CGI | Sci-fi Art

Hey all,

Well, it's been a crazy few months, with commissions and stuff.  But it's time to get back to my personal projects that I've been putting off.  I have a mind-shelf full of ideas and I need to get them down in a more-or-less polygonal state before they get stale.

Jaspera

Since I've been a kid, I've had this idea of a space station that is, essentially, a giant mall in orbit of a very affluent planet.  This station, called Jaspera, had inflicted upon it one inept attempt thus far to build it.  I need to do something better this time:

A very old model I built over ten years ago... eww. :(

The scene above is very old.  But it's a general approximation of what I want to do with the space station.  It does capture the mood, as it was described in my original one-page description of the scene I wrote up when I was about 15, sitting in a lobby of a Chinese food restaurant that my father cleaned in Skowhegan, Maine.  (I had finished my job of vacuuming the carpet on the main floor, by the way, so I wasn't being lazy, as I recall...)

I want to build the following sections:

1.) Main Atrium -- This is pictured above.  It's a 20 - 30 story tall inner core with a skylight above pointed at the sun.  There walkways all around the periphery that connect to the various storefronts along the external hull of the station.

2.) Industrial Docking Bay -- The docking bay is at the bottom of the station.  It's where the thousands of space ships that visit the station every day have berths and refuel gantries to resupply the station.  It's a more industrial part of the station and less pretty than the civilian areas.

3.) Passenger Docking Bay -- At the top of the station.  It's a more elegant docking area, where yachts and whatnot dock.

4.) Shops -- I want to build some of the generic shops.  These can be modular in design so that I can make a bunch of 'em if I want.

5.) Ol' Baid's Bar -- A bar in my magnum opus, Armranath (a colossal film project which will never be made), but it would be cool to have the bar.

6.) Hotel Area -- An outer ring of the station is a massive hotel, with windows facing space or the inner core, depending on what you desire.  It'd be cool to see that actually completed.

At any rate, that's the goal.  Probably will take the better part of a year to complete.

Plagarus, Part 3

Plagarus... :\  I'm still working on Part 3.  Got a bit of work done on it this month!  But it's slow going simply because being a one-man animation machine is tough.  I may have recruited a real life friend to help me out on some of the animation, but he's still hammering out school over in Full Sail, so it might take a bit of time, unfortunately. So I apologize that this time around, you'll still probably be dealing with my crappy animation skills.  :(




I'd just like to say that the stills look a lot better than the actual action. :(  I'm dreadful at character animation, and try to avoid full body stuff at all costs.  But, I've chosen to focus on modelling mostly.  Movies are, by far, the most complex art form out there, and it takes more than one person to make one.

At any rate, I'm expecting Plagarus, Part 3 some time this late spring/early summer, depending on how much I get done.

Adamant Command Deck

Also, there is the Command Deck of the SSC Adamant, which I still have to complete.  I'm planning on getting that thing done pretty soon, as I was thinking about incorporating a scene on the Adamant in Plagarus.  We'll see how that goes, though.

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So, there will hopefully be more updates coming on this page now that I'm through the woods and get to start putting attention on my own projects again.  I'll definitely try to put up a link to the Star Wars fan projects I was privileged to assist with for the Star Wars Fan Film Awards that are scheduled to be released in a few months.  Also, huge shout out to Ansel Hsiao who was gracious enough to allow me to use his awesome Star Destroyer model for the space scenes in one of the films.  I finally got to meet a personal inspiration--the guy that got my butt into gear with spaceship modelling in the first place--and it was awesome.




Well, that's about it.  Hopefully everyone is doing awesome and that things are going well.  If not, I hope things get better for you soon!

Dan

Hey all,

I know it's been a while since I posted anything, but I'd like to show what I've been working on.

A few projects early this year.  Two Star Wars projects beginning this week to hit.  One, hopefully, to win the Fan Film Challenge on starwars.com.  We'll see.  It's pretty awesome to be included in those projects.

As for paid client work, continuing process of making high resolution print-ready images for a novel, "Reality", by Daniel Liut.  Since it had to mimic preexisting artwork that was made in a traditional paint medium, I had to add a somewhat "painted look" to the images in post-production.  The client has been happy so far, and so I'm pleased.

