Spaceships, Stations & Vehicles

Red Dragon Spaceship

This is my advanced term project I did at Think Tank Online focusing on Environments and Props for Film. Working through this project gave me the chance to take my 3D asset from modeling to integrating it into a final scene. The two main inspirations for this landing scene were from Prometheus and The Beacon short film.

3D Renders

For these renders I did the ship, ground, characters and shadows as separate passes in Vray maya and composited them together in Nuke for the final look.

Concepts

In searching for spaceship concepts I found this design I liked, the Red Dragon with a Laser Gun shown below, done by maxim kuharuk: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Ook2Zv

The front landing gear was modified for the ship but based on the concept by Lance VerMeer shown below: https://lancev.artstation.com/projects/rR5Oy2

Modeling

I started the modeling process with a perspective match of the ship by blocking out simple shapes and lining up the camera. After the initial blockout I viewed the ship from different angles and found it looked better from a side view being longer. In continuing I extended the back of the ship to be a bit longer while keeping with the features of the concept.

I also started with a perspective match for the laser gun.

With the base concept of the ship progressing I wanted to add additional features and functionality to it that would be contained within it and not alter the main concept of the ship too much, in case I didn't get the time to finish them.

These included the landing gear, cockpit interior, ladder deployment, side thruster mechanism, rockets on top the ship and the gun attachment.

For the rear landing gear I used the front concept as a base reference and designed it to have a similar look and feel. I went with a quad base and used real-life aircraft references for the linking brace and to build up the mechanical features look.

All pieces of the ship were subdivision modeled except the cockpit interior and landing gear interiors which I did a blockout for with polygons.

Rigging

Both the front and back landing gears were rigged using IK handles and constraints. I was quite motivated to get this part done and learned alot in the process. I worked on rigging the legs while going through the three weeks course on rigging fundamentals at Think Tank and also some online tutorials.

For the front landing gear I did a similar retracting movement to the concept with some modifications to fit the ship. For the rear landing gear I matched the folding of the legs base with the front while having it retracted to its design.

References

Apart from the main concepts, I used various real life references to add the extra accessories to the ship. I also used other designs of spaceships for inspiration.

Driver Animations

Throughout the modeling process I added the various functional animations stored as drivers so I would have them ready to be animated later on where needed. I added an attribute for each driver animation to be able to control them from the channel box or attribute editor.

Landing Animation

I started the landing animation fairly early in the process once the landing gears were rigged and added to a driver animation. The landing animation went through multiple iterations, camera shot angles and landing tweaks which came to be the final two shots shown in the video.

UVs

Texturing

The bulk of the texturing was done in Mari to paint the texture maps while I used Substance Painter to create some auxiliary maps and damage masks that I would further refine in Mari. Through this stage I learned about working with nodes in Mari and the spec-gloss workflow which was a bit challenging for me as I would usually use the PBR metallic roughness workflow. 

For the floor I modeled the shapes of the painted details to the concept and used Substance Painter to bake an ID map. I continued with Substance Painter to texture the floor.

Lighting and Lookdev

I did two separate lighting setups, one for the concept scene and one for the landing scene. I used an HDRI in both scenes and used a sun light and area lights to get the required shadows and reflections.

I used Vray shaders for the texture maps and also used a remap node to make any final adjustments to the texture maps within vray maya. 

Compositing

For completing this stage of the project I had to learn the most which I did from my supervisor throughout the term, Think Tank courses and lots of online tutorials. I was also quite motivated to complete this and show the ship in a scene.

Combining the final scene together in Nuke got me to work with multi-channel exr files, learn about using cards and the 3D viewer and alot of new things to get the scene completed.

I used stock footage from Action VFX for the thruster flames and fog. For the thruster flames, I used various references and decided to go with a more fiery look for the flames.

 In combining all the videos in Davinci Resolve, I added some thruster sounds which I got from pixabay.

Cards added for thrusters

Overall, I tried to start blockouts for different stages of the project as early as possible, where possible, to allow for iterations, and challenges I would face in the areas I was not as knowledgeable in.

