Live Stream of Game Design Experiment - Sketching a spaceship, building a model, adding to Unity!

Hi I'm Jerry from Bliz Studio LLC. In this game design experiment live, I am sketching a spaceship in Photoshop, then building the model in Asset Forge, and then adding to Unity and creating particle effects. For the Model I created in this video, you can download it here and you can freely use it

This live stream walks a spaceship from rough Photoshop sketch to a textured 3D model flying through a particle starfield in Unity — a complete concept-to-engine pipeline compressed into one session. It's an experiment rather than a polished tutorial, but the workflow itself is very repeatable. Here's how each stage went.

Stage 1 — Sketch loose, throw away freely

The concept phase in Photoshop is deliberately rough: several thumbnails get abandoned before one sticks — a beefy fighter with a centralized hull, big honking engines, thin aggressive wings, and front-facing blasters. A practical design note from the sketching: if the engines dwarf the cockpit, the pilot can't see around them, so the canopy gets pushed up and the engines down. Sketches exist to find these problems cheaply.

Stage 2 — Kitbash the model in Asset Forge

Asset Forge assembles 3D models from predefined blocks (you can also import your own from Blender). The ship comes together piece by piece: hull, canopy, twin oversized engines mounted low so they stay out of the pilot's sightline, four small mid-mounted thrusters, forward-swept wings duplicated and mirrored, nose blasters, and louvered vents. Two useful habits show up here: drop the grid snap to half-size when blocks won't land where you want them, and break symmetry with small one-sided details — greebles like a fuel cap — so the ship reads as a machine rather than a mirrored shape. Materials finish it off: a yellow-orange hull, patterned gray engine cowlings, deep red intakes, and near-black accents. Export with the Unity preset.

Stage 3 — Stage the scene in Unity

Drag the export into a Models folder and into the scene. For the space look, set the camera's clear flags to a solid black color instead of the skybox, dim the directional light, and add a point light near the ship for focused illumination. The ship sits angled at 137 degrees on the Y axis, slightly offset from the camera.

Stage 4 — Starfield and engine particles

The flying-through-space illusion is one particle system: shape switched from cone to a large rectangle (eventually 80 x 80) rotated to match the ship's 137-degree heading, start lifetime raised to 20 seconds, emission at 40 per second. The trick that sells it is Random Between Two Constants — speed varies from 2 to 40 and size from 0.2 to 2, so some stars whip past while others drift, which reads far more naturally than uniform particles. The engines get their own systems: a cone with its angle at 0 for a tight beam, looping with Prewarm on (so the exhaust is already firing at frame one), scale around 0.2, emission pushed to roughly 500, speed 7-10, and Color Over Lifetime fading a blue plume — deliberately opposite the orange hull — to transparent. A blue point light parented to each exhaust lights the ship's tail. All systems get grouped under one Engine Particles object so they fire together.

A final hull-lights particle experiment didn't pan out before the camera died — the honest ending of a live experiment. The finished model was posted free for anyone to use in their own project.