Space Station Fly Through

Hi! My name is Elijah, I am a student VFX artist specialising in Environments based in Adelaide, Australia. Thank you for looking at my entry!

My entry is a sci-fi shot with the camera moving across the surface of a space station and I am excited to say that everything in the shot other than the HDRI was created from scratch by me! Here is the final shot before I go into the process of making it:

Process

My inspirations for this project were from a number of films, including films such as Interstellar, Gravity and the Star Wars series.

To begin, I searched for actual images of space stations to use as references. I gathered these images from science websites, the NASA website, and ebooks available through my university.

Here are a few of the images I used a reference:

The next step in my progress was conceptualizing the shot's composition. To do this, I created a basic block out in Blender and experimented with the output render in Photoshop.

Astronaut

I knew the hardest part for me as an environment artist would be the astronaut so that's where I started. I began compiling a lot of astronaut images, including the documents from the seamstresses of one of the first space suit designs. Here's a few of the references:

To create the outfit, I utilized a base mesh from Daz3D in Marvelous Designer and used my references to start putting things together.

This was the result of a few day's work:

I imported this mesh into Blender and started working on the gloves and boots.

To create the gloves, I utilized Zbrush and sculpted from the hands of the base mesh to expedite the process. I modelled the boots in Blender and used Zbrush to enhance the fabric pieces and achieve a more realistic look.

Next was the helmet, this was very difficult for me because the shape was different to anything I had tried modelling before but I managed it after a few tries and this was the result:

After unwrapping the character in Blender, I proceeded to texture it in Substance Painter. The result is the complete astronaut model:

Space Station

After finishing the astronaut model I started making the space station. For this, I created a few procedural models that I could use to quickly make similar but varying assets around the scene. Here is an example of how a few of them worked:

Here's a glimpse of the geometry nodes used for one of the assets. Specifically, this is the graph for the solar panels. I was able to put this together in a few days.

The nodes take a curve and resample it to define the number of panels, then use modulo math to offset the position of every second point on the curve to create the zigzagging pattern. I used a number of math nodes to make sure that depending on the value defined by the user to set the extension of the panels it would look like it was unfolding. All of this was controlled by editable parameters.

Using these tools and some hard surface modelling I ended up with this space station:

Animation

To animate the camera I constrained it to a curve circle and had it move along its path while moving the curve along the station, this helped me get the dynamic movement of the camera.

Animating the astronaut was difficult as I am not very experienced with character animation. I ran the model through Mixamo and downloaded the resulting rig in the t-pose. I then moved the model to Maya to fix any issues with the weight painting before importing it into Blender to animate.

Compositing

I did some very simple compositing in Blender to get the glare on the bright parts of the station and the glare from the main light source in the HDRI.

To keep the station and HDRI separate I rendered with a transparent background and rendered an environment pass so that I was able to edit them separately before bringing them back together.

After rendering all that was left to do was to put the frames together in premier pro and I had my final product! Of course, as most other artists will also always feel about their work, I would have liked to spend more time perfecting it but I am very happy with the result.

Thanks for checking out my work!