Spaceship Horizon in Station-07

This is my intermediate term project at Think Tank Online. I wanted to create a large sci-fi environment and further along found a spaceship design I liked, to add in as the hero asset.

I completed all aspects for this final shot except the character on the ship was modified and used from Mixamo and detailing the open areas of the environment was done with a few kitbashing kits.

Using Vray LightMix I turned the main beacon light off without having to re-render.

Concepts

The environment concept was a photobash created by my supervisor, Allan Li from a few references I had gathered.

The concept was used as a start for the 3D environment and modified along the way.

I searched for designs and found this spaceship concept by Josh Atack which would be added to the environment. The main features of spaceship design was used as a base and the proportions of the ship were altered to read better when placed in the environment viewed through the render camera.

Modeling

I started blocking out the environment by doing a perspective match to the concept and modeling the main structure forms. I used a 1920x1080 resolution and focused on modeling within these bounds.

Once the main structures were blocked out I modeled in panels and and refined the structures for a more detailed look.

I created a modular set of platforms and stairs which I used to add further detail to the environment.

To quickly detail the open areas of the environment I used kitbashing with a few free and paid kits. During this kitbashing process I learned how quickly a 3D scene can be built up by using efficient techniques.

All parts of the Spaceship were subdivision modeled.

Process Breakdown

Base blockout | Paneling | Platforms and Stairs | Kitbash | Spaceship

Modular Stairs, Platforms and Ladder modeled to add to scene

Materials

For the environment, all the materials were done procedurally with Vray shaders in Maya. For this I utilized the Vray BlendMtl for layering more complex materials such as the walls and panels. I also used some PBR texture sets from PolyHaven for the floors and rusted metals. Throughout this process I learned more about working with the hypershade in Maya and the different types of vray nodes.

Spaceship UVs and Texturing

I did the texturing of the spaceship in Substance Painter using a PBR metallic roughness workflow. I started building the base materials of the Spaceship with Substance's procedural features before moving on to painting custom dirt. The paneling of the the ship was also done during the texturing stage.

Lighting and LookDev

For the main beacon light I used a vray environment fog container and created an IES light with a sharp falloff to shine through the fog. This way I could see how the beam would be generated and dissipate with Vray's engine.

As this was a dark space scene I used alot of vray mesh lights to populate the scene. I did alot of tweaks in the positions, brightness and colour of the lights which came to the final look. This process took a while due to render times when tweaking the lights. 

Composition

I used Photoshop to post-process the final render and add the finishing touches. For this part I also learned quite alot through feedback from my supervisor on setting the mood of the shot and bringing focus to the areas of the image where you want the eyes drawn to.

RAM TRX 1500 Truck

This is a personal project I did over a few months to work on my hard-surface subdiv modeling skills, modeling from reference, proportions, form creations,  scene organization, modeling assembled parts and surface smoothness. There were certain parts of the vehicle I modeled and re-modeled to achieve a better surface smoothness and I also used various modeling techniques throughout the process to model different parts of the vehicle.

I chose this truck because of it aesthetic look and the nice modern style curves it was designed with.

Modeling

For this truck I used reference images that were as close to orthographic to start the modeling process. I scaled each view to be the average dimensions of the truck and positioned them accordingly in the 3D viewport.

I started this by edge modeling a base mesh of the full vehicle. From there I started separating the panels into their individual pieces. I utilized Blender's shrinkwrap modifier where necessary when moving around the panels vertices to keep the smoothness of the mesh. In completing the finer details of the truck I made the meshes dense enough to maintain the smoothness of the panel surfaces.

References

I utilized lots of references when modeling the details of truck. These references provided multiple angles of the same parts for me to better analyze and understand the more complex forms in the images.

Materials

All the materials for the truck were done procedurally using Blender's material nodes. I created these materials based on a vehicle creation course by CG Masters I had done before.

Lighting and Render

I used an HDRI as the main light source to capture the reflections and area lights to brighten up the dark areas. The main goal of the lighting setup was to bring out the reflections and surface quality of the metal panels.

Post Processing

For the final renders I added a glow effect and colour adjustment with the  compositing tab in Blender.