I'm pretty proud of this stuff.

The images had to be full-page printable 6" x 9" at 300 ppi.  That means it was necessary to render up images at 1800 x 2700 pixels to accomplish this.

My personal favorite thus far, first:

"Facing the Knights"



Final version of what is temporarily called "Plate Z", and I call "Facing the Knights".  The directions for this piece indicated a scene where three of the main characters stand in an open hatch of their starship looking out at an army on a planet that has achieved only medieval state of development.  It was encouraged to emphasize the difference between the two worlds, so I decided to use luminary contrast: the darker interior of the super advanced starship's airlock against the lurid sunlight and fog of the natural forest beyond.  Also, the harsh, non-organic nature of the ship's interior against the softer, more natural designs of the alien armor was used to highlight this contrast.

Several elements to this image.  The first is the foreground elements, which included the starship interior, which is standard 3D modelling for me and was completed extremely quickly.


The characters in the foreground plate were preexisting meshes I had laying around.  They're just the same 3D models I've always used for any project I need to use characters in--Daz Studio Michael 4 and Vicky 4 models that were imported into Blender years ago and still hold up under scrutiny to this day, so I continue to use them.  The fox-like alien was the most challenging.  I had to go ahead and purchase a fox body model and then place the head on the top of the humanoid model.  This took several days of prep work and weighting, but I was relieved the same armature worked for both models pretty simply.  It's not pretty, but we were under a crunch time, and it worked.

The background is the same story about the characters, but the forest scene was constructed using plant models I had laying around the computer and several assets downloaded off of Blend Swap.

This was a few days of work to get it to look at least partially right.

After post production, using Cycles' mist setting:


Not much to look at without the corridor hiding all the bad stuff, but there's little point to filling out stuff that won't be seen in the final product, so I just put this out there.

The final product was this, before the post production paint effects in Gimp:


A strong vignette effect was added to amplify the darkness of the interior sections of the scene, and direct the viewer's attention to the center of the scene, where the alien commander and his standard-bearer stand on the rock.  This was intended to highlight the impression the character's line of sight and where their attention is--the unknown threat.

The second shot was actually the first I did for the book project.

"Falling Towards the Intrepid"


This involved something I enjoy doing: starship modelling.  The design of the starship was already complete, so all that was necessary was the actual modelling itself.  While not exactly the shape of the original, it was effective for the shot and the angle we see it from sufficiently masks any issues with the over all shape of the ship.

The client requested that the scene depict the main character falling toward the starship in the background. This is difficult to accomplish in any still image, but in space it's even more complicated because things are so far apart and appear static.  Therefore, a subtle motion blur was added to the background ships (but not the planet or the character) to impress the idea of plunging toward the ship below.  While not 100% effective by itself, I am grateful that all the images will have small captions underneath in the final book.

The background, of course, was a simple planet model I adjusted from an earlier project.  The character model was the same as the model in Plate Z, but, of course, was modified because it represented a different character.  The capsule was also a model I built.  A subtle blur effect was added to give the impression of falling toward the ship.

Hopefully everyone enjoys this.  I appreciate the client allowing me to show this work on my portfolio.  Hope everyone is doing awesome.

Dan

Starting to work on the new Adamant's interior.

The bridge shell has changed shape to this, with a human model to give an impression of scale:


It's necessary to redesign the interior of the Command Deck so that it fits.

I also wanted to take this chance to redesign the ship's interior motif, too. I wanted something a bit more menacing and muted. Since the outside looks tougher. To that end, I came up with this test motif:


I'm still not thrilled with this design, and may address some of my concerns. The most notable one is...there's something about it that doesn't look good...I don't know. I know I don't like the baseboard lights. I'm going to get rid of those...the support struts also don't look quite right to me...perhaps they should follow the rounded edge motif of the rest of the design more.

Here is the Officer's Conference Room, directly aft of the Main Bridge, now, instead of to the side like the old design. This is looking to starboard. Left is forward, and that door on the left is the door to the bridge. It is shown in the old Adamant's interior color scheme. I'm seriously considering changing it.


