Nero's Fire Interior Update

Still plugging away on this.

Dan

Nero's Fire Freighter Interior Corridor WIP

A new project.  Been a couple of weeks' worth of work on this one off and on dabbling on it letting it go where it wants to.

Still to do: Add doodads and props and fill out the rest of the rooms.

Substance Painter and Blender.

Hope everyone is doing awesome.

Dan

Starship Command Center Model

Hey all,

Well, another model finally finished.

Starship Command Center:

Hopefully someone finds some use for it and everyone is having an awesome day.

TurboSquid and CGTrader

Fun times. :)

Dan

Adamant Command Center Walkthrough

Still plugging away on the command center.  Should be done fairly shortly, once I complete the render passes for the various screens (still to be added) and holographic displays.



UPDATE: And here is what it looks like currently.  Still to do: add the aft blast door.

Hopefully everyone is doing awesome.

Adamant Command Center Texturing Pass WIP

Hi everyone.  Sorry for the lapse in updates this past couple of months.  I'd been tied up in several projects and work was piling up. :(  But, had a week, here, to breathe and de-stress.  Here's the result when I de-stress!

I took the Adamant's command center and started texturing it and prepping it for finalization.

The scene relies very heavily on dubious topology and severe color correction to make it look good.  This is still very much a WIP in that I have to add the sweeteners to the holographic displays (control rings, numbers/letters/symbols, readouts, etc....) and flesh out some of the detail geometry--most notably the detail lighting and a few other things to highlight the scene a little more.

Hopefully everyone is doing good.  More work on this today to finish it out and get it done!

Have a good one, all.

Dan

Jaspera Central Core Modelling - Part One

Work starting on the interior of the core region of the station.  Got a rough idea from some concepts on what I want to do, so now it's just time to build it.  The video above is a timelapse of the concept phase of the station's interior.

Hopefully everyone is doing awesome.

Dan

Old and New Projects: Plagarus, Adamant Command Deck, and Jaspera Interspatial Station

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.

------

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

Commissions for Book Art

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