Inspiration

This is one of the best Star wars shorts I've seen in terms of quality.  His laser blasts are excellent, (Has a better glow and blast object than the below videos) and the shows what the Unreal Quixel Mega scans can do.  He could've used Iclone7 to make his character, but used a Human Generator which ;also makes shape keys for facial poses. Just fantastic.

Here he breaks down how he did the vfx.  Interesting to note that he uses after effects also.  He explains how he used instances and the lowest resolution megascan to keep memory requirements managible. He aslo uses a mist pass, which allows you to add mist to the scene in a compositor. (he used After effects)   He used Noise modifier on quite a bit of the animation parts.   The head of the r2d2, the x-wing etc.  He also used bezier curves to animate the x-wings.  But noted that you could have the x-wing stay static, and move the environment around instead.  There are situations where that technique is better, but not sure which yet. 

 

Not sure if this is blender, and quite amazing if this was one person who completed this small short. (Ah, he mentions some people who helped)  Has a beginning, middle and end, and tells the story of a cargo raid quite nicely.    Might of been better if they somehow got some cargo with tractor beams.

 

This person knows how to make a starwars fan fiction short film.  Some character animation and a surprise Rebel weapon make the short very interesting. Very well done.

 

This short has some great things and some things that need to be redone.  At time index 27, he has an excellent warp, and exit of an x-wing.  Note this is not one shot but 2 shots connected by a fade from white.  (Perfectly done)  The best shot I think is at time index 1:30, where an X-wing fires off some Blasters.  The blasters look really good because of a few extra glow frames added at the right time. (It's interesting to note, that he used a glowing ball with a glow, instead of maybe a string of balls to make something more of the shape of a energy discharge, but for one frame simple works, and saves you time)  The worst shot was the shields on a ship that didn't look like shields but something else.  Nice use of interiors of the fighters, for pacing.  One thing to note though, compared to the lighting of the above films, the lighting was not quite right.  Can you see the difference.  A little too much grey blends things together so you don't know where to look or not as much details in the shadows. 

 

This is such an awesome sytlized Starwars film.

 

 

Beginner

This can also be used for Star Trek

 

A different Hyperspace for your ships.  He uses a tube with procedural shaders.  You might use this tutorial as your hyperspace and the above tutorial at the end when the ship exits hyperspace. Figuring out how to make the stars un-stretch to a single point is the tricky part. (would you use an empty to control the shader? or an empty to shrink the object?)

 

Intermediate

 This is a great tutorial about how to make blasters, with a few other things thrown in. (xwing random motions) He uses an x-wing, and attaches particles to the blaster areas.  His end product looked pretty good with automatic shots firing from the x-wing.  He doesn't go over explosions, but there are plenty of those types of tutorials around. 

 

Advanced

This tutorial as an advanced ship texturing process.   Excellent results.  He uses his paid textures and has 2 workflows to get the grungy effects using ambient occlusion and bevel nodes.   I'm curious about his image maps. He achieves the worn metal look at the edges.   This is very good because blender has had many ways to do this like using the pointiness values etc.  I like his bevel node technique Very clever.

 

This video shows how to light the spaceship escpecially the little windows.  Just excellent Advanced Tips.  Thanks Chris.

Very interesting video of workflow of creating a Star Wars shot, not in space but over a ocean and landscape.   He uses a smoke simulation for an explosion of the tie fighter. Not an in depth tutorial but gives you an idea of the work flow.  He uses a bezeir curve for the motion of the x-wing, tie fighter and camera, and uses constraints for the camera.  This technique allows for easy cut and paste of the curve and offset to have fighters chase each other.