Spaceship Interior

When trying to come up with a design for the interior of the spaceship I knew I wanted to keep it simple as I did not want to over complicate things, and also have the possibility of running out of time for completing it. When I was looking for inspiration I came across some hotels that had a very minimalist / futuristic feel to them, especially within their spas. I really liked this design as it was very clean cut and did hold a futuristic feel to it.

I had a rough idea of what I wanted after finding some these spas as inspiration so I drew up a really quick idea and then took it into Photoshop to test out some colours. I knew I wanted my interior to be bright and reflective to add more to that simplicity look and feel. Also as my character was going to fairly colourful, not sticking to the norms of animalistic colour conventions, I didn't want the interior clashing with my character. The colour scheme I came up with was quite muted and when it came to painting the texture for the inside of the dome, it didn't feel right, when placing behind my shot footage, I found that Jeff (my actress) didn't sit very well within the background. It ended up looking too fake and it wasn't something I wanted at all. I felt that if I used a free texture I would be able to achieve a more realistic setting where the two components, both actress and backdrop would be able to fit nicely together.

The last image, you can see is one of my rendered shots. Initially I tried using blinn shaders to achieve a specularity and reflectivity on the objects, however I found that I couldn't control it too well and was not able to get the effect I was looking for. Instead it was suggested by a friend that I use a shader within Maya called: mia_material_x. This shader works really well with mental ray and as you can see, produces really nice reflections. Mia materials can only be rendered using mental ray as well. Because it turned out really well I ended up using it for the floor and on my alien character too. With the floor there is also a bump map plugged into it to give more depth. The alien also needed a reflection map as with using mia_material_x, everything has specularity on it, so you need a map to tell it where to not have it e.g. everywhere apart from the nose and mouth.

Spaceship development

Trying to figure out a design for my spaceship ended up being a lot harder than I thought. I wanted something that would relate to my character yet the common sci-fi spaceships you see in movies would not fit the style I was going for. In the end I realised the main thing that would relate the spaceship to the character is fur, again a typical spaceship wouldn't really work with fur so even though it's very simple I thought just a sphere could work. By adding fur onto it it gives it another dimension and is different to what you would normally see. To make it more interesting I plan to add one large spaceship and a couple small ones flying about in the scene, hopefully I will be able to show the fur dynamics with this which will add to the performance. Another reason for keeping it just a polygon sphere is that it allows me to spend more time making sure the rig I create for my character is correct, without a decent rig my animation would be let down. As my character is a quadruped, the rigging setup is slightly different and I will have to pay close attention when it comes to painting the weights. Before all of this however I will have to make sure that my model has the correct topology, the flow of the lines are all correct and will be similar to how a real mammal would be constructed. 

In a previous post I have already been testing out different types of fur and adjusting the attributes. Now I have had more time with it you can see the images below with what I have come up with, something more different than just using the presets. It ended up being a lot of trial and error, sometimes the fur was clumped up too much or other times it was too thick. What's good about Maya Fur is that it allows you to save a setup within the fur that you have created so you are able to easily apply this to another object. Obviously I don't want the smaller spaceships to be an exact copy of the larger one so I adjusted the attributes of the main fur preset I created, I think I may also adjust the hues of the little ones within After Effects when it comes to compositing, as this will then show it's not just a copy and make it more interesting to the eye.

Spaceship and Other Assets

This is my spaceship fully textured with a bump map. I found it quite hard to achieve what I had envisioned in my mind and in future I will definitely have to work on designing more. I have tried to keep it more futuristic and vastly different from the mushroom tree as it has crash landed on an alien planet. I want the player to be able to distinguish that these two things don't normally cross paths. The other image is off my statue that I created in order to show the player what type of alien would inhabit this planet. I tried to keep it organic with the way that I modeled it and the textures that I used are all natural things, like different types of stone and marble. I included a bump map into the actual statue, however as these are going to be place above the player (far out of reach) you wouldn't really be able to see the detail, so I didn't put a bump map for the plinth as there wasn't really a need for it.

Concept Art

In the end I took an idea I briefly drew up and developed from there, a mushroom cluster based on a bonsai tree. I liked how I could incorporate many different stems that grew off the main root and this was quite similar to the properties of a bonsai tree.

These are the final concepts for my game level, once I had it all laid out in Unity I had a better idea of perspective and scale so I was then able to produce this piece within Photoshop. The spaceship in the bottom right hand corner gives a rough idea of the scale of the whole piece and how big you would be as the player. When it comes to texturing the mushroom and the whole level I am going to try and stick by these colours, however I know there will probably need some alterations when it comes to the final thing. I may also change the colour of the mountains as this at the moment doesn't look too much like an alien planet, however it could work better when the lights and textures are in place. The scene itself is going to be around evening time in order to emphasize the glow of the mushroom, it will also add to the mood and atmosphere as to why there is a giant mushroom and if anyone or anything inhabits this place.

Originally I planned for my spaceship to have crash landed on a platform, however I found that this was too artificial and didn't fit in too well; like why would there conveniently be stepping stones leading towards the little island right where you have landed upon? To make it seem a bit more natural I thought it would be best to have the spaceship crash land in water, so the bottom concept art shows this.

Spaceship Development

Carrying on from my quick photoshop colour of my spaceship I decided to mock it up in Maya as I find it easier to gauge depth using a 3D modelling software rather than trying to imagine it and draw it out. At the moment it is just in smooth view and I think it looks quite sleek and with textures on top it could look really futuristic. Obviously with making it smooth, it would increase the polys quite a bit so I will have to be aware of this as I would have the big mushroom cluster, and the inside of it to complete my scene. I will now go in and paint this on Photoshop and I now have a much clearer idea of what the spaceship looks like from different angles. I want to keep the design quite simple, nothing too elaborate as I want the attention to be on the surrounding area - the mushroom cluster rather than the spaceship itself.

Just using the perspective view as a basis, I painted over using different layers, first blocking out the main colour and tones. The top image is just the basic black and white colour and from here I added a texture and a colour tint. It still needs a lot of work and experimenting with different colours and possible textures before I can settle on a final idea. I'm not the best at using Photoshop so I'll just have to do the best I can and see what I can come up with. The black and white one is okay but the textured one needs a bit of work with the tones.

Spaceship Design

The spaceship even though I haven't talked much about is so far, is actually a big part of my scene. The brief was to create a UFO crash site, so without the spaceship it won't be fulfilled. As it has crashed landed on an alien planet I want something that is really distinctive and futuristic to contrast against the organic forms of the mushrooms and also as it is set in the far future, only something futuristic would fit.

The moodboard shows some images/concepts I have found online. I have out off designing the ship until now as I really have no ideas what I am going to do or how to go about designing one. I want to keep it fairy simple as well as most of my polys will be used up creating the actual forest/environment.

Just some quick sketches of spaceship designs which I then took one idea further and created a simple silhouette of the top view and a 3/4 view then added some basic colour on top. I will get onto creating a proper scale drawing soon and develop more on the colours but for now this is the one I think I will go for.