CURIOUS

A rover searches for signs of life on an alien planet, and narrowly misses it's opportunity.

This was a fully CG film created for our second year project at the University of Hertfordshire.

The Alien

The Creature created for this film is a small alien-lizard nicknamed "Stinky". It proved quite a challenge making him from scratch as we've never previously worked on a creature with more than 4 legs. For reference we used a combination of a Leopard Gecko, a Crested Gecko, and a Gargoyle Gecko for the model and textures.

Both the rig and animation went through many iterations, however we eventually settled with using an IK Spline rig as we found it was easiest to pose. Attribute-driven keys were also used to control things like the jaw movement and the fingers to make animation faster.

The Rover

The rover created for this film was made entirely from scratch as well, using the different rover models from NASA as a reference. The main body of the rover was inspired by the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers, while the solar panels were inspired by the Opportunity rover. The head of the rover is an original design made for the film.

Lighting and Compositing

The lighting and compositing went through many iterations during the making of the film. Below are some before and after screenshots of the compositing.

The Environment

The environment for this film was created procedurally to make iterating on it faster and to make art direction easier. The main layout of the cliffs were quickly modelled in Maya and exported to Houdini where heightfields were used to create the main model. Three different types of procedural rock were created to scatter around the environment. Instancing was used to scatter the rocks as it didn't impact the render times too much, and it allowed us to paint in areas where there should be more rocks and detail.

Concept Art

For the concept art, each team member individually created their own designs for the film during the pre-production phase. We then picked the best designs and used those as reference for creating the final film. Below are the designs we ended up using for the alien and the environment.

Credits

Myles Baker - Rigging, Pipeline, Compositing, and Project Lead

Jaye Blunden - Creature Modelling, Surfacing and Concept Art

Daniel Chester - Compositing, Lighting, and Layout

Nazly Sabit - Animation and Storyboard

Eliot Swain - Direct / Procedural Modelling, Surfacing, and Editing

Ross Probert - Music Composition and Performance

Freelancers

Eleanor Briddock - Animation

Parker Britt - Pipeline

SFX from Epidemic Sound