I will definitely be adjusting the windows of the ship for the interior. I'll leave them the same on the exterior, because they're so small that they're fine the way they are. But close up, they're too angular. I'm going to round the edges for the interiors so that they provide more detail for the close-ups they'll be subjected to in any interior scenes on board the ship.

And here is the final color scheme, I think.  I need to add some stuff on the walls, including handrails, displays, door control panels and perhaps a display case for a model of the ship.




All that's left is adding some detail on the wall, including getting rid of the door in this image and adding a table.  I'm thinking on a circular table, with a holographic display in the center for presentations.  If that's the case, I'll change out the ceiling to fit the table. Instead of the door to the left in the following image, I want to put a display of a model of the Adamant (probably in silver or gold).  Right now the room has 3 doors.  The door to the left just leads out into the central corridor leading from the bridge, and 2 doors is more than sufficient for this room.



The table here is probably a bit too big around.   The bridge crew consists of 6 people--the captain, first officer, helm, comms officer, gunnery, and sensor officer.  The chief engineer would likely be included in meetings, too, so, at most, I'd need room for just 8 - 10 seats.

Dan

Hi all,

The (major) work on the Adamant is done. :D  I suppose I'll always be tinkering, making her better.  I suppose this could be chalked up to the fact that the ship always is in for refit as new technologies become available, right? :)






Also, a new demo reel for 2015, featuring the new ship!  The old demo reel was really starting to show its age, so I decided to bite the bullet and make a new one.  Not much room for stuff in only 2 minutes of video, so I had to be choosy.  I decided to show the work for Gingerbreed and a possible future concept web series I've been tinkering with called Starship: Adamant, which would feature short little snippets of various missions the Adamant goes on in her voyages. :)



Dan

A sad day. :(

Blender Artists is the first art forum I really joined, way back on November 25th, 2005.  It's therefore been a decade in a couple of weeks since I joined that site.  On August 31, 2010, I started what would later be called The Giant Spaceship Thread. That thread was a great help to me back in the day, so I wanted to post an honorary post about it, here, as Blender Artists will be going to its new format by what the mods hope is the end of this year.  The Giant Spaceship Thread will be closed and archived along with the rest of all currently open threads on Blender Artists when that site migrates to its new format, and I'm finding myself a little misty eyed over that.  The TGST was very good to me for the 5 years its been around.

However, while I was in mourning over the TGST, a somewhat controversial, yet thought-provoking piece by Andrew Price slapped me across the face and got me thinking.  While it was a nice place for me to showcase my work and for other geeks to share their own work with each other, has it helped me to become a better artist?

I feel like my work has stagnated in recent months, to be honest.  Here is work from five years ago:

Woo! Old art!

Here are a few a samples from this past year:

Some improvement!

Not too bad...

In comparison, I noticed that there was some pretty impressive work on other forums, and even my very best work would be unlikely to be even mentioned on those forums.  Which was somewhat depressing.  Andrew Price's comments resonate, while also giving me pause.  While a certain level of balance is necessary--one cannot compare themselves with other artists exclusively to determine their own worth as an artist--it should be noted that any artist who becomes self-referential is in serious jeopardy of being left behind in a world that is moving forward at faster-than-light speed.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm primarily a modeller, and there is a certain unthankful nature to that job description.  A modeller doesn't generally get to put a lot of work into finalizing the product--lighting, texturing, compositing--and none of these things are my expertise, I'm afraid.  So, the majority of a modeller's work involves somewhat boring clay renders which most people don't really like much.  Obviously, images of brightly lit, colorful artistic scenes seem to light up the art pages much more than, say, a clay render of a starship interior.  Why?  Well, aside from the fact that the scenes are more colorful and seem more completed (and besides, a lot of them feature various bits of anatomy), they are just more visually interesting than the gray-box style render that modellers like myself usually put out en masse.

But, but...the spaceship doesn't have clothes on, either! :(

So, to sum up all these rambling musings, I've discovered that while I'm glad to have known The Giant Spaceship Thread, and I am grateful for its contribution to my work, and I may port over a version of it to the new Blender Artists forums, I have discovered I should spend more time in places that frighten me.  Namely, CGSociety, and ArtStation (eeeeeek!) and hopefully I don't plunge into a deep depression at what awaits.

