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.