinema4d 9.6
Maxwell Render 1.7
Paint Shop Pro.

A 1994, 2006 scale drawing by George Gassaway is being used as the plan in Cinema4d.

Apollo 7 patch image courtesy of NASA public Images.

The Saturn 1B consists of quite a few sections. However my 3d model will have no interior detailing so I decided to construct the model in 3 sections; Lower Middle, Upper.

Starting with the lower section, a variety of Cinema4d cylinders and cubes were modified to form the overall structure. I'm keeping the UV mapping work flexible. Parts with text/noticable markings have higher resolution textures than plain parts.

Here, I've modified the upper ring of my lower section and added some inset flanges to the liquid oxygen tanks.

Engines get started. These were made using the same technique as the my Space 1999 engines bells so no need to repeat that description. Positioning of the parts was helped by cutting a section from the plan I'm using and using that as a texture on a Cinema4D disc primitive. The four outer engines are slightly angled to match the real Saturn 1B.

Moving up to my middle section - a rough start has been made.

Lower and middle sections 'joined'.

A quick start to the command service module. Another section of the plan was cut out and used as a texture on a Cinema4D cylinder. This helped as a guide to adding knife cuts to form different polygon selections that will be allocated to different materials. The red number '1' is there to make sure this part is in the correct posisition in relation to the rest of the model.

The CSM with 3 material zones - shiny white, diffuse white and a custom silver alloy.

An addition of a few cones, cubes and cylinders added to what will be my upper section of the Saturn 1B. I've also modified the 'white' materials to a slight off white, creamy colour - looks more natural I think.

All the sections together. Just a few parts to add plus some more UV mapping to be done and this Saturn1B will be completed.

More gets done to the upper assembly! A number of polygon selection tags were created to aid UV mapping. Except for the metal thruster cones, all the parts that form this assembly were connected into a single object and given a temporary Cinema4D material that included a simple plain texture.

Now, the tedious UV mapping gets done - this took a few hours! The template colours represent the three material zones that I will use for this - diffuse, shiny and 'silver'.

I used Bodypaint for the simple painting that made a texture ready for some vector lettering to be added in my paint software.

Also, I baked an ambient occlusion. The big block of white in the top right of the preview image is the US text and flag area - this is overscaled compared to the other UV's because I wished the detail to hold up when and if rendered fairly close.

Now for the 'silver'. For anything with metal then most times I use a Maxwell material powered by IOR (Index Of Refraction) data - solid objects have surface refraction that differs according to what material it is!

I opted for the platinum ior data because I think the aluminium has too much 'blue' and the titanium goes too dark in some lighting set ups.

This is were it's at now. Text and other stuff has been added and materials adjusted (but not finalised).

The ambient occlusion bake has been used to mask a very light dirt layer and is set at 12% opacity - hardly noticable but adds a subtle amount of definition to the structure.

The 'silver' material has some bump map lines but I think the uniform environment is causing them not to show very clear. If they still don't work as expected I will put the bump map into a displacement layer.