To commemorate TGST, however, a couple screenshots (I seem to have lost a few! :( ) I've taken over the years of moments that made me happy. :)

The Adamant got the 92nd monthly header at Concept Ships, and received top-row on Blender Artists, which I never thought would happen

Top row for the 3 space fighters, too! Woo! :)

Additionally, some of the art has been featured on the top row of some 3D websites I sell on.  Quite a feather in the cap, there. :)

So, moving on, as time always seems to, I guess it's time to post some new stuff in the CGSociety and ArtStation sites...oof.  Here's hoping for the best! :|

Dan

Changes to the overall shape of the structure have been completed.  The nose is considerably more discreet and narrower than before.  Also added a gentle slope to the lower bow region.  It's now swept back slightly to improve the curved look of the entire ship's overall motif.


I'm much more pleased with the elevation orthograhic shots.  Gone is the jarring sharpness of the dropping bow, replaced with a gentler curve which matches the rest of the ship much nicer.

The bridge section is also greatly simplified and more curved, making it much more sleek and even a bit menacing, I think.  That was an unforeseen effect of the changes--the ship looks more "wicked" than before.  Sometimes you don't know what the result will be until you try it, I guess?




Still to do: the forward deflector/shield dish section.  Finish out the panels and greebles (some are still not right--hovering greebles or whatnot).  Add windows and lighted interiors, including the hangars and their doors, and create the new quad-cannon turrets.  Also, need to re-do the insides of the main engines.  I was never quite happy with the mechanism that spun.  It was way too small to be noticeable.  I'd like to make it bigger so that it's visible from medium and perhaps even wide shots.



After that, it's the materials and light schemes and I think we're done with the remodel.  The model will be ready for import into whatever project I think up for it. :)

Dan

More work on Gingerbreed for the guys at HiFi 3D.






Still some work to do on detailing out the aft sections and other things.  But so far, so good, I hope.

This particular model has to have a full interior as well, for filming.  So a high res interior model for this, seamlessly integrated into the exterior modeling is necessary.  Fun times.

Dan

Hey all,

Just wanted to share this.  I made a spaceship for a guy a few years back and he's released the movie just recently.  Seth was super cool to work with, and this ended up sending me on a secular career I really enjoy.  He made a V-Log to talk about the film, Dust, which was a sort of sci-fi drama.  I didn't do much on the film.  Seth's already a really amazing digital artist--whether he's aware of it or not--and so all I did was use Blender to build out and render a spaceship for him.  It's very rudimentary by today's standards, and I've learned a lot since then, but I suppose it was nice to see my work in there.  I hope my work didn't take down the otherwise pretty slick work he did on it!



Thanks,
Dan

Received permission from the guys over at HiFi 3D to show the fun I've been having on their project up until now.  I've been commissioned to provide modelling for digital sets for their project, an indie film called Gingerbreed: The Motion Picture.  Here is a link to the project website.

Client provided over all set direction, as all the sets must interact with live action actors.  Therefore, at points where there is interaction (i.e., doors, consoles and whatnot), dimensions and placement of items must be precise.  Modelling only has been completed at this point, and they provided me with some preexisting geometry to use, and I built on that as I went.

Digital sets are listed in the order they've been worked on.  All modelling done in Blender 2.7x, to be exported to Maya for further work on shading, materials and lighting.

BRIDGE

MESS HALL

HANGAR COMPLEX

The Hangar Complex is actually two sets connected to each other--a large storage chamber, and a smaller chamber attached to the first level of the hangar.  This room had numerous pieces that were already constructed that the client requested to be extrapolated through the rest of the room.  These meshes included the main floor, the crates and the corrugated exterior walls.  Only one corner of the room was modeled.  The rest had to be modeled from scratch.


Still work to do on the project, so more updates on the way whenever I finish them.

Hope everyone is doing awesome.

Dan

Well it's been a bit of time since my last update.  I've been extremely busy with commissions, and haven't been able to share much of it since I'm under NDAs.   But, a little bit of a respite this week, so I decided to finally finish the ship interior I was working on earlier this year and upload it to the various storefronts.

I give you the Spaceship Interior C HD!



















Dan