Concepts and early designs

Using the reference I had gathered of various aircraft I started to draw up simple silhouettes in photoshop to get an idea of the crafts basic shape. At this early stage I didn't want to get bogged down with detail and just started to scribble some shapes. I was careful to reference the material I had gathered as I wanted the ship to look it had been built by humans whilst still maintaining a futuristic look. Here are a few early designs I came up with using Photshop.

I was very pleased with the initial concepts that I had produced. This now gave me some good foundations to work from. I knew the shape I wanted and the details that needed working on. The upper half of the ship itself would be clad in some sort of metal plating. The lower half would be strewn with mechanical bits and pieces as well as various fins and wings. I was slightly concerned, at least at the beginning, how I was going to build the details on the underside of the craft. The concept was detailed, but the shape itself should be easy to build in maya.
I suppose the only thing I was worried about was finding textures for the ship that would bring out details on the upper surface of the ship. Modeling the ship looked daunting ,however, I was confident that I would produce something that looked like the concepts I